She moved to Meriden Anglican School for Girls and, "They signed me up to this weird class at lunchtime," she says. "They kept putting my name on the clipboard – 'You need to go to this room' – so I went in, and we sat down in a big circle, and you get thrown a little ball. Then you have to say something about yourself: who you are, where you're from. It got around to me and I said, 'My name's Natalie, I've just come from Five Dock.' The teacher was, like, 'Whoa, you can speak English!' They put me in ESL class, I guess because I was Asian. "I also got put in the bottom English class and the highest maths class. That's a weird thing to go through when you change schools, when you're hormonal and you're a horrible teenager." Tran says Meriden was a nice school but she "wasn't really a fan". She did "not very great" in class. "I'm not a very ambitious or very applied student," she says. "I did okay." But she went on to study Education at UNSW, partly because her father was a teacher. "It was a really depressing degree," she says, "because I really value teachers and I don't think they get paid enough. It's a really hard job. I don't think it should be a degree that people look at as a segue, and a lot of kids do. If you go into Education, you look around and feel, 'I really hope none of you teach any of my children in the future.'" She switched to studying Digital Media at the College of Fine Arts. "And that was a stupid degree," she says. "It doesn't even exist anymore. And I really think, if your degree stops within five years of you graduating, you should get your money back."

She began making YouTube videos while still at COFA, but says her course was of little practical help. "I feel really bad," she says, "because any parent just wants you to be okay, or safe. And the way my parents understood that was, if you had a degree, you would be able to get a job. So I got a really useless degree, and got stuck in traffic trying to pick up my boyfriend on my way to my graduation, so I missed my graduation, and we just went to my sister's house and had cake." She made her first videos because her partner was away and she had a lot of time to herself. Her audience was largely confined to her friends, until one of her movies featured on the front page of YouTube, and she saw a big increase in her traffic when the site redirected to her homepage. "Mine has been a very slow, organic, maybe-not-growing-anymore growth," she says. "I remember going, 'Wow, five people are watching. That's amazing.'" In 2010, she appeared on a list of the 10 independent YouTube stars globally who supposedly made more than US$100,000 ($135,133) from the site. She's non-committal about this and her other internet rankings. "I don't know if there's any fact in any of it," she says. "I don't really pay much attention to them." That same year, she was offered a regular spot on Network Ten's news show, The Project. She worked as a reporter on The Whip segment, talking about what was going on around Sydney. She met producer Rowan Jones while filming a piece about the Easter Show, and they have been a couple ever since. "Whenever we try and do an anniversary thing," says Tran, "we rock up to the Easter Show and I'm, like, 'I'm not paying $40 to get in.' Because the first time, they paid. I'm, like, 'Does it get cheaper after five o'clock?' And then we wait. And then I go, 'Don't worry about it, let's go.' So being a tight-arse over-rides the romantic side of me."

The internet has not made her rich. Jones is a freelancer, he and Tran work as a team, and the majority of their income comes from filming events and weddings, making corporate videos and promotional clips for real-estate agents. Tran and I have been talking for a while when our photographer arrives at the restaurant, leading to a slew of new apologies, beginning with a generic "sorry" when he introduces himself, and ending with an expression of remorse for not having ironed her shirt for the picture. I visit the bathroom, but leave my recorder running on the table. While I'm away, Tran says "sorry", twice, to some anonymous individual. When I return, she apologises, twice. I don't know why. Tran often refers to the Yama Café online. "I used to come here after uni all the time," she says, "and have the yaki-udon. This year, I decided to finally become a vegetarian, and I haven't eaten here as a vegetarian. I could have vegie yaki-udon. It might be really unattractive to eat in front of you, though. I'm pretty gross when I eat." I sense an apology on its way, but I get in first by explaining that I don't use chopsticks well, and asking her not to mock me. She says she won't, but by the time our food arrives she has forgotten. As I'm about to tuck into my teriyaki chicken (which I order in the mistaken belief it's yakitori chicken), I push my fresh chopsticks, tapered-end first, through the paper wrapper in which they are provided. They pop out like gun barrels.

"The way you opened that packet was so totally not how an Asian would've opened that packet," says Tran, smiling, as she expertly slices her herb-crusted vegetarian wrap. She generally avoids talking about being Asian, because "it's such a loaded topic", she says, "and when you say one thing, people expect it to represent what other people feel". She can only address her own experience. "And it's something that changes for me," she says. "It's a very personal journey you go through." She takes some of her comedy from her background, but she highlights the eccentricities of her family, rather than setting them up as immigrant caricatures: "When I do jokes, and I'm doing my mother's accent, I'm trying to replicate it, because that's the way she sounds. If she says a word differently, I'll say it differently as well, but I'm not making fun of the fact just that she has an accent – which I think is where a lot of humour, unfortunately, goes: 'We're not really writing any jokes apart from the fact this Asian has an accent and mispronounces.' Whereas that's not really the joke. The joke is my mum says these silly things – like 'wear a jumper' when it's 29 degrees outside." Tran thinks that "Australia's going in a weird direction with the way we handle multiculturalism. It's interesting to me, in a multi-cultural country, how we're going to work it out so we don't end up with ghettos. How are we going to integrate it properly? Because we see countries that are older than us having so many problems." She says she understands that people search for comfort and familiarity, and like to surround themselves with others who share their language, or even have a similar income. It happens everywhere. "When I go to LA, all the Aussies live together," she says, "and they all joke, 'We never thought we'd be like this.'"

But Tran thinks perhaps we should not feel bound exclusively by these commonalities in Australia, and fears it will lead to trouble in the future. "People just don't want to deal with it," she says, "because it's too confronting. It's a touchy subject, and it brings up other issues. So we'll just end up having those problems." In Yama Café, Tran conversation is, by turn, amused and amusing, thoughtful and concerned. But, in her own, mind, she's just boring, a dud lunch date on a dull day. As our dessert (Tran's favourite pistachio biscuits) is cleared away, she offers one final, all-encompassing apology – "Sorry I don't have anything interesting to say" – and I smile. Because she is pretty funny. Timeline 1986 Born in Sydney 2006 Began making YouTube videos

2010 Graduated from UNSW with a degree in Digital Media; worked as correspondent on The Project; met partner, Rowan Jones 2011 Reached one million YouTube subscribers 2012 Hit half a billion views 2013 Got a cat ("I'm just trying to think of any milestones," she says)