May God-our-Father release blessing for you in this new year-of-the-horse. May he go before you and watch behind you, bringing you close to his heart. May your eyes be brightened and enlightened, that you can appreciate Joy like never before, even in places you didn't expect to find it.
Chúc mừng năm mới! We love you!
~Tim and Janet
Today is the day after Tet Holiday, or the second day of Tết. (By the way, I’ve begun to learn to type with Vietnamese diacritical markers, so if I toggle to my Vietnamese keyboard—Win+Spacebar—I can type “T e t e s” and it puts the hat on the e and adds an upward stroke. And I feel very cool about it.)
In this email I just want to unpack the screenshot above a bit.
This is a message sent to the woman who worked for the professional service they hired to clean the house we’re living in prior to our move-in. She’s named Nhung, and she agreed to come once or twice a month to help the house get a periodic deep clean—we’re so grateful!
The message is sent in an app called Zalo. It’s created by the Vietnamese government, for the use of the Vietnamese people, and if you’re a privacy advocate you can read into that statement anything you want to. It’s an easy guess that if the “winds” ever shift here, like they have in China, all the other messaging platforms could lose access and the people would need to use Zalo to communicate. In China the 微信 app is also the one they use for banking and paying each other, so it makes for lots of … transparency. We enjoy using Zalo with local friends and consider all of our comms, regardless of encryption, fully transparent.
I sent the blessing message to her on the evening of the first day of the Lunar New Year. February 17 is the basically the latest date for Tet that we’ll ever see.
Next 9 Years (2026–2035)
2026: February 17 — Year of the Horse (Ngọ)
2027: February 6 — Year of the Goat (Mùi)
2028: January 26 — Year of the Monkey (Thân)
2029: February 13 — Year of the Rooster (Dậu)
2030: February 3 — Year of the Dog (Tuất)
2031: January 23 — Year of the Pig (Hợi)
2032: February 11 — Year of the Rat (Tý)
2033: January 31 — Year of the Buffalo (Sửu)
2034: February 19 — Year of the Tiger (Dần)
Nhung gave a heart to my message and replied with a blessing of her own. She’s home with teenage sons and extended family this week, and we’ll see her again next week.
When we saw her for the last time before Tết holiday, we handed her an envelope with “lucky money” inside. I have more to learn about lucky money, but what I know so far is that any time someone enters my home for the next two days, I should have a red envelope with clean/crisp money inside. The luck that I’m extending isn’t based on the amount of value, and the luck is luck for them as well as for me. But if you’re a kid in 2026 you definitely track which of your uncles gives a better payout when your family visits their house.
I have a friend here in Đà Nẵng, an American war vet, who gives out Lucky Money envelopes all year long. I try to get coffee with him (and/or a bowl of phở) every week, so I see him giving red envelopes A LOT. Someone selling hair bands or cigarette lighters or lotto tickets will walk through the cafe we’re in, and he gestures them over and hands them an envelope with cash inside, and wishes them a simple blessing from God. He gets his red envelopes printed with a tièng Việt Bible verse on them, and he buys them 5000 at a time. It could be wrong, and I know about lots of the inherent dangers of coupling spiritual things with financial charity, but I’ve been with this guy enough and seen the interactions enough to validate that what he’s doing is deeply right on so many levels.
