Huyen grew up in a large, poor farming family, left school after ninth grade, and married at 19. Her first child was born with cerebral palsy, which added heavy medical costs to the family’s already tight budget.

To help her household, she began preparing and selling local specialties such as dried fish simmered with peanuts, fermented vegetables, and sesame‑seaweed salt. Initially she sold the products wholesale to grocery stores and market stalls.

In 2023 she decided to reach more customers through social media. She wrote short, humorous scripts about daily rural life, filmed them while acting as the granny, and started livestreaming the cooking process.

The “granny” character speaks in the local accent, wears blackened teeth and a stooped posture, and shares memories of her own grandmother’s kitchen. Huyen says she wanted to bring back “affectionate memories of childhood and the countryside.”

Her videos quickly gathered millions of views overall, and many individual clips have surpassed one million views.

After about a year of steady posting, the online orders grew far beyond what her home kitchen could handle. To keep up with demand, Huyen opened a small production facility in her hometown.

The new plant earned a food‑safety certificate from the Quang Tri Department of Agriculture and Environment. It now sells roughly 1,000 boxes of the dried‑fish‑with‑peanuts product each month, bringing in about VND150 million ($5,700) in revenue.

Huyen stresses that social media gave her visibility, but product quality keeps customers coming back. “No matter how famous you are, if the food is poor, people will leave,” she explains.