She gripped her mother Loan’s hand as they stepped off the plane at Noi Bai Airport in Hanoi. No one was waiting. The heat and constant noise were her first impressions of her mother’s homeland.

“Yet deep down, I still felt something familiar,” the 61-year-old says, recalling her first trip to Vietnam in the summer of 1990.

Isabelle felt a pang of disappointment when the immigration officer stamped a red seal on her tourist visa and slid it back through the glass window. The stamp reminded her she was only a tourist in her own homeland.

The unwelcoming feeling quickly faded at the hotel over a steaming bowl of pho. The aroma of cinnamon and star anise brought back the stories her mother had told in France. “If it tastes like home, then we are home,” Loan told her.

From that moment Vietnam felt alive and set her on a journey to rediscover her roots and give back to her mother’s homeland.

Isabelle was born in a small village in Tours city in central France, the youngest of five siblings. Her mother left Ha Tinh, Vietnam, in 1955 with her father, a former French soldier who had fought in Indochina and returned home with psychological trauma after leaving the army.

The family lived in poverty. Her mother was the breadwinner but endured the prejudice of neighbors.

“I was an outcast in French society. I lived in the shadows of isolation and discrimination,” Isabelle recalls.

School was her only place for social contact, but it did little to ease the pain of being sexually abused by her biological father for nine years. With no way out but obedience and silence, she attempted suicide twice, when she was 13 and 17.

After graduating from university, she moved to Germany to work as an interpreter and met her husband, a technology entrepreneur.

She had saved enough to take Loan to Vietnam, motivated by her mother’s stories of their heritage. One of things she wanted to see was if Vietnamese shared her mother’s resilience in the face of hardship.

During the trip they reunited with Loan’s younger brother, Le. Isabelle saw a thatched-roof house and lush rice fields for the first time. A cousin picked pineapples for her and climbed a coconut tree to get her fresh coconut water.

“The warmth made me feel this was where I truly belonged. Step by step, I began to feel deeper love for this country.”

Loan passed away in 2003, leaving a wish to build as many schools as possible for poor children in Vietnam. Isabelle promised to fulfill it.

“She wanted equal educational opportunities for all children,” she says. She also wanted to give back to Vietnam, a place that had given her the affection she needed to heal after a traumatic childhood.

In May 2016 Isabelle established the Loan Foundation. Over nine years it undertook more than 48 projects, including scholarships for disadvantaged students and orphans, building boarding houses and kitchens and supporting disaster relief. Funding came from individual donors, international organizations in Europe and Vietnam and royalties from her books.

“I don’t want these children to see me as a rich ‘western woman’ who only hands out money. My efforts will mean nothing if they don’t recognize the value of education.”

Isabelle Muller at the handover ceremony for a kindergarten in Na Hang District, Tuyen Quang Province, September 2023. Photo by courtesy of Isabelle.

On trips to the highlands, Isabelle met children asking for US$5 each time someone took their photo. She realized financial aid and scholarships were not enough to bring lasting change, as traditions, family pressure and social norms often caused children to drop out of school or marry early.

Four times a year she flies to Vietnam to join awareness classes, counsel children and help them plan their futures. She draws inspiration from teachers in remote villages who cross forests and muddy roads to reach school.

The results of her efforts first became evident in children like Ma Thuy Thuy, born into a poor farming family. Her parents once forced her to quit school to work in the fields, and so she ran away to Hanoi by bus. With support from the Loan Foundation, she was admitted to East Asia University of Technology to study food technology.

Sung Thi My, 22, from the Dong Van Karst Plateau in Ha Giang was also on the verge of dropping out four years ago due to poverty. Isabelle reached out when My was in 12th grade at Ha Giang’s boarding school for ethnic minority students and encouraged her to continue.

“She was the light at the end of a dark tunnel,” My says. She works part-time in a hotel in Hanoi’s old quarter and is set to graduate from the Hanoi University of Commerce in 2026.

Vu Yen, Isabelle’s colleague at the Loan Foundation, praised her dedication to children in the northern mountains.

For every school-building project, Isabelle travels over 10,000 kilometers from Germany to personally oversee the work, even in dangerous locations on mountainsides or deep in remote areas. When roads are too slippery for cars, she rides a motorbike or walks with the team. Isabelle visits disadvantaged children at home to listen to their stories.

“I’m impressed by her belief that children are pieces of a puzzle that helps shape the world,” Yen says.