Early morning one day in the middle of July Toan folds his blankets and steps outside to catch some sun.

After spending eight days in the emergency room with oxygen therapy, the man who feared he would die of the novel coronavirus can now enjoy the summer breeze back home in Vietnam.

“In the last seven months I have experienced many things and realized that life is strange and beautiful simultaneously,” the 42-year-old engineer says.

Born in Hanoi, he now lives in Saigon’s District 4 and works for a project funded by the Bangladesh government and the World Bank.

After the Lunar New Year in January, the chief consultant to the mechanical engineering team left for the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, hoping to return to Vietnam on February 28. But a visa issue caused him to miss the return flight, which was then postponed to March 26.

But that did not go too well either.

In late March the first Covid-19 case was confirmed in Bangladesh, and the government decided to impose a lockdown to contain the pandemic. On March 26, the day of his flight, the country suspended flights to all countries except the U.K. and China.

Toan’s group, which had four people in the beginning, grew larger after 11 more Vietnamese from construction sites across Dhaka came. The 15, comprising three women, shared a 250-square-meter apartment.

Without enough beds in the four-bedroom apartment, some had to sleep on the floor. Stranded, with no idea when they could come return home, and anxiety due to the raging pandemic stressed some of them out, and arguments and conflicts broke out constantly.

Toan, understanding that people were worried because they did not know when they could return to Vietnam, tried to comfort his fellows but also told them to stop fretting to reassure their families. After the first week things got better as they realized they had no choice but to put up with the hardship.

Nguyen Quoc Toan works out on the roof of his house while stranded in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photo courtesy of Nguyen Quoc Toan.

Dividing themselves into groups of three to five people to cook and clean, they bought gloves, protective clothes and face masks for those going out to shop. They went to the supermarket once every four days. When there was too much to carry, they would rent a trolley to bring the stuff home.

Toan was working and reporting to his manager, and spending time reading and working out. Every day he would exercise looking at a YouTube video and jog on the roof, and urge his housemates to join.

The rooftop quickly became their favorite place as they worked out and watched planes fly in the sky, nursing their dreams of returning home.

After more than 100 days they were told there would be a flight to Vietnam on July 2. But the good news from the Vietnamese embassy was quickly replaced by bad: Covid-19 had arrived at their apartment.

On June 24 one of the group got a fever. Within five days 14 or 15 of them had Covid-19 symptoms like fever, body ache and tiredness.

“We did not think we could be infected since we were taking serious precautions,” Toan recalls.

They bought medicines, made soup to be given as comfort food, used homemade herbal steam baths, and took care of each other.

The fever vanished after two days, giving them reason to believe it was just the flu.

At 10 p.m. on July 2 they were taken to Dhaka airport in protective clothes.

Nguyen Quoc Toan’s group prepares to leave for home from Bangladesh on July 2, 2020. Photo courtesy of Nguyen Quoc Toan.

Toan, following his long journey from Dhaka to Van Don International Airport in Quang Ninh Province in northern Vietnam and transfer to a quarantine facility in Thanh Hoa Province, almost passed out of dehydration.

The next morning medical workers came to take their samples for testing. On July 5 the results came, and 14 of them had Covid-19.

They were taken to the National Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Hanoi immediately. That night Toan felt his body ache, and he struggled to breathe. All he could eat was soup.

The next day doctors decided to put him in the emergency room as his oxygen level was too low.

“You must breath on your own to increase your oxygen level,” they told him.

Doctors and nurses were around him that night, but the machine indicated that his oxygen level went too low every 10 minutes.

The doctors told him to get down on his knees and lie face down to breathe, but the exhausted Toan could not remain in that position for long.

“You must try, you must breathe on your own.”

“I can only kneel, I have no energy,” he complained.

The next morning he felt better, but doctors told him his lungs were severely damaged by an acute complication caused by the virus.

“You have to try to eat no matter how tired or uncomfortable you are,” they told him explaining he had to keep his strength up.

Nguyen Quoc Toan recovered after spending several days in the emergency room at the National Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Hanoi. Photo courtesy of Nguyen Quoc Toan.

Toan, despite his constant headache and 39-degree Celsius fever and sometimes bloody sputum in the mouth, never skipped a meal.

After three nights without sleep, his condition got better. On July 15, after eight days of fighting with death, he could finally be taken off the ventilator and discharged from the emergency room.

