Vietnam’s Gen Z Is Quietly Rediscovering Rural Roots on Social Media

The first thing heard is not music, but chopping. A knife strikes a wooden board somewhere in a Vietnamese family yard, followed by the rustle of leaves, the hiss of a cooking fire and the voices of relatives preparing for Tet, Vietnam's Lunar New Year. On another screen, an elderly woman patiently turns fruit in a pan of sugar, repeating a process that may have been part of her family’s New Year preparations for decades.

For millions of young Vietnamese viewers, these scenes are becoming a form of comfort.

Across TikTok and YouTube, a quiet category of content is gaining an audience among a generation otherwise associated with rapid edits, viral challenges and an almost endless stream of short-form entertainment. Videos showing grandmothers making preserves, families wrapping bánh chưng by hand, preparing traditional dishes or simply spending time in rural kitchens are attracting large numbers of views, offering an unusually slow alternative to the digital noise surrounding them.

The young Vietnamese people are not just watching traditional content but they are increasingly using the platforms of hyper-modern culture to recover something that feels increasingly difficult to find in everyday urban life: a connection to family, place and memory.

Nguyễn Trần Đăng Khoa experienced this almost accidentally. His vlog, “Tết ở quê,” or “Tet in the countryside,” began with a personal fear rather than a calculation about social-media engagement.

“I made the vlog because I feared one day I might forget the image of my grandmother wrapping rice cake by the stove, the chopping sounds in the yard, my father pasting calligraphy on the porch…,” he said.

He filmed those details and assembled them into a video of nearly 10 minutes, capturing the ordinary preparations that might once have seemed too mundane to record. Instead, the video quickly drew nearly 10,000 views.

Nguyen Trong Hieu shares the story of a rare traditional Tet jam made from pickled eggplant. This unique treat started in Hue, moved to Quang Nam province, and is now very hard to find. Photo by Nguyen Trong Hieu

“I didn’t expect it to reach nearly 10,000 views in a few days,” Khoa said. “Many people messaged me saying they watched and missed home and the Tet of old.”

That response points to something larger than nostalgia. The viewers were not necessarily interested in a polished representation of Vietnamese tradition; they were recognising pieces of their own lives.

The appeal of ordinary life

Some of the most successful rural-life creators have built audiences around precisely this lack of spectacle.

On screen, there may be little more than a kitchen, a garden and a pair of hands preparing food. There are no luxury products to promote and no carefully choreographed influencer lifestyle. The camera lingers on repetitive work: washing fruit, cutting vegetables, stirring sugar or preparing rice.

In the Mekong Delta, Út has built an audience around videos showing traditional food preparation, including the laborious production of New Year preserves. The process can take considerable time, but she has described the work as emotionally rewarding, saying she feels “excited, as if reliving Tet of the past.”

The phrase captures the appeal of the genre. The videos are not simply demonstrations of how to cook an old recipe. They recreate a rhythm.

For viewers accustomed to scrolling through videos designed to capture attention within seconds, watching someone slowly prepare food can become almost meditative. The sounds that would normally be discarded as background noise — chopping, boiling, frying, conversation — become the content itself.

This creates an unusual reversal of the logic of social media. TikTok and YouTube normally compress experience into increasingly rapid fragments. Rural-life videos often do the opposite, using the same platforms to make ordinary time visible again.

With Vietnamese New Year getting closer, cooking videos for traditional holiday meals get more likes and comments. Photo by Nguyen Trong Hieu

Looking for somewhere to stand

The trend is emerging against a broader transformation in Vietnamese society. Young people are growing up in cities that are increasingly expensive, competitive and digitally saturated, while traditional family life is becoming more distant for many who leave their hometowns for education and work.

The countryside can therefore represent something more complicated than a place of origin. It becomes an emotional reference point.

Cultural researcher Nguyễn Khoa, of the Institute for Research, Preservation and Promotion of National Culture, sees the phenomenon as part of a wider response to the digitalisation of everyday relationships.

When relationships are increasingly mediated through screens, he argues, people begin to seek more direct, tangible and lasting emotional anchors. Family and hometown provide exactly that.

For Nguyễn Khoa, this does not mean young Vietnamese are rejecting modernity or abandoning tradition. They are reconnecting with their roots “using the language and tools of their own era.”

From heritage to self-expression

The same impulse can be seen in other online trends surrounding Vietnamese heritage, including the growing practice sometimes described as “flex di sản” — proudly showcasing heritage sites, traditional clothing, architecture and other cultural symbols.

The appeal is partly aesthetic, but it is also personal. Traditional dress can become something to wear with pride rather than something associated only with ceremonies. Historic sites become places to visit and photograph rather than distant symbols in textbooks. Regional food becomes something to rediscover and share.

For Gen Z, heritage is therefore increasingly something to perform in the broadest sense: not as an official cultural duty, but as part of constructing an individual identity.

This makes the trend different from a conventional campaign to preserve tradition. There is little sense of instruction or obligation. Instead, young people are asking what elements of the past still feel meaningful to them and then translating those elements into the visual language of contemporary social media.

There is a high volume of interest in the traditional methods used to create the clay folk toys. Photo by Nguyen Trong Hieu

The countryside comes back

There is an irony to this revival. The route back to rural Vietnam increasingly runs through the very technology that has helped separate younger generations from slower forms of life.

A young person in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City can spend the day surrounded by traffic, screens, deadlines and rising living costs, then open TikTok at night and watch someone prepare food in a Mekong Delta kitchen. For several minutes, the pace changes.

There is something particularly powerful about the fact that the content does not necessarily tell viewers to return to the countryside. It simply reminds them what is there.

The chopping sounds in Khoa's yard, his grandmother wrapping rice cakes and his father putting calligraphy on the porch are insignificant as individual events. Together, they form an atmosphere that many viewers recognised immediately.

Their response — messages saying they missed home and “the Tet of old” — suggests that what is being rediscovered is not necessarily a rural lifestyle itself, but a sense of belonging associated with it.

-Asia Media Centre

Banner Image - With Vietnamese New Year getting closer, cooking videos for traditional holiday meals get more likes and comments. Photo by Nguyen Trong Hieu