Tuoi Tre Newspaper fully sponsors a 15 million VND scholarship to support Nguyen Van Duc in paying tuition fees at Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology and Education, after learning that Duc came to Ho Chi Minh City with only 1 million VND and worked as a manual laborer.
Boarding the bus to Ho Chi Minh City with only 1 million VND The state provides support for his mother with mental illness
On the day he took the bus to Ho Chi Minh City, Duc had only 1 million VND in his pocket. This was the money his grandfather received from social support for Duc’s mother who suffers from mental illness. With this small amount, Duc had to “stretch every penny” to cover transportation and living expenses during his first days away from home.
Duc traveled by coach, and his uncle who was staying in a rented room picked him up. At that time, the 18-year-old still didn’t know if he had been admitted to the thermal engineering technology program, but he was confident in his score of 25.5 and determined to go to Ho Chi Minh City to earn money for tuition.
Duc said: “I checked the admission scores from previous years and compared them with my own graduation exam scores. I was confident I would get in. So I proactively came early to find work. Every day, manual labor at construction sites pays 250,000 VND. I saved up to have money for enrollment.”
In Ho Chi Minh City, Duc asked his uncle to find him a janitorial job at a company near home. After that work, Duc went to do manual labor at construction sites.
In the cramped rented room in Binh Hoa Ward, Ho Chi Minh City, Duc worried a lot about money. His suitcase contained only a few sets of clothes from high school, some notebooks, and other personal items. That was all he brought to the South. When mentioning his grandparents and his mother who doesn’t recognize her own son, Duc shed tears.
The young man in unfamiliar surroundings tried to save as much as possible from his manual labor wages. He would salt meat heavily to eat more rice, and one bunch of water spinach would be prepared as two dishes to avoid monotony…
Without a laptop, in his free time in the evenings, Duc went to a nearby internet cafe to go online to search for more jobs and apply for scholarships.
Mother is ill, raised by grandparents’ love
In late August 2025, we visited the
