But I’ve been away from Vietnam since high school so there are now a lot of concepts and ideas – even simple ones – I’m only capable of expressing in English, things I simply lack the vocabulary for in what’s nominally my native language. If one of my younger cousins shows me their biology homework, I wouldn’t be able to recognise the Vietnamese word for ‘mitochondria’, let alone explain how it’s the powerhouse of the cell.

I’m not scared of losing face with my cousins – ultimately, I’m still the big boy in the family who got to study abroad. It’s not like our people look down on mastery of foreign languages either: in the annals of Vietnamese history there’s the tale of Prince Trần Nhật Duật (1255-1330), sixth son of the Trần Dynasty’s first emperor – and a noted scholar and polyglot – who used his skill with languages to great military and diplomatic renown.

The story goes that in 1280 Trịnh Giác Mật, a leader among the ethnic minority people of the Đà Giang region, took up arms against the Trần government. Prince Nhật Duật was given an army to respond. Giác Mật wanted to lure this young prince into an ambush, so he issued an invitation – would His Highness come over to my camp, alone, to accept a drink and my surrender? Against the advice of his generals, Prince Nhật Duật accepted.

The history books did record their full conversation, but it involved a lot of local colloquialisms and subtle cultural details. Let’s just skip to the bit where their meeting ended with an astonished Trịnh Giác Mật: “O Prince, surely you must be one of our own kinsmen!”

“Our people have always been kinsmen,” the Prince answered. Thus, a war was ended before the first battle even began.

At this point it’d be fitting if I could say I first heard this story in English class, but unfortunately real life isn’t so serendipitous. It’s a shame, for this tale illustrates many of the key mechanics of speaking in a foreign language, or indeed, in any language.

Some of the first things I was taught about English were that you’ll regularly be asked a point-blank, non-rhetorical question and that you must never actually answer it. The only acceptable response to ‘Hi, how are you?’ is ‘I’m fine thank you’, or some variant on this. It was only later when I came to Australia that I understood English-speaking people don’t just enjoy insincere conversations; they’re a form of freedom for all parties involved. No matter whether you’re starting a conversation or responding, you have a script you can rely on.

These ‘scripts’ – little norms, expectations, and shibboleths governing how people interact – they exist in Vietnam too. They exist in all languages, not just English. If you know how to use them, like Prince Nhật Duật, something as enormous and bewildering like riding up to the enemy camp unarmed becomes more manageable. It’s only a matter of learning the script and giving the correct response on cue.

It’d be even more thematically fitting if I could bow myself out right here. Tie everything up into a neat lesson: Oh, it’s just a matter of learning a culture’s pre-established scripts. You might have to play catch-up a bit, but in this age of global telecommunication it should be easy to connect with other Vietnamese folks on Facebook and keep in touch with the culture, right? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

I have social anxiety. I don’t just speak English better, but come across as ruder and more irritable when speaking Vietnamese with friends and family back home. Even with a simple question I’d struggle to answer, which is embarrassing, and my anxiety would act up so I’d get flustered, and thus defensive, and before you know it, it’s a feedback loop. Is it really that much help to know there are tons of different scripts I could have fallen back on, when I don’t instinctively have access to any of them? And what if there is no script for me at all?

I am a genderfluid trans woman, which simply means my gender isn’t fixed although most of the time I identify with womanhood. For the majority of contemporary Vietnamese society I must also be either a diseased victim needing to be cured or, perhaps more likely, an immoral deviant seduced by ‘imported’ Western debauchery. There’s no other option.

To wit: there are a number of words for LGBT+ people in Vietnamese, but the most popular colloquial term is perhaps ‘pê-đê’, an indiscriminate catch-all for any non-normative gender or sexuality.

It’s an adaptation of the French pédéraste. From the Greek paîs, meaning ‘child’ and erastḗs, meaning ‘lover’. It’s a term with an unfortunate double meaning.

Yet maybe I am being unduly pessimistic here. Even in the realm of vague umbrella terms, there are other options. I could say ‘’ái nam ái nữ- (Sino-Vietnamese), ‘gay’ (taken from English), or ‘đồng bóng’ (from Vietnamese autochthonous folk religion: originally a term for the spirit medium, in whom both male and female spirits can be incarnated). A quick Google search shows that more accurate vocabularies seem to be gaining traction – showing just because I haven’t been in contact with the Vietnamese LGBT+ community, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, or hasn’t been doing brilliant advocacy work.

I admire them. I cannot be as good an activist as they are – I’m no good at speaking out in public with my tied tongue – but I admire their guts and their dedication.Some may say they’re playing a fool’s game, and that writing a new script for a whole society is impossible. But then again, so was riding up to the enemy camp unarmed.

So is everything, really, until someone has the nerve to try.