To the amusement of other classmates at the adults’ Saturday Vietnamese class, one tutor and I often wind up trying to explain political philosophy to one another in Vietnamese (‘Không, không,’ I once exclaimed just as the class went silent, ‘cái đó không phải là genocide!’).

One afternoon, I settle for a descriptive phrase to describe ‘libertarianism’: tự do buôn bán và tự do ngôn luận (free trade and freedom of speech).