Tuan works in the hotel in Hoi An and has the most wonderful smile - a very slight young man, with the longest, most elegant fingernails.
I asked him about them.
He told me he had been growing them while he worked in the hotel, where he expects to be for six months.
Before that he worked on the family farm very hard and said he was very strong, from carrying heavy loads on his shoulders.

I asked him what time people have to get up in Hoi An.
Everything closes down very early.
He said most people get up at about 2 am. They go to market to get fish - I think probably to sell on in the local fish market, because fishing boats are pulling up at the quayside continuously. I don't think the boats actually fish from Hoi An because the river is rather silty. Its days as a port ended long ago.

Tuan's family farm has a buffalo, he told me, a pig, a few hens and some ducks. They grow rice.
He said they plough with the buffalo, then wait for the floods. He told me how the rice is grown, using the expression 'rice tree' and I explained with a drawing that it is rice plant, not a tree!
They grow two crops a year and all the work is done by hand.
Snakes are a problem, said Tuan, they crawl up from the flooded paddy fields and wait on the paths. A lot of people are bitten and the black and white striped snake, that he drew, and the cobra, are deadly poisonous.
He sleeps on the marble floor in the lobby of the hotel, with just a sheet and he said that when he comes back in his next life, he wants to come back as an Australian!