At the other end their daughter and two sons stuck their heads in front of the camera, and excitedly told their parents how they got to stay home due to a heavy storm that was causing floods and landslides.
While the children were happy to have the day off due to Typhoon Yagi, De constantly worried about the bad state of the roads around his village every flood season.
After Typhoon Yagi, seeing images of damaged hills and roads in his village, he grew even more anxious about his children’s well-being.
De said, looking at his wife with red eyes: "Poor kids. If it rains for a long time the ground may collapse. It’s very scary.
"We’re so far away, I don't know what to do."
De and his wife are among the first people to join the migration wave from the mountains of Son La to Binh Duong Province near Ho Chi Minh City, as they struggled with a life of constant hunger and debts back home.
When the couple first left seven years ago, it had been the storm season then too.
De had thought it would be for a short period and that they would return home soon. But they have visited home three times without being able to return for good.
The year they left home saw a sharp rise in migration rates in the northern mountainous region.
In the last three years that rate has ranked second out of the country’s six regions after only the Mekong Delta.
But it has not always been the case: Between 2006 and 2008 this region had the lowest migration rate in the country.
Then, according to a 2020 survey by the International CARE Organization in Vietnam, between 2017 and 2019 the number of people leaving their hometowns soared by 200% among many ethnic groups.
Working far away from home was becoming a trend among the Mong, Van Kieu and Sedang people, with the two most common options for them being factory jobs (68.7%) and informal or seasonal work (18.3%).
Their destinations and timeframes changed gradually. Initially many only left for a few months in a year when there was little farm work. But natural disasters, debts and the attraction of urban areas have made them leave for longer and longer.
Migrations become for the long term, and there were no definite return dates.
De, 27, was married at 13, and has taken the responsibility of feeding a family of seven, including his parents and three children, since he was 20.
The entire family depended on the corn field that De and his wife worked on.
In 2017, they had a good crop and the yield was the highest in five years, but prices fell sharply to a mere VND4,000 per kilogram, "a 10th of the earlier price," De said.
They sold the corn for VND50 million (US$2,000), with half gone toward paying back money borrowed to buy seeds and fertilizers for the crop and rice to eat.
The remaining was not enough to live on until the next year's harvest.
But the couple kept on working from morning to night, rain or shine, only to be empty-handed at the end of the year.
"I felt so miserable; it gave me a headache," De said.
He felt more and more insecure as his eldest daughter began going to school, his parents got older and corn prices continued to fall.
De was thus easily persuaded by his cousin Song A Thai, now 32, to leave home to work for a company in the south.
Thai was one of the first six people to leave the village for Binh Duong in 2015, after being recommended to work for a lumber mill by an acquaintance of his parents.
The job paid VND6-7 million a month, and did not require him to even know how to read or write.
After the 2015 Lunar New Year Thai and his younger brother paved the way for the first generation of Mong people in the village to migrate.
They left home when it was still dark and cold, walking with the mountain on one side and the cliff on the other until reaching a point when they could catch a bus.
They had to make two different bus trips, traveling for nearly three days, to reach Binh Duong.
Information about the villagers leaving to earn good money then spread through phone calls.
"Going to the south to work in a company" gradually became a motto among the locals.
De did not know where "the south" exactly was, he could not imagine what it was to work for a company either, but he trusted his relatives.
"Every day the salary is paid to us and there is no need to pay creditors," "the weather is cool and not cold" - such descriptions of the new land made De all the more determined to leave his homeland and head for the place.
In September 2017 De retraced Thai's journey, getting motion sickness to the point of "just wanting to jump out of the bus".
"I had to go," he explained his choice then. "I didn’t make any money at home."
A month after De left, his district Phu Yen suffered from historic flooding. Many communes and villages were isolated due to landslides.
The natural disasters and difficulties of farming made more young people want to find new livelihoods.
In November 2017 De's wife, Giang Thi Do, 31, followed her husband, blending into the wave of migration from the village.
Having studied migration for more than 30 years, Prof. Dang Nguyen Anh, a former vice president of the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, said 2017-19 marked the second time that ethnic minorities in the northern mountains left home.
But in 2009-12, during the first migration, they went to the Central Highlands to clear land for cultivation, meaning it was merely from one rural area to another, he said.
In 2017 they went to urban areas looking for jobs, he said.
Anh pointed out that climate change is indirectly affecting people's livelihoods and pushing many young people in the highlands to leave since they can no longer survive on farming like their fathers did.
"The migration has switched to long term from seasonal, and like a tree taking root, few people return home."
Hours in the field are replaced by factory shifts, from farmers they become a link in the industrial production chain and create new "villages" in the form of rented rooms right next to factory chimneys, he added.
But the new life was not all they had expected. For generations the Mong people in Son La have never been hired workers.
De’s hands, once used to break corn, had now switched to closing cabinets, sharpening stones. The feet that were used to walk on mountain paths now stand quietly by the machine.
Even after a while the couple could not get familiar with the routine or the language.
"It's too much pressure," De told his wife just a few weeks after stepping into the factory. "How can you do this for a whole year?"
Once he left the factory he remained within the four walls of his rented room most of the time.
As the rooms stood close to each other, he could only see a small patch of sky when he looked up between their corrugated roofs unlike in his mountains back home.
