The decision to move back to hometown is no longer just a trend for dreamers who want to enjoy a leisurely life as it requires a certain amount of alertness and a bit of courage to take this decision in order to adapt to the rural lifestyle with the slower pace and simpler living.

Kim Ut has created a TikTok account to introduce her local specialties after moving back to her rural hometown.

Kim Ut has become a familiar face across social media platforms after moving back to her hometown in Quang Nam Province to create a TikTok account with the aim of promoting local food. She is known for her loveliness while wearing Áo Bà Ba (or Vietnamese silk pajamas), a typical casual wear in Southern Viet Nam like the Mekong Delta and other rural areas, as well as her storytelling style in a rustic, natural manner. The 25-year old lady frequently shares videos on TikTok in order to introduce local food and culture, along with lifestyle of people living in Da Nang and Quang Nam Province, and Central Viet Nam as a whole,.

After graduating from Vietnam National University – Ho Chi Minh City, Kim Ut has found a good job with monthly earnings of VND 10 million that she have stayed in for two years. After a while, she realized that she wasn't really passionate about my career, so she decided to quit her job and change her career path. She gave herself time to think, to hesitate to make this decision.

She said that she had found it difficult to choose to return to her hometown from a modern city where she found a good job with a stable salary as the cost of living needed to maintain her standard of living in her hometown posed a great challenge to the young girl in her early twenties, who has yet to work in a physically demanding job.

Kim Ut started a business in her hometown by creating a TikTok account called ‘Ut returns to her hometown’. Fortunately, her relatives provided meticulous advice and guidance on farming skills and knowledge to her. Besides, she strengthened farming knowledge through self-learning.  As a ‘Gen Z farmer’ in the digital age, Kim Ut is active in recording videos and taking photos featuring her working moments and daily activities in her rural hometown in order to share them on social media platforms. Unexpectedly, her posted videos have drawn a great deal of attention from social media users around the world.

"Initially, I found it funny to share my cooking and gardening videos and others featuring rural life on the internet but I didn't expect to reach a large number of audience with rapid increase in view numbers. This will increase the chances of my TikTok content going viral. " Kim Ut remarked.

More than half a year after creating her Tiktok account, Kim Ut has got more than 1,000,000 followers, and each her video has attracted millions of views. She shares videos to introduce food and culture of rural areas through daily meals and recipes or instructions for making Vietnamese traditional dishes such as pancakes, bread, chicken rice, and fish stew. In her efforts to diverse her TikTok content, she shares more videos that teach viewers how to make cake, how to weave, and how to make crafts. Tiktok helps her to monetize her account, and earn income based on her followers and their engagement.

Like Kim Ut, Dao Duy Tai decided to quit his job to return to his birthplace in Dai Loc District, Quang Nam Province from a city in early 2023. At that time, his decision caught many people by surprise. He has become a digital content creator to promoting his hometown's culture and its food after moving back to his hometown.

After returning to his birthplace, Duy Tai renovated a shabby warehouse which was made of bamboo and located behind his parents’ house. He then converted this warehouse into a small hillside kitchen where the young man frequently records videos to share them on the internet in order to teach viewers how to cook his local dishes, including Dai Loc’s Quang noodles, banana pork bone soup which is a hearty stew soup made with pork bones, braised snakehead fish, pork rice paper rolls, and lotus seed sweet soup. His videos have captured online audience's attention.

Duy Tai said that the kitchen is also considered a ‘healing’ place where the homeowner can invite his relatives and friends to play and chat together.

He has reached an incredible milestone of 50,000 followers on the internet after nearly a year of setting up his 'Hillside Kitchen" online channel. Especially, his video series on the theme of ‘Cooking at a stranger's house’ which introduced vivid stories about the simple life of Quang people, have grabbed his audience's attention on social media due to their realistic scenes that helped bring viewers a familiar feeling.

In the midst of fast-paced modern life, young people like Kim Ut and Dao Duy Tai are making significant contributions to promoting and preserving their local culture through food of their hometowns in a very unique way as their digital contents have reached a massive audience on social media.

Reporting by NGAN HA – Translating by H.L