Before Slowmading Was a Word, It Was Just My Life

It's Monday morning in Sóc Trăng. Yesterday I sat through 18 IELTS mock speaking tests and a round of primary level exams before that. This morning I cleaned the air conditioner filter, put washing on, walked next door for a banh mi and a coffee, and came back to my laptop. The week's schedule is open in one tab. This post is in another.

Nobody planned this life. It just kept not ending.

I arrived in Sóc Trăng in 2018 on something close to autopilot. I was agency property then, four months of jumping through hoops, showing up sober, not complaining, being grateful enough to stay useful. As an agency teacher in provincial Vietnam, you're a hole-stopper until proven otherwise. I wasn't a problem, which meant I got to stay. That was about the extent of the strategy.

The agencies don't last. The town did.

Once I was out from under the agency arrangement, Sóc Trăng stopped being a posting and started being a place. There was no dramatic moment of choosing to stay. The choice happened in the background, quietly, the way most real decisions do. One contract became another. A routine formed. The Bún riêu shop next door learned my order. I stopped checking how long I'd been here.

Slowmading, if you've seen the word lately, means trading the one-month-per-city grind for longer stays. Three months somewhere. Six months. Long enough to stop consulting Google Maps for the local market. Long enough to have a usual table.

I've been doing this for eight years without knowing it had a name.

What the trend articles don't tell you is what it actually feels like over time, and I don't mean that in a glossy way. Eight years in a Khmer-Vietnamese provincial town does something quiet and strange to your sense of belonging back home. South Africa recedes. Not all at once, and not painfully, but steadily. The cultural references you grew up with start to feel like a language you once spoke fluently and now only catch in fragments. Things that used to matter stop mattering. Things your old friends consider unremarkable start to seem genuinely foreign to you.

It's not homesickness. Homesickness has a direction, a pull toward something specific. This is more like a waterline dropping slowly over years. You can still see the shore. You're just not swimming back anytime soon, and somewhere along the way you stopped wanting to.

That detachment is both the cost of staying and, honestly, part of what makes it liveable. You're not performing an identity that no longer fits. You're just getting on with things.

Sóc Trăng is not on most people's Vietnam itinerary, and that's not a complaint. It sits in the Mekong Delta, a few hours south of Ho Chi Minh City, and it moves at a pace that only makes sense if you're staying. The town has a significant Khmer community, temples, festivals, a texture that's genuinely distinct from the Vietnamese coastal cities that dominate the travel content online. The streets are wide and much quieter. The food is good and cheap without anyone having decided it's worth writing about yet.

This is where slowmading works best, not in Lisbon or Chiang Mai or the other hubs that feature in the trend pieces. Those places have long since optimised themselves for the medium-term foreign resident. They're fine. They're also full of people running the same calculation you are, co-working in the same spaces, eating at the same foreigner-friendly restaurants, having the same conversations about visas, cost of living, or some new budget hack.

Provincial Vietnam doesn't have that infrastructure. What it has instead is actual life, and the patience required to find your place in it.

My friend Thanh is part of what that looks like in practice. We met outside of work, which in a town this size takes longer than you'd expect. He's become a constant. We talk about most things, serious and otherwise, and he has a reliable tolerance for the way my ADHD brain circles back to the same subject three times before moving on. He doesn't treat that as something to manage. He just waits, responds, and we carry on. That kind of easy, unperforming friendship doesn't happen in a month. It barely happens in a year. It took time and proximity and enough shared ordinary days for something real to form.

That's the thing the slowmad content usually skips over. It talks about integration as though it's a milestone you reach. It's not. It's just what happens when you stay long enough for people to get bored of noticing you're foreign.

If you're weighing up whether something like this is actually possible, here's the practical version.

Vietnam's e-visa covers 90 days. After that, options exist, business visas, longer arrangements if you're working legally, and teaching English provides a real foothold if you need income. The demand in secondary cities is steady, even if the rates aren't Hanoi numbers. The internet is functional enough for remote work. My setup handles blog writing, video calls, and everything else without much drama. The cost of living is low, not because this is a poverty tourism destination, but because this is simply what things cost when they're not priced for foreigners.

What takes longer, and what no practical guide can shortcut, is the slower work. Learning enough about the culture and the language to be polite. Finding the rhythm of a neighbourhood. Building the kind of familiarity where people stop registering you as a curiosity and start treating you as furniture, which sounds like an insult but is actually exactly what you want.

That part can't be rushed. Which is precisely what makes it worth something.

The word slowmading makes it sound like a considered lifestyle pivot, something you research and announce. For most people actually living it, it happened the way most things happen. Gradually, then completely, then one Monday morning you're cleaning an air filter and realising you've been here eight years.

I came to Sóc Trăng because I needed a job and something lined up. I stayed because the town and it's people got under my skin before I noticed it happening. There was no epiphany. No moment of clarity. Just one ordinary day followed by another, until ordinary started to feel like enough.

There are worse ways for a life to go.

If you're thinking about teaching English in Vietnam as a way into this kind of life, particularly if you're over 40 and wondering whether the window has passed, I wrote the guide I wish I'd had. It's called Go Anyway.