Names

Faces, yes; names, absolutely not. It doesn't help that in Vietnam half the people I meet seem to be called Linh, Huy or Trang. In my office there are three Trangs, so we've had to label them by department, like files. What works for me is using the name straight away, something like 'Nice to meet you, Mr Quan', and then linking it to a detail, say, Quan with the red motorbike. If all else fails, I save the phone number with a description, so my contact list is full of entries like 'Hoa tall, yoga class'. As a child I had a nickname at home: Tep, which means a tiny shrimp, because I was a very small baby. My parents believed a plain nickname made a child easier to raise. It was fine until my mother shouted it across the school gate in front of my whole class. Change my real name? No. It's Minh Anh, which is common enough that nobody misspells it, and my grandfather chose it, so swapping it would feel like returning a gift.