I’d like to think after my two and a half years in Ho Chi Minh City I am now used to the rapid fire questions I am generally asked within minutes of meeting someone. I’m 25, I’ve been here for two and a half years, No, I don’t have a wife, or a Vietnamese girlfriend, I work for a magazine… and  all of a sudden I am asked how much I earn every month and I stumble.

Talking about your money isn’t the “done” thing back home in Britain. At least not with people you don’t know personally. My best friends back home don’t know how much I earn now and my omission has nothing to do with the geography that separates us. It seems impossible now to remember exactly which “money” question I was asked for the first time, but I do remember it being intensely awkward. Much like the times when parents march their children up to me in supermarkets and bark “Noi Hello Teacher di!”

It’s ingrained in my culture and my family’s that money is a private matter. My mother, not being a materialistic person by nature considers talking at length about personal finances to be impolite and vulgar, after all she said, “It’s only money”, which sounds like we were stinking rich, we certainly weren’t.

In Vietnam, people who I have just met don’t seem to have a problem either divulging their financial details, or requesting mine. I have been asked for my salary, how much I pay on rent, what I paid for my bike, but the shock has certainly worn off, but the reluctance to give up the information is not so easily shaken. This may be because I still fear that answering will have the same social consequences as it would back in a British social context, much like asking someone how much they weigh amongst twenty of their closest acquaintances. In short, you wouldn’t be thought well of.

An American friend of mine has a bright orange Vespa and has spent a lot of time and money working on it to get it where it is today, so obviously he is justifiably proud. I have asked him about the color choice (I preferred it before), and even the color of the inside of the wheel, but I have no idea how much he spent on the paint, or on the recent work he has had done. He could have spent the same amount making it look hideous as he has making it look great, so I’d rather ask about his design decisions than the amount of money involved. But this didn’t stop one man who just before the traffic light turned green leaned across to my friend on his Vespa to quickly ask how much he paid for it. This happens roughly 3 times a week now, and sometimes he answers, uncomfortable of course, but not wanting to be rude.

So if I am horrified by having to answer a very personal question about money, there are two options. Either I just come out with it and list what I have in my personal inventory price for price, if I can remember, or I evade the question, which is difficult and potentially rude in itself, after all it may be rude to ask about my finances in the west, but I’m in Vietnam, and here it’s very similar to asking what you had for breakfast.

As to why the subject of money is so taboo, it’s difficult to say. Many would say “It just isn’t British”. A poll carried out in 2011 in the UK found that after sex and death, money was the third least favorite topic of discussion, which should go some way to demonstrating the issue I have with “how much do you earn?” Personal wealth or the lack of it is one of the strongest taboos I know of in a social context, and there are perhaps three people I discuss my personal finances with, largely because they are in such a depressing state I don’t want to bring my friends down. What I have noticed though, the longer I stay here, is that I have found myself asking the odd over familiar question about money.

Whether this has been a gradual change or a sudden shift, I don’t know, but just the other day I caught myself asking a friend I hadn’t known for very long how much their rent was. I don’t know whether I was more horrified by my question or by the same awkward look in their face that I know so well.