De began to miss his home food and the vegetables that he grew himself at home, which were not as tough as those sold in Binh Duong.
The feeling of wanting to return grew increasingly stronger after watching his wife cry at night because she missed their children, especially after once receiving the news that their eldest daughter had been hit by a motorbike on the way to school and caused her to fall.
"I was afraid her injury would be bad, she would not know what to do without us," De said.
The couple told each other that they "cannot work at the company any more and have to go back."
Their first trip ended that way within five months. Binh Duong became a memory that De did not want to recall.
But life at home had not changed and remained hopeless.
In March, when the corn crop began, De had to borrow VND20 million to buy seeds and fertilizers, restarting the vicious cycle of debt.
"I ate very little, but I had to pay a lot of interest. Debt collectors made me miserable."
Creditors charge interest rates of 50-60% a year.
De did not want to go back to the vicious cycle of being stuck in debt and having an empty stomach, and again decided that working for a company in the south was a better option.
In March 2019 De and his wife went down the mountain for their second journey south.
The couple left home at 4 a.m. so that their children who were sleeping did not know.
Slipping along a dark, jagged slope covered in mud, they once again caught two different buses to head to Binh Duong.
This time the couple went to a different factory to work indoors and with air conditioning, and it was less difficult than before.
Their monthly incomes were enough to save to buy phones and a motorbike, and so they no longer had to walk half an hour every day to work.
After a while De found himself enjoying the sunny southern weather with few cold rains.
But just when life began to stabilize, in October 2021 Covid-19 hit Binh Duong and nearby areas.
The stress and trouble caused by lockdowns and factory closures, apprehensions about possible sudden death and an uncertain future prompted the couple to leave once more.
More than half of Son La's 110,000 migrant workers in Binh Duong returned home during this period, according to the province Department of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs.
The return trip on motorbikes took De, Thai and many others more than three days and they were determined "not to go back to the south for the rest of our lives".
After one and a half years living in the plains, De was surprised when he returned to his village. Several blue and red concrete roofs had sprung up on top of the mountains replacing the wooden houses.
Most of their owners had been to Binh Duong or had children working in companies there and sending money back, Song A Su, the village head said.
Building concrete houses had become a new goal for the mountain migrants.
De and his wife were no exception. They spent their savings from their salaries and borrowed some money to build a new house. And just like that, the debt trap closed again, prompting another trip to the far south.
Su said the village had changed since the local Mong people began to go to work in the south. Almost everyone had enough to eat, and the idea of "going to work for a company" - formerly disdained as a last-ditch effort to escape poverty - has now become a new way of life, he said.
"In the past only the poor went south. Now the rich and poor all go away. There is no one left in the village."
In Phu Yen District, 22,000 people have migrated, according to a 2023 report by its People's Committee.
Their main destinations are industrial parks in the northern provinces of Hung Yen and Hai Duong and Binh Duong in the south.
Rarely do people return home, and most only during the Lunar New Year.
Many people stay in the south for a few years and only return after saving up a large sum of money.
After seven years as a factory worker, De has seen a more promising future.
He has gradually widened his circle among the Mong people in Binh Duong.
His hostel has nearly 100 rooms, half of which are rented by people from his district in Son La, mostly young couples.
On weekends they gather in one room and have a party with corn wine and paprika sent from home.
On the clothes line, among T-shirts, jeans and company uniforms can also be seen the traditional colorful flower dresses of the Mong women.
"Life is very comfortable," De, sitting on a vacant lot outside his room, said with a smile.
"I'm happy here."
According to Dr. Ngo Thi Thanh Huong, policy researcher at CARE Organization in Vietnam, migrant workers often build networks based on certain factors: the same hometown, the same ethnic group and the same workplace.
They have neighbors from their own ethnic groups and support each other, practice cultural rituals and speak the same language.
"This is also a way for them to maintain a sense of security in an unfamiliar land."
According to the CARE survey, 79.2% of ethnic minority workers go to faraway places to work because of introductions by acquaintances and invitations from them.
Only 20.8% search for information online, get recommendations from local officials or are hired directly by companies.
Migration opens up a new life not only for those who leave but also for people who never leave the top of the foggy mountains.
At home the elderly and young children know how to call people living far away using smartphones.
Song Thi Phang Nha, 12, De's eldest daughter, goes to boarding school every week. Her family’s meals now have meat and rice regularly.
De and his wife have set themselves a goal of staying in Binh Duong for another two years, paying off their debts of VND150 million from building the house in Son La and saving enough money for their children to go to school.
Every time he calls home, he tells his children not to get married young, study hard and go to vocational school if they do not want to study much so that "life will be more fun later".
He does not want his daughter to traverse the harsh path he and his wife did by getting married at the age of 14 and 15 and slog for years from dawn to night for virtually nothing.
He does not want his children to bury their young years in a factory like him either.
But the girl has other plans.
Now in seventh grade, she has already made plans to "go down to Binh Duong to work" like other adults.
Clueless like her father used to be, she does not know where Binh Duong is, does not understand what a company is, but sees it as a way to leave the top of the rainy foggy mountain.
Content: May Trinh, Phung Tien
Photos: Phung Tien
