People often ask me what it is like to be a twin. The honest answer is that I…

People often ask me what it is like to be a twin. The honest answer is that I have no idea what it is like not to be one. My brother Minh and I were born twelve minutes apart, and for the first eighteen years of our lives we were almost never separated.

We are identical twins, which means we look so similar that even our grandmother sometimes confused us. At primary school, we occasionally took advantage of this. Once, in a spelling test, Minh, who was much better at spelling, sat in my seat and took the test for me. We were caught when the teacher noticed that "I" had suddenly stopped making my usual mistakes. Our parents were not amused.

Although we look the same, our personalities have always been very different. Minh is quiet, careful and organised; I am talkative and tend to do things at the last minute. As children, we divided our roles without discussing it. He planned our games, and I persuaded other children to join them. Teachers often described us as "two halves of one person", which we both hated.

The hardest moment came when we were eighteen. Minh was offered a place at a university in Hanoi, and I chose to study in Da Nang. For the first time, we had to introduce ourselves as individuals rather than as "the twins". I felt strangely incomplete for the first few months. I would turn to say something to him and realise he was not there.

In the end, though, living apart was good for both of us. I became more organised, simply because there was nobody else to plan things for me, and Minh became more confident with new people. When we met at the end of the first year, we both noticed that the other had changed.

Today, we live in different cities but talk almost every day. We still finish each other's sentences, and we sometimes buy the same shirt without knowing it. But we have learned that being a twin does not mean being half a person. It means having a best friend you did not have to choose.