“Oi, no more talking about Vietnamese students abroad and their decisions to return or not,” you may be saying. It is already as old as the hills, and still recently found its way to go viral all over the social media among us Vietnamese people who used to be, have been, or simply care enough about studying abroad at all. I should have been more than happy to have a little pack of popcorn enjoying the debate show between hot bloggers, successful people in or out of my country, and selling writers on the press… until I felt the urge to write something from my perspective.

Here’s a brief summary of the context to people who may feel lost: It started with of a scandal of Dr Dang Dzoan, a university teacher, scholar, and researcher in Can Tho, who came back to Vietnam after finishing his doctoral degree in the Netherlands. And now he was assigned to work as an administrator at the university (i.e. got fired from teaching) because he published his controversial points of view and disagreements with the university leaders or the way it worked on his Facebook account. To the press coverage of this story, reputable and famous people go online to share their opinions about Dr Dzoan and then (boom!) the big issue of coming home or not after studying abroad.

Needless to say how easy it is to rant about why people should or should not stay working in a wealthy Western country with an internationally recognised degree. If you stay, you will earn so much better, and will live in a civilised, modern society where your family are secure with welfare and promising future for the next generations. On the other hand, if you return, you will have to face so many difficulties in the poor researching conditions and the political/administrative regime where employment and promotion depend so little on your expertise.

Above are not even opinions, they are facts-set-in-stone. Opinions are about whether they contribute to the development of their home country, whether their potentials are wasted in their home country, whether they can focus on researches and sciences among so many difficulties in their home country, whether they can adapt in the home country employment culture, etc.

And about — this is so new — whether they are so afraid of walking out of their “comfort zone” under the western sky to step into the working environment in their own country.

Isn’t that just one hell of an irony?

Since when a country where you can’t speak your mother tongue in most of your daily routine and social relationships, where you have almost no supports from families and childhood friends (and, remember, let alone housemaids and nannies), and probably where you have to strive only not to be discriminated, is a comfort zone?

Well, just kidding. Both the people who share that opinion and I know that it is not what they mean. They certainly mean that in the western education, people are only taught how to work or research, so now they can’t come back to Vietnam and enter an environment that requires so much more.

To some extent, they are right.

But they forgot that the western education also teaches students more than just fundamental subjects, about more jobs that just doctor, lawyer, engineer, accountant, programmer, and all that.

Why only count people who stay in wealthy countries and people who return to Vietnam? What about people who go to even much less developed African countries?

Why only count people who research in laboratories and people who work in big name businesses? What about people who call for social changes, who advocate human rights and animal rights?

Many of my friends changed their minds since they went abroad to study. And it’s not only about whether to stay or to return. It’s about dropping their mothers’ desire to major in Finance or Economics to study Women and Children Abuse. It’s about abandoning their own intentions to earn a PhD to go to construct water supply system in South Sudan. Or it’s about rejecting their job offers in the largest city of their home country to help Haitians rehabilitate their infrastructure after an earth quake.

And I must wonder how comfortable the red signal zones they are working in are.