After losing eight kilograms in 15 days since contracting the disease, he tested negative for the first time. He was so happy that he began to write poetry, something he had never done before.

He had been speaking with friends and colleagues around the world, and they had constantly encouraged him to fight the deadly virus.

He now wants to spend more time with his family, especially his two young daughters. He plans to meet and thank all the doctors and nurses who helped him get well when they can finally discard their protective clothing for good.

“The most valuable thing we have is not a mountain of cash or a massive house, it is our health and the safety of our family,” Toan wrote on his Facebook page, saying the Covid-19 infection and the hardship he suffered made him realize those things.

Van, CEO and a co-founder of the Will to Live Center, was born with spinal muscular atrophy, but she never let it stop her from chasing her dreams. Based on her brother’s suggestion “to train disabled people, show them how to use technology and English to connect with the world,” she founded the center in 2003.

She told the BBC: “We have had more than 1,000 graduates, 80 to 90 percent of them are now employed. Some of them are their family’s breadwinners.”

Van Thi Nguyen and her husband. Photo by VnExpress/Phan Duong.

Van, 33, wants the environment in Vietnam to enable people with talent and devotion to develop, “instead of people feeling like they need to move abroad to use their skills.”

Seeking to create an equal working environment for everyone, she also runs social enterprise Imagator, which employs 80 people, half of them disabled.

The other Vietnamese in the list, Trang, is a wildlife conservationist. Growing up in Vietnam and seeing from a young age monkeys chained up for sale on the streets and bears held to extract bile, she travels to preservation sites, safaris and national parks to save animals.

Trang, 29, is also the founder of WildAct, that monitors the illegal wildlife trade and organizes education programs for youth.

“For the future of nature conservation, it is important that women’s voices are heard and their actions are recognized,” the BBC quoted Trang as saying.

Last year she won the nature conservation prize, the Future For Nature Award, and was nominated for the Women of the Future Awards Southeast Asia for her contribution in global wildlife conservation.

Trang at Burger Zoo, Netherlands. Photo courtesy of Trang Nguyen.

The BBC’s annual list, which this year poses the question what the future would look like if it were driven by women, also includes U.S. congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mexican Oscar nominee Yalitza Aparicio, and Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg.

Journalist Vu Viet Tuan

The Panorama hotel and coffee shop was erected on the Ma Pi Leng Pass of Ha Giang, one of the most popular tourism destinations in Vietnam’s northern highlands. But there is no legal document, not even a construction profile, to justify its existence.

The first time I visited Ma Pi Leng was three years ago. On my motorbike, along the winding slopes, I saw towering limestone cliffs, silvery rivers and valleys that spread out as far as the eyes could see. It was an ecstatic, heart-thumping experience.

When I was going down a hill, a group of children sprang out from the side of the road. They were dusty, unkempt; one was carrying her younger sibling, while another wore no pants. They were trying their hardest to snatch whatever was on my motorbike. I revved up my engine, hoping to outrun them, but they just kept chasing until their figures eventually disappeared behind the tree line.

Ha Giang Province is blessed with some of the most spectacular mountain scenes in the country, an idyllic refuge for anyone who craves the quietude and serenity of a life detached from the madness of big cities. But every year, the government still has to transport hundreds of tons of rice for the people of Ha Giang. The children I saw earlier were just pixels in the big picture of the poverty that plagues the region. Ha Giang’s nature, as dazzling as it its, has not done much to propel the economic fortunes of the province’s downtrodden.

This time, I’d come to Ha Giang to figure out why the controversy raging around the hotel. I was also keen on seeing how the region has changed after all these years.

Some of the scenery stayed the same. Houses and huts with dilapidated roofs stood on several mountain slopes. Children with ragged nor no clothes were still to be seen.

But the six-storey hotel stood out like a sore thumb.

The Panorama hotel on Ma Pi Leng pass, Ha Giang Province. Photo by VnExpress/Giang Huy.

Built on top of the Tu San cliff, the most beautiful location in all of Ma Pi Leng, the hotel came up after Meo Vac District authorities called for investors to build a place where tourists could rest their feet. A year later, the work was done and the hotel opened to the public.

But that’s not how this story ends.

