This story belongs to the second group.
Back in 2023, during my second year of university, I joined a musical instrument club. Calling it a club is probably underselling it. It was basically a small army of musicians, with more than thirty members and enough personalities to fill several different friend groups.
That was where I met someone I now call Aba
.
He is the same age as me, but somehow ended up with the nickname Anh Ba
anyway. Aba is the kind of person who can be incredibly talented and completely ridiculous at the same time. He plays guitar, has frighteningly fast hands despite being built like a small child, and can casually play things that made me question whether my fingers were connected correctly.
He is also way deeper into deathcore and heavier stuff than I am. To be fair, I enjoy that kind of music too. I am just not as far down the rabbit hole as he is.
For whatever reason, we got along immediately. Maybe it was the music. Maybe it was the humor. Maybe we were both equally stupid. Probably all three.
Through Aba, I was introduced to a group of his friends from Soc Trang. Most of them had already moved to Saigon for university while Aba had moved to Can Tho. At first, they were just names in Discord calls and profile pictures on Facebook.
For nearly a year, that was all they were.
We played League together, shared memes, talked nonsense late into the night, and said things that would sound completely insane to anyone outside the friend group.
The funny thing is that despite barely meeting in person, they slowly became people I talked to almost every day.
Then Aba left Can Tho. He transferred to a university in Saigon. Officially, it was an academic decision. Unofficially, our friend group still jokes that love may have had something to do with the timing.
That part by itself was never the deep part. The real lore came after he left.
The club in Can Tho was not exactly overflowing with musical brilliance to begin with, and Aba had been one of the few people genuinely keeping both the energy and the skill level interesting. Once he left, the band tried to keep struggling forward a little, and I did my best too, but without one of my best friends there the whole thing felt flatter. Same club, less fun.
It did not help that the club's musical judgment could be questionable on a good day. There was one guy and one girl who were both rough musically and somehow even rougher in personality. One of them uploaded a self-produced song that, in my extremely biased opinion, was nowhere near ready for daylight, yet he posted it with heroic levels of confidence. And somehow those were the kinds of people drifting toward club-president territory.
So yes, those days got boring pretty fast.
After that, life continued. I stayed in Can Tho. The others stayed in Saigon. We kept playing games. Kept talking. Kept being idiots online.
And then, somehow, the internship happened.
Early 2025 arrived and suddenly I found myself in Saigon too. For the first time, the people I had spent countless nights talking to through a screen became real.
- Aismyx
- Hnhat
- Wy
- Phuy
- Thao
- Tdat
People I already knew, yet somehow had never actually met.
And almost immediately, it felt natural.
What started as a reunion quickly became one of the best parts of my time in Saigon. We hung out constantly. We stayed out late. We wandered around the city with no real plan. They dragged me to places I never would have found on my own.
Food spots. Coffee shops. Music gigs. Random corners of Saigon that somehow became memories.
Looking back, I do not remember every destination. I remember the people.
I remember laughing until my stomach hurt. I remember conversations that made absolutely no sense. I remember feeling welcomed. Most importantly, I remember never feeling alone in a city that should have felt unfamiliar.
When people talk about moving to a new city, they usually talk about opportunities, careers, or personal growth. Those things matter. But the people matter more.
Saigon was fun because of the people I experienced it with. Without them, it would have just been another city.
This quest is not really about a reunion. It is about friendship. It is about the strange reality that some of the most important people in your life can start as random voices in a Discord call.
It is about realizing that distance does not matter nearly as much as effort.
And it is about being grateful for the people who make a place feel like home, even when you are hundreds of kilometers away from where you started.
So if any of you somehow end up reading this: thank you.
For the rides. For the food recommendations. For the music. For the stupid jokes. For the late-night conversations. For making Saigon feel a little smaller. And for being exactly the kind of friends every idiot moving to a new city hopes to find.
Saigon was not home by default. You all made it feel like one.