Shopkeepers characterize Hang as a reliable, fair business person who provides them with high-quality products. While this approach sounds like the basic outline of any successful small business, Hang, who lives in Thuong Tim village outside Hanoi, had no such outline to follow when she started out in 1990. Like most entrepreneurs here, she had no role models or connections, just instincts that have made her, like her products, rather exceptional in Vietnam.

Until eight years ago Hang's village was a cooperative that specialized in lacquer products. When it folded, Hang, then 41, saw an opportunity. "I didn't want to grow rice so I borrowed 300,000 dong and brought samples I made to shops in Hanoi," she said from the workshop behind her three-story house, the village's finest. "At the beginning I worked very hard, but I met many people and business improved."

Hang's days are now spent overseeing production (six employees), and travelling to Hanoi to take orders and collect money. At each shop, she asks which products sell best, who bought them, and at what price. She doesn't know what her profits or gross are, she said, because after eight years she still works from order to order, reinvesting her profits.

While she has obviously done well, she maintains a sense of modesty, insisting on being interviewed in a low brick workshop where her products are made. Nonetheless, her three-story house, Honda Dream motorbikes and a Sony television are in stark contrast to the lifestyle of her neighbors, most of whom are still farmers.

Since the business' inception, she has raised three children, all college educated. One, an art school graduate, designs products for the business. She also cares for her husband, whose $6,000 heart operation in Ho Chi Minh City she was able to pay for with her earnings.

She is proud of her achievements and reputation, but knows she faces the uncertainties common to Vietnam's small-scale private entrepreneurs. "I have no plan," she said. "The market is okay now, but might not be in the future. It's very risky. My advantage is good quality products and honest practices."

That her approach has proven so successful would suggest that her business has the potential to contribute to Vietnam's economic growth on a wider scale, except that the government has no real framework in place to make this happen. Hang would like to export her products, but she cannot because her business is not registered, a process she has avoided because she has heard it is too time-consuming and expensive.

So for now, she enjoys the small ways in which limited market reform has improved her life. "I used to wake up at four," she said. "Now I sleep until five."