The money that comes home

In Hung's village in Nghe An, you can tell which families have someone working abroad just by looking at the houses. His parents' new two-storey house, with its shiny gate, stands next to his uncle's old single-storey home. Hung paid for it with five years of night shifts at a car parts factory in Japan. 'Every brick in that house is overtime,' he says, laughing.

Hung, 31, is one of many Vietnamese who have gone to work in Japan, South Korea or Taiwan. Wages there can be several times higher than at home. A few years of hard work can clear debts, support elderly parents and pay for a younger sibling's university fees. The money matters on a national scale too. World Bank figures put Vietnam among the countries that receive the most money sent home from abroad.

The new houses don't show the costs. Before he left, Hung paid a recruitment agency a large fee, and like many workers he borrowed to cover it. 'My whole first year was paying back the loan,' he says. The work was physically hard and the hours were long. The hardest part was being away. His daughter was two when he left. For years she knew him mainly as a face on a phone screen, while his mother did most of the raising.

Many workers describe a heavy sense of duty. Once a family depends on the money, coming home gets harder, even if the plan was to stay for three years. Hung stayed for five. When he did return, village life felt strange. 'Everyone thought I was rich,' he says. 'Nobody understood that the money was already spent.' The skills he'd learnt in the factory didn't match any of the jobs nearby.

In the end, his Japanese did. He now works as a team leader at a Japanese electronics company in an industrial park an hour from home. His language skills earn him better pay than most of his colleagues. A few of his friends have used their savings to open small businesses. Hung picks his daughter up from school every afternoon now, and on Sundays they practise Japanese together. She's already better at it than he was at her age.