TWTBACD Ch.7 - The Hands That Built the Future

Chapter 7

The Hands That Built the Future

Hai Phong, Vietnam — 1984–2019

pressure

Vietnam enters the supply chain

Ch.7 opening: The factory, the hands, and the grandmother who survived everything

Grandmother Mai was born in 1929, which means she was born during the last years of French Indochina, came of age during the Japanese occupation, lived through the First Indochina War, survived the American War, and was present at the reunification of 1975 as a woman of forty-six who had already seen more history than most people in most countries are asked to absorb in a lifetime.

She did not talk about this often. When she did, she talked about it the way she talked about weather: as something that had happened to her, that she had been inside of, that she had found her way through by attending to the specific and manageable and refusing to be consumed by the general and catastrophic. You could not stop the war. You could feed your children. You could not stop the bombing. You could know which roads were safer. You did what you could do. The rest was beyond you.

This philosophy — if it could be called that, it was more a practice than a philosophy, something lived rather than articulated — was the inheritance she gave her son, and her son gave to Tuan, and Tuan gave to Bao, though by the time it reached Bao it had been translated through two generations of a country transforming itself at extraordinary speed, and what had been the survival practice of a woman in a war had become, in Bao, something more like a professional methodology: encounter the new requirement, learn what it needs, provide it with your hands.

Tuan Nguyen was born in 1984, nine years after the war ended, in a Hai Phong that was already — quietly, without announcement — beginning to be a different city. The Doi Moi economic reforms, adopted in 1986, began to open Vietnam to foreign investment and market economics, and Hai Phong's port, one of the deepest natural harbours in Southeast Asia, made the city a natural destination for the manufacturing investment that began arriving in the 1990s.

Tuan grew up in the city's transformation. His father worked at the port. His mother worked at a textile factory. The household was not poor — two incomes in 1990s Hai Phong was sufficient — but it was not comfortable in the way that required no thought. Money was managed. Decisions were made carefully. The specific quality of a family that understands the difference between what it has and what it would need to lose was present in everything.

He trained as a metal fabricator at a vocational school, which in the early 2000s was not a compromise but an ambition: the manufacturing jobs in the new Vietnamese economy required precisely the skills the vocational schools taught, and the wages were competitive with university-educated office work, and the work itself had a quality — the direct relationship between skill and outcome, the physical satisfaction of making something that had not existed before you made it — that Tuan found, and would continue to find for forty years, fundamentally satisfying.

He joined the Samsung component factory in 2006. The factory was one of the largest in Hai Phong, employing three thousand workers making circuit boards and housing components for Samsung's global supply chain. Tuan's hands entered the factory's requirements and met them. The factory noted that his tolerances were consistently tighter than required. He was moved to a precision team within eighteen months.

He married Linh Phan in 2009. She worked at a garment factory that made technical sportswear for European and American brands. They had four children: Hanh, Minh, Bao, and eventually a fifth who did not survive infancy, which they did not discuss much because some losses require silence as their adequate response.

The factory in 2019 was not the factory of 2006. It had been rebuilt twice. The products it made had become more complex, more miniaturised, requiring tolerances that Tuan, in 2006, could not have imagined. He had grown with the requirements. His hands had learned what the hands of the next generation of components required.

Hai Phong itself was changing. The coastline south of the city, where Linh's mother had kept crab traps when Linh was a child, was now container port infrastructure. The fishing villages that had existed before the port expansion were gone. The mangroves that had once stabilised the coastline were largely gone. The water in the bay was murky in ways it had not been murky when Grandmother Mai was young.

The sea was also higher. Fourteen centimetres higher than in Pieter van den Berg's Netherlands, as it happened — the sea level rose everywhere, not just in places with the infrastructure to measure it precisely. Hai Phong's fishermen and coastal farmers measured it differently: in the flooding during typhoon seasons, which was worse than it used to be— in the saltwater intrusion into the rice paddies at the coast, which was also worse— in the disappearance of fish species from waters where they had been abundant in their grandparents' time.

Tuan noticed all of this in the way of a man whose attention is divided between the interior precision of his work and the exterior reality of his world. He noticed it. He did not know what to do with the noticing except keep working, keep adapting, keep teaching his children that the hands that learn new things are the hands that survive.

Bao was two in 2020. He had already dismantled one toy and examined its interior with an expression of complete contentment. The expression told Tuan everything he needed to know.

coastal degradation

Ch.7 close: Seven hands, seven stories, all about to be changed by the same invisible breath