I often asked my mum about Vietnam, what it was like being in the middle of a war, and her answers would sometimes surprise me. She told me it was the little trivial everyday things that you couldn’t do that was the most annoying; like running out of ingredients and not being able to just stroll up to the shops to buy some. ‘You get used to the noise and bombs and bullets and you end up not being really concerned about getting killed so much as being sick of having this bland rice with no fish sauce,’ she said.
