thanks for the advice, but i'm learning chinese anyway as a hobby.

This is basically what I was going to say.

It's been a while since I checked but last I heard, there's decent money that can be made as an English language tutor. Of course, business English tutoring attracts the best money and qualifications always help but you can go quite far if you commit to being a good tutor and put the effort in even without qualifications or having experience in business-speak.

Vietnam is pretty cheap with regards to the cost of living as well.

If I had to flee where I live and I had a choice, Vietnam would rank extremely high on my list.

But I think Vietnamese is deceptive with regards to ease of learning the language. Imo it's more difficult to master Vietnamese tones than the tones in Mandarin, and that's without incorporating the glottal stop that's very common in Vietnamese. The romanised script definitely lowers the bar for reading Vietnamese by a huge margin but it's a challenge to learn how to speak Vietnamese well.