A Vietnamese woman’s way of resilience

The older I get, the more clearly I feel my root as a Vietnamese woman and the indelible imprint it leaves on me.

Our homeland’s history is the work of making and keeping a country, and through every chapter, women have held the line. Beyond the heroines who fought on battlefields were the women at home who did it all—stocking the front with food and medicine, holding families together, raising children alone, cooking, mending, nursing. If something needed doing, they did it.

On Vietnamese Women’s Day (October 20), we don’t just reflect on what it means to be a woman—we honor the wives who never reunited with their husbands and the mothers who waited for footsteps that never returned. We honor the qualities they passed down—heroic, unyielding, faithful, resourceful—and the way they embodied them with elegance and love.

They taught us resilience not by force, but by embodiment. It isn’t a trend. It isn’t performance. It’s character—layered by generations who survived wars without letting life harden them.

Not jaded.

Not resentful.

Not hateful.

And somehow, they always rise with hope.

As if they had mastered the art of turning any pain, no matter how vast, into lullabies.

They knew progress can be slow and still be progress. In Vietnamese we say “nước chảy đá mòn”—flowing water wears down stone. Perhaps that’s our way of resilience: not “toughen up” to avoid pain, but to trust that consistency and gentle persistence outlast brute force.

It’s not just idealistic—it’s also practical. And there’s a kind of tenderness in this remembering. On weary days, I remind myself that I’m firm enough to withstand and agile enough to regenerate—that powerful feminine energy flows as I tune to my ancestors’ wisdom, grace, and strength, letting it steady my hands.

Until the stone gives way ✨