He was born too early. Congenital optic nerve atrophy left him severely visually impaired, and for years his parents carried him from one treatment to the next. Nothing worked. The marriage did not survive it. When he completed lower secondary school in 2019, the practical question was simple and unforgiving: where does a blind boy from a provincial town go to continue his education. The answer was Hanoi, roughly 70 kilometres away, and he went by himself.
He now studies social work at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities on Nguyen Trai street. The arithmetic of his life is tight. Living costs run to three or four million dong a month; his disability assistance comes to a little over one million. The rest he has earned by telemarketing, handing out leaflets, promotional modelling, and selling SIM cards — whatever paid, in whatever hours the coursework left him.
The "5-Good Student" title is not a consolation prize. Awarded by the Vietnam National Union of Students, it measures ethics, academic results, physical fitness, volunteering and international integration, all five, with no allowance made for the fact that one candidate reads by touch and by ear.
He did not stop at his own case. He is vice chair of the Disabled Youth Club of Thanh Xuan — a district that no longer exists, dissolved into three wards when Vietnam abolished the district tier of government — and sits on the board of the Vietnamese Blind Students Network. He took medals in adaptive sports and dance in 2022 and 2023, and a commendation from the Central Union of Vietnamese Youth in 2024. This year he was among 26 people chosen nationwide for the "Shining Vietnamese Resilience" programme.
We want to be seen through the lens of our abilities, not our impairments.
It is worth hearing that sentence as what it is: not a plea, but a correction. Cuong is telling the people who honour him where to look.