Sài Gòn flows in a hurry
Đà Nẵng drifts gentle and slow
I carry two breathing rhythms
Between two shores I go.
There are cities that give us work to do. And there are cities that give us room to think. For me, Sài Gòn belongs to the first kind — and Đà Nẵng, I believe a little more with each passing day, belongs to the second.
I do not write these lines as an outsider comparing two names on a map. I live in both. Work pulls me back and forth between the two ends of this strip of land — and over time, I came to see that I was not traveling between two cities, but between two rhythms. One rhythm for doing. One rhythm for thinking.
Sài Gòn is the fast rhythm. In the morning there, before you can finish your coffee, the day has already broken into a run. Meeting follows meeting, calls crowd into calls; every street seems in a hurry to be somewhere, and you hurry along with it — not because anyone is pushing you, but because the air itself carries you. In Sài Gòn, ideas are tested by fire very quickly: if it works, run with it; if it doesn't, fix it; if it can't be fixed, let it go and do something else. That city does not give you much time to hesitate. And the ones who do need exactly that.
Đà Nẵng is the slow rhythm. I once called this place a resting station for feeling — and every time I return, that phrase resting station rings a little more true. Here the sea is very near, and so are the mountains; walking along the riverbank in the late afternoon, you find yourself slowing down without knowing why. Đà Nẵng's slowness is not sluggishness — it is the deliberate slowness of a land that knows what it has and feels no need to show it off.
People often ask me which place is my "real" one. I usually just smile. A human life, I once thought, is a string of resting stations — some for refueling, some for resting, some only for looking back at the road behind. Sài Gòn and Đà Nẵng, for me, are not two choices that cancel each other out. They are two stations present at once in a single life — and each keeps a part of me safe.
I feel the speed of Sài Gòn the way one feels a rushing current — it pushes you forward, makes you decide, never lets you stand too long inside a hesitation. Many of my most important matters were settled in that rhythm.
I feel the slowness of Đà Nẵng the way one feels a deep breath. Here I can hear again the soft "dạ" of the Central people — soft but not weak, slow but never late. The tangled thoughts I carry out from Sài Gòn somehow loosen a few knots here — not because anyone untangles them for me, but because I have finally slowed down enough to see the thread.
I feel, too, the very moment the rhythm changes — when the plane touches the runway, when the phone stops buzzing without end, when I allow myself to think about one thing for many hours instead of many things in one hour. People often say you must choose: this city or that one. I think otherwise. Those who know how to live are not those who pick the one right rhythm — they are those who know when to change rhythm.
Perhaps that is why, when our yacht company set up an office in Đà Nẵng, I did not see it as merely a business decision. The yacht trade, in the end, is the trade of inviting people to leave the hurried rhythm on shore and step down to the water — to listen to the wind, to the waves, to see the city from another side. Work like that needs a seat in a place that understands slowness. And I believe the people who sit there will do it well — because no one goes far alone, and no one goes far on a single rhythm either.
I am grateful to both cities — one taught me to do, the other taught me to think. Sài Gòn gives me the speed not to fall behind. Đà Nẵng gives me the stillness not to lose my way. Moving between those two rhythms, I find myself still whole — hurried enough to keep up with the work, slow enough to keep up with living.
What remains — is knowing which rhythm today calls for.
Đà Nẵng — Sài Gòn, August 2026 — Nguyễn Ngọc Hải