I still remember vividly the first time I learned about the virus that would define the entirety of 2020. It was a couple weeks before I was about to fly back to the US from Vietnam to visit my family during the Lunar New Year break, and a friend sent me an Instagram post about a mysterious illness in China that was beginning to cause some worry. I chalked it up to being just another passing news story at the time, but that idea ended up being quickly proven wrong.

Flying back to Vietnam via Tokyo a few weeks later was a more nerve-wracking flying experience than I’d ever had in my life to that point due to the sheer uncertainty that the entire globe was beginning to be faced with. At the time, there was no way to know that returning to Vietnam, a country with a fraction of the USA’s healthcare budget (that also shares a long border with China), would be the best and safest decision I could’ve made, so there was a lot of anxiety about what the rest of the year would look like. …

From the very beginning, Vietnam has undoubtedly been one of the world’s best stories in regards to managing the COVID-19 pandemic.

After decisive action was taken to mitigate the spread of the virus way back in February, which eventually culminated in the decision to ban all public gatherings of more than two people for the entire month of April, the country of nearly 100 million, which shares a long border with China, virtually eliminated the virus from the community. …

Ho Chi Minh City, the commercial and financial center of Vietnam, is a bustling, rapidly modernizing megacity. Still colloquially known as Saigon, its former name from prior to the reunification of the country in 1975, it is the largest city in a country that features one of the fastest growing economies on the planet, and is thus constantly undergoing massive changes to its landscape and infrastructure.

One of the side effects of the huge growth that the city has seen — the official population of the city proper has almost doubled in the last 20 years from about 5 million to nearly 9 million, but some estimates place the real population at over 12 million — is that some projects get left behind before they can be finished. …

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a university student who studies geography. You are having this conversation for the 11th time this week, and unfortunately, you know that it won’t be the last time.

“What’s your major?”

“Oh, I study geography.”

“Cool! Like studying rocks and stuff. So you’re going to be a teacher?”

“No, that’s not exactly…”

“…so what are you going to do with that degree?”

“………”

This was a typical experience during the four (okay, five) years that I spent at the University of North Texas as an undergraduate student; having to regularly explain my major (and how I planned to use it in the future) to strangers was at least a weekly occurrence, and the same rang true for my classmates as well. …

Every left-leaning American has probably heard it at some point.

“If you love socialism so much why don’t you move to a socialist country?”

It’s a tired trope, but one that Republicans and other conservatives have latched onto for quite awhile. Fox News pundits have certainly expressed similar sentiments on-air fairly often in recent years, possibly even more so prior to Trump’s presidency during the Obama years.

In the lead-up to Trump’s election in 2016, I definitely heard it a bunch. At the time, I was a passionate Bernie supporter reluctantly planning to vote for Hillary and, being that I have a very hard time biting my tongue when I see something I disagree with, I found myself quite frequently clashing with the opposition in comment threads in political groups on Facebook, or even just on a random local news channel’s page. …

With much of the world still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic fallout that has followed, the sports industry has of course been deeply affected. Around the globe, professional sports leagues were abruptly stopped in their tracks as the virus began to take its hold, in some cases before new seasons could even get off the ground. However, in the past couple of months, sports leagues have finally begun to slowly resume play, offering a slice of normalcy for a world that so desperately needs it.

While the return of major professional sports, such as Europe’s top football leagues or the NBA and MLB in the United States, is certainly a welcome respite from the harsh realities of the pandemic and the uncertain future that lays beyond it, one major aspect of the draw of these leagues is missing. Fans are currently not allowed to attend matches, and thus the incredible and intoxicating atmosphere they create at the world’s top sporting events has been replaced by the thud of someone kicking the ball, the sound of coaches and players communicating on the field or court, or by fake stadium noise that’s added to broadcasts before they reach everyone’s television screens. Some teams, leagues, and broadcasters have gotten quite creative in their attempts to simulate a realistic match-day atmosphere, but nothing hits quite like the real thing. …

In recent years, there’s been a marked uptick in the number of foreign visitors in Vietnam as the country has exploded in popularity as an international tourist destination. As the war for which the country is unfortunately most well-known drifts further back in the collective memory of both its citizens and the global community, Vietnam is becoming increasingly associated with its breathtaking landscapes and pristine beaches, its delicious cuisine and vibrant culture, and the immeasurable kindness of its people, rather than just its tragic history.

However, in a country far vaster than most realize, there are always going to be incredible destinations that get overlooked by the majority of tourists. Most trips to this diverse Southeast Asian nation center around visits to one (or both) of the major cities, the capital Hanoi in the north, and the always-bustling Ho Chi Minh City in the south. Of course, these trips usually include short-distance treks to popular nearby destinations such as Ha Long Bay or the Mekong River, or perhaps even a jaunt to Da Nang and Hoi An along the South Central Coast, but most visitors to Vietnam miss out on a plethora of stunning locations that even many domestic tourists never make their way to. …

67 days.

It’s been 67 days (as of publishing) since the last confirmed community transmission of COVID-19 in Vietnam, a country of nearly 100 million people that shares a 1444-km border with China, its neighbor with which it has, for all its political and social complications, an extremely active and productive trade and economic relationship.

Meanwhile, in the United States, my home country and where I spent the first 24 years of my life, there’s been somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000–30,000+ new cases confirmed every day, averaging out to a new infection occurring somewhere in the country every 3–4 seconds. Every day I wake up experiencing a cocktail of emotions ranging from anxiety and worry about my at-risk family members to disgust and shame at the atrocious response to the pandemic by the government of a country that is supposedly the greatest in the history of the world. …