In tears, the hotel’s owner, 57-year-old Vu Thi Anh, told me that the land where the hotel was erected on used to have nothing. There were only rocks and pebbles, where no plant could grow. Since the day the first stone was laid until the day it was completed, she didn’t sleep or eat much.

She said she wanted to bring more tourists to the region so that the people could have a better life. While admitting that she knew the hotel was an unapproved project, “it did not deserve to be either dismantled or shunned.”

People do frequent the hotel. They eat, they drink, the go sightseeing and they take pictures. The hotel’s always filled with laughter, though some patrons are aware it is an illegal enterprise.

As I sat on the highest balcony of the hotel and watched the sun go down behind the Nho Que River and the mountains standing opposite, I felt strangely calm. On the paths leading up to the mountain’s huts, I could see silhouettes carrying large bundles of wood on their backs, swaying side to side as the last light of the day started to fade away from the horizon.

There will be more investors and businesses interested in capitalizing on the beauty that Ha Giang’s been gifted with. If it wasn’t Vu Thi Anh, it would have been someone else who built a different hotel or establishment somewhere in Ma Pi Leng.

Anh’s hotel is not solely born out of her aspiration and resoluteness. It is also a product of its time, of the tourism market’s potential to grow and meet the needs of more and more travelers satisfying their wanderlust.

Whenever one reads socioeconomic reports about Ha Giang and Meo Vac, they would most certainly think there was little the region could do to improve itself, save for farming. But the hotel on the Ma Pi Leng pass, though illegal, was not a minor investment. It is proof that there is more to Meo Vac than the picture painted by the reports; that the district can grow financially and economically through tourism.

But how did it come to this? Local authorities have not figured out a way to deal with either the illegal hotel or the public criticism, while travelers and nature lovers feel betrayed knowing that the area’s natural state has forever been altered. Vu Thi Anh might end up losing everything she has poured into the hotel’s construction.

Panorama’s story is not simply its own. It tells us that the best things this poverty-stricken land offers is poorly utilized and made useless. It tells us that local authorities don’t care enough for such things, and even worse, have no vision or strategy to grow the region’s economy.

The head of the provincial Department of Transport has said that one of the factors behind the illegal hotel is that the province has no detailed development plan, because it has no budget to draw one up. And if this situation persists, there will be more Panoramas illegally erected along Ma Pi Leng at some point in the future.

There’s no definite, easy answer when it comes to dealing with Panorama. Should it be dismantled, fined or simply let be? An unapproved hotel that did not go through any legal process or safety checks, if left be, would signal a breakdown of law and order and create a bad precedent. If it is dismantled, it would be a huge waste of the time, effort and money spent on building it.

If Meo Vac and Ha Giang authorities had considered construction requirements in the area, Panorama could have been built in a different location without violating the law. It could have been an environmentally-friendly structure that easily blends with Ha Giang’s natural beauty instead of an odd, aberrant block of cement standing ungainly amidst the province’s mountains and valleys. I wonder what exactly do Meo Vac officials talk about in meetings to develop the district’s economy if not about proper directions and methods to utilize investors and their capital to develop the region.

At the end of the day, no one and nothing should be above the law. The hotel might very likely have to go. But I’m afraid Panorama’s fate would not be the last of its kind. As long as there’s no strategy or planning for development, any project can easily go down the drain in Meo Vac or Ha Giang. As long as authorities stay ignorant and clueless, disaster awaits.

[Editor’s note: The Panorama hotel, situated on the Ma Pi Leng Pass, Meo Vac District of the northern Ha Giang Province, has been in the news after it was revealed that it had no construction approval and negatively affected its surroundings.

The hotel was also built on top of a land plot reserved for agriculture, which has not been converted for non-agricultural purposes yet.

It might be partially dismantled in the future, Ha Giang officials said.]

*Vu Viet Tuan is a journalist based in Hanoi. The opinions expressed are his own.

So serious that she’s still there, in love, and enjoying life.

Iranian summers are never easy, with temperatures going up to 50 degrees Celsius (122F), but Do Lenh Hoai Anh, one of few Vietnamese women, if not the only one in the northwestern province of Qazvin, leaves the house without a qualm, covered in 3 layers of outfit, from top to toe.

“Many local women want to explode due to the strict rules of dressing here, but I just love this culture and I wrap my outer garments around myself more carefully than many of them,” she said.

This was an unimaginable situation five years ago.

