has a population of nearly nine million people. All of her family and school friends live in this hot and humid city crowded with people and a chaotic sprawl of motorbike traffic. Daily street life is a crush of bodies passing through the narrow streets under red and yellow awnings and street signs in a cacophony of horns bleating from motorbikes and taxis. Food and merchant stalls line the streets, people doing business, tourists, amateur street acts, vendors, working girls (the city is known for its many able-bodied massage parlors), and people just getting on with their lives—all the symptoms of one of the strongest market economies in the world.
Trinh notes that the only city in America that is comparable to the population density and high energy of her home city Saigon is New York City. The hardest thing about leaving Vietnam is being so far away from her family and friends. “My friends and relative and cousins were always there; sometimes I miss the life there a lot.” Trinh relied on her motorcycle to get around the city and took public transportation during her first year in university. “But the public transportation (bus) is not great,” she adds. “The city is in the process of building a light rail system but hasn’t finished it yet,” she says.
Today Ho Chi Minh City is the financial center of Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange (HOSE or HSX) is headquartered in the building where the seat of the South Vietnamese Senate was once located under President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, from 1967 to the fall of Saigon in 1975. According to a forecast by PricewaterhouseCoopers in February 2017, Vietnam may be the fastest-growing of the world's economies, with a potential annual GDP growth rate of about 5.1%, which would make its economy the 20th-largest in the world by 2050.
Among the things Trinh misses about her homeland, food immediately springs to mind. She misses the fresh ingredients that are found everywhere in the local markets. “We go to the local market every day, one or two hours before our meal to buy our food fresh,” she says. Expressing surprise at all of the frozen food and food packaging in the America, even seeing spices packaged in small containers, she says, “In America everything is packaged in plastic and you go shopping once a week.” She had never experienced anything like that in Vietnam, where the herbs and spices, vegetables, seafood and meat are so fresh, hopping from the farm to the table.
Things in Vietnam might have changed a lot now, but six years ago before Trinh left, she remembers her house being located by one of the biggest local