For Liz, the experience was profound. “I didn't really have an intrinsic sense of what it was to be Vietnamese,” she explained, “I was only 5 or 6 when I came to America. So, I didn’t have the context I needed growing up in Nebraska, being educated and living amongst a monoculture that did not look like me.”
But returning to Vietnam was different, she said. “By my dress, my walk and everything else, they saw me as being American, but they also saw me as uniquely one of them - or ‘a returning Vietnamese’. During my time immersed in the country, there were so many little things that I did or could relate to that were ‘Vietnamese’. The longer I was there, the more I realized, oh, my God, I really am Vietnamese!”
When meeting the rubber farmers, this connection proved invaluable not just for business relationships but on a visceral human level. “I couldn't meet these smallholders without thinking, ‘wow, this could also be my family, me’” she remembers. After the war, the country experienced deep poverty for over a decade, and one of the programmes instigated by the new regime was to give people land so that they could survive and provide for themselves through subsistence farming. Particularly in the south, this was one of the only ways for people to survive.
“I’ve always been passionate about giving back,” Liz explained, having spent almost three decades working and volunteering for nonprofit orgs in the US, “But in Vietnam, it was a little bit more poignant. I had the ability and the power to give back in a different way. It really hit home.”