After finishing her bachelor’s degree in international relations in Ho Chi Minh City, Hoai Anh accidentally learnt about a 6-month scholarship program in Iran. Applying “just for fun,” she planned to return to Vietnam and pursue a career in education.

But, as the Yiddish proverb goes, “Man plans, god laughs.”

“The mysterious land and an Iranian man held me back”, Anh said. The man is Amir Hossein, the 30-year-old director of a travel company in Qazvin.

Hoai Anh and her husband Amir Hossein. Photo coutersy of Hoai Anh.

Hoai Anh still remembers the difficulties she faced when she started a new life in the Iran’s northwestern city (in the eponymous province). She confined herself completely to the university, since her Iranian was not good.

In spite of following all the dress rules, she was questioned by security guards as well as policemen. It turned out that her clothes were not thick enough. Eventually, Anh had to throw all of the clothes she bought in Vietnam away.

In such conditions, Anh was the only Vietnamese to stay. Her two friends left for home right after the 6-month course. With no admission letter from the university, no place to stay and having little money, she ate bread the whole week.

“I did not dare to go out, I was lonely and scared so I cried”, she remembered.

Once the admission letter arrived, and she knew more about the local language and local people, Anh started exploring the land of a “One Thousand and One Nights”.

In November 2016, on a hiking trip with some friends, she met Amir Hossein, a helpful and friendly tour guide.

“I wanted to know more about her at first sight. I wondered how she could live 1.5 years in Iran on her own,” Hossein said.

Commonly, Iranian men do not ask for contacts of other women. But Amir could not help asking for Anh’s number after the trip. He talked to her and helped her learn Iranian. After 6 months, with the excuse that Anh’s place was on his way to work, Amir often drove her to school and introduced her to people as his girlfriend.

However, he had not said those three magic words.

Anh was confused, she was not sure about his affection for her. One day, she tested it by inviting a male friend to join her for a trekking trip. Amir duly went green with envy. He kept texting and complaining during the entire trip.

The next day, he told her, “Be my girlfriend. Seeing you going with another guy makes me miserable.”

Anh later found out that Amir had been hesitant because he was afraid of an “easy come, easy go” relationship.

A pre-marital relationship is taboo in traditional Muslim societies, so Anh was always scared. “When we were together, we always kept a distance, there were no hugs and kisses”, she said. Furthermore, they could not sit next to each other in coffee shops, cinemas or cars.

“The most intimate moment was when he drove me to the university and parked in front of the dormitory for a couple of minutes, or when I tried to sneak into his room without his parents’ knowing. I like those moments, they were adventurous and helped maintain the connection between us,” Anh said.

She also remembers being frustrated sometimes because she could not show her affection freely. Amir understood it and tried to make his “stubborn” girlfriend feel better by treating her with great courtesy and care.

Amir’s affection also helped Anh to break her own taboos. She was always turned off when men mentioned starting a business, being influenced by her family to think the worthwhile thing to do was to work in the education or medical sectors.

“You are qualified to reach your goal, but you need more motivation. That is me,” said Amir, encouraging her to start a business.

He brought his country’s specialties to Vietnam and showed his sweetheart how to attract customers and connect with Iranian enterprises.

“Being in a (U.S.) sanctioned country makes it difficult for Iran to join business activities. Sometimes Anh wanted to give up, but we overcame all of those challenges,” Amir said.

After 2 years, Anh established an agency distributing Iranian products in Ho Chi Minh City. She bought a house and a car and will have a master’s degree in English-Persian translation in the near future.

“I have achievements to show my parents, thanks to Amir,” she said.

Hoai Anh and Amir Hossein officially received their marriage license on September 3, 2019. Photo coutersy of Amir Hossein.

In the summer of 2018, Amir introduced his girlfriend to his family, after 1.5 years of dating in secret. They tied the knot last September, and Hoai Anh officially had her Iranian name and marriage license.

The husband’s family could not be happier.

“Thank you for becoming my daughter-in-law,” Amir’s mother told Anh. The Vietnamese woman could not hold back her tears as the family celebrated the wedding with one party after another.

“Public gathering and activities are not encouraged here, so these parties are how we entertain ourselves. To Iranians, family comes first,” Amir said.

Hoai Anh knows there will be more challenges in the future, but is confident of overcoming them, as a Vietnamese and an Iranian.