Phuong Uyen Tran
At Tan Hiep Phat, we have never measured a company’s character by the comfort it can offer the people around it. We measure it by the strength it helps them discover in themselves. The same, I have come to believe, is true of a person. Circumstance does not decide what someone becomes. What they choose to do next does.
For more than seven years, THP has sponsored Nối trọn yêu thương (Connecting Complete Love), a VTV1 program built entirely around that belief. Each episode follows an ordinary Vietnamese life reshaped by hardship — illness, loss, disability — and, more importantly, what that person built afterward. It is not a program about rescue. It is a program about the particular kind of will that refuses to stop at the point where most stories would end, and what happens to everyone around that person once they keep going.
Lâm Thị Nga lost the use of her legs to transverse myelitis when she was six years old. Decades of treatment never gave them back to her. What she built instead is a Hà Nam workshop that engineers three-wheeled mobility vehicles, each one customized to the specific body and needs of the person who will ride it, and that now employs dozens of workers with disabilities alongside her. Nga does not consider the vehicle her real product. Confidence is. “When people gain confidence,” she has said, “they may pursue better opportunities outside” her workshop — and she counts it a success, not a loss, each time one of them does.
Nguyễn Thị Nha was born with half of her left arm. Vietnam’s job market turned her away more times than she cares to count. In 2010, unable to find steady work herself, she began teaching computer skills to other people with disabilities — unpaid, because no one had offered to pay her either. Three years later she founded the Youth Club for People with Disabilities in Hải Dương, and has since connected more than 720 people with disabilities to training and employment, one phone call at a time. “Sometimes I think about stopping to find stable work myself,” she has said. “But then someone calls.”
Neither woman asked to be tested this way. Both decided, at some point no camera captured, that the test would not be the end of the story. That is the human spirit THP looks for in every story Nối trọn yêu thương tells: not the absence of hardship, but the refusal to let hardship write the final line. It is also, I think, the truest measure of what any of us — a person, a family, a company — can leave behind: not what we were spared, but who we helped keep walking.
“Adversity does not define a person, or an organization. What they choose to build afterward does.”
— Phuong Uyen Tran
