"Are you returning home after graduating?"

A familiar question for anyone who studies abroad. This is not about staying illegally in another country; it’s about finding job opportunity. They mean to ask where you prefer to seek jobs and work for the majority of your life.

Why don't?

A developed country knows how to correctly utilize your intelligence and in return you get what you deserve, equally to your potential. In addition, a third world country can never provide you adequate social needs: insurance, welfare, facilities. In an agricultural country where most process are done by workers and labors are cheap, health is not an essential part of our life. Diseases and food safety. Facilities aren’t advanced enough to detect and cure sickness.

In the place where most people are still poor or just have enough to live day by day, corruption is unavoidable. You tend get promoted by money and favor, but not by your true talents. Students studying abroad are admired, but there’s no guarantee about their future even though if you compared a person who studied a regular Vietnamese program learned and a person studying an American or foreign program earned, there’s a noticeable gap.

On another aspect, no one can grow up in a place that gives them no freedom of speech. No one ever dares to speak up about any sensitive issue that relates to government or higher-positioned people because they know they would either be legally arrested to jail for “opposing” despite the rightness of the point or murdered for knowing too much of the truth.

But why do?

Because it’s home; it’s where you grow up. You love every unique side of it: the noise, the chaos, the wildness. The cheap and easy-accessing food, unclean but delicious. It’s home, it’s family, it’s childhood. It’s part of you.

Most of the time people who ask about coming back to the hometown are those who always think of the America or any other first world country as a heavenly place to live, but they have never lived there. They think in those places, people earn more than work. It’s true that living in a first world country gives you more than benefits, but in return you have to exchange more. You have to compete with more people who are just as good or much better than you and so many more issues. People often think that foreign companies often pay so much higher, but the truth is that is because living cost over there is also 10 times higher. And also crime. In a small developing country, stabbing and cutting is the scariest crime, while in those big countries, mass shooting is common.

If you think about it, you would rather be an innovator in the underdeveloped place, stand out and be a leader than just be one of a million followers. You would want to use what you you earn because you have better education, to come back and help develop your home country.

For me, I always leave that for opportunities. I like to be an innovator, but I wish the country ran under more disciplines, where money does not support for corruption and poverty does not give power for abuse from higher level class.