Moving to Vietnam 2026. The Book I Almost Didn't Write: 8 Years of Unvarnished Truth About Vietnam

There is a particular kind of conversation that only happens over dinner, late, when the food is finished and neither person is in a hurry to leave.

I was sitting with a friend somewhere in Sóc Trăng—the kind of evening where the ceiling fan is doing its best and the street outside has gone quiet. We were talking about Vietnam. About what eight years here had done to me, the visible changes and the less visible ones. About the person I was when I crossed the border from Cambodia in 2018 with a bag and a rough plan, and the person sitting across the table from him now.

At some point my friend said something like, "You should write this down."

I didn't start the next morning. It took a while longer than that.

Why I Questioned If My Experience Counted

The real obstacle wasn't the writing itself, the time, or the structure. It was the question I kept circling back to every time I sat down to start: Who am I to write a book about this?

There are people who have taught in Vietnam longer. People who speak better Vietnamese. People with more formal qualifications, more polished careers, and cleaner stories.

I came here at 43 without a particularly elegant plan. I made mistakes along the way that I am not especially proud of—some of them avoidable, most of them born from bad planning and a specific kind of ignorance that you only recognize clearly in hindsight.

For a long time, I thought those mistakes disqualified me. I believed a book worth reading should be written by someone who "got it right."

The Mistakes Are the Story

I was wrong about that, and I think I knew it even while I was using it as a reason not to start.

The mistakes are not footnotes to the story. They are the story. The bad planning, the things nobody told me, the things I wish someone had said plainly before I signed a contract or booked a flight—those are the reasons the book exists.

It exists not despite the rough edges, but because of them.

What Writing Eight Years of Memory Revealed

I expected the process to be difficult in a practical sense: finding the time, organizing eight years of memory into something readable, and getting the facts right about visas, contracts, and the bureaucratic machinery of teaching English in a Vietnamese province.

What I did not expect was how emotionally clarifying it would be.

Writing Go Anyway forced me to sit with experiences I had filed away without fully examining:

• The Loneliness: Navigating the isolation of that first year.

• The Shift: The slow transition from outsider to someone more settled.

• The Students: Relationships built in classrooms with teenagers who have no idea how much they taught me in return.

• The Attachment: The particular bond you develop with a place that was never supposed to be permanent.

I discovered how much I have changed—not in a grand, converted way, but more quietly. Eight years of living inside a culture that operates on different rhythms and different definitions of "enough" does something to your perceptions.

I could not have written this at year two or year four. I needed the full eight years to see it clearly.

A Field Guide for the "Thinking Adult"

Go Anyway is not a travel book. It is not a language-learning memoir or a generic expat lifestyle guide.

It is a field guide written specifically for the person standing where I was standing in 2017: seriously considering this move, looking for honest answers, and finding mostly promotional content or cautionary tales with nothing useful in between.

If you are over 40 and thinking about teaching English abroad—particularly in Vietnam's provinces rather than the major cities—this book was written directly for you. It covers the paperwork and the practicalities, but it also covers the harder questions:

• What it costs.

• What it gives back.

• What nobody tells you, and why.

The Honest Verdict: Go Anyway

The answer to the title is not a guarantee. It is an honest assessment after eight years of doing exactly that.

Go anyway. Eyes open, expectations calibrated, and with a realistic picture of what you are walking into. That is what I needed in 2017. That is what I tried to write.

Go Anyway: The Honest Guide to Teaching English in Vietnam Over 40 is available now on Kindle and releases in paperback on 31 March 2026.

Get your copy on Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/author/hein-lombard

Front cover of Go Anyway by Hein Lombard, showing an authentic Vietnamese bridge and street life, representing the unvarnished expat experience.