The Lover

“We were white children, we were ashamed, we sold our furniture, but we weren’t hungry, we had a houseboy and we ate.”

The narrator reflects on the financial hardship her family faced while she was a child. Though close to poverty, her family never went without food or inconvenience due to their white race.

“Now I’m talking about the hidden stretches of that same youth, of certain facts, feelings, events that I buried.”

The narrator discusses her relationship to writing and why she has never written about this period in her childhood. The events she describes are hazy; nevertheless, she has reached a point of acceptance about them.

“Sometimes I realize that if is writing isn’t, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it’s nothing.”

The narrator explores her motivation for writing about her affair. She wants to expose her interior world (the “vanity”) to release associations in her mind (the “void”). 

“The photograph could only have been taken if someone could have known in advance how important it was to be in my life, that event, that crossing of the river.”

The image exists solely for herself, as no one took a picture. Perhaps the absence of photographic evidence allows it to take on greater meaning in her mind.

“I had the luck to have a mother desperate with a despair so unalloyed that sometimes even life’s happiness, at its most poignant, couldn’t quite make her forget it.”

The narrator’s mother’s depressive episodes engender pity in the narrator and fear of becoming like her. Her mother’s depression shaped the narrator’s childhood and the development of her personality into a more somber, reflective young adult.

“What I want to seem, I do seem, beautiful too if that’s what people want me to be.”

The narrator believes she has power over her appearance, that she can mirror anyone’s desire.

“You don’t have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn’t exist. Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been.”

The narrator compares herself to the adult women in Saigon. She realizes that her own sensuality is capable of attracting men without her having to work too hard.

“Everything flows towards the Pacific, no time for anything to sink, all is swept along by the deep and headlong storm of the inner current, suspended on the surface of the river’s strength.”

The narrator compares herself to a river. The codependence of the “inner current” and the “surface” of the river correspond to her belief that her outward appearance should reflect her inner desires. This supports the novel’s theme of the fusing of exteriority and interiority.

“It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.”

The narrator wants to leave her mother’s influence as soon as possible. She desires an “escape” that will allow her to experience independence.

“And that’s why the child already knows how to divert the interest people take in her to the interest she takes in money. That makes her mother smile.”

The narrator’s investment in her relationship with her lover is driven by her family’s financial situation and need for money. Her mother, while abhorring the means by which her daughter comes by the money, is nevertheless grateful.

“The child knows what she’s doing is what the mother would have chosen for her to do, if she’d dared, if she’d had the strength, if the pain of her thoughts hadn’t been there every day, wearing her out.”

Because of the strict expectations placed upon women in the narrator’s society, her affair with the lover is seen as scandalous, the worst possible outcome for a young, unmarried daughter. However, the narrator notes that her family’s extreme need for money outweighs, in her opinion, the social backlash of having an affair. She knows that her mother would support her pursuit of money if not for social expectations.

“He won’t let his son marry the little white whore from Sadec.”

The lover’s father uses his influence and financial hold over his son to keep him from proposing to the narrator. Their racial and financial differences are shameful to the lover’s father; he will repeatedly dissuade his son from pursuing marriage with her.

“As soon as she got into the black car she knew: she’s excluded from the family for the first time and forever.”

Allowing her soon-to-be lover to drive her through Saigon marks the narrator’s first act of independence from her family. She craves emotional and physical separation from her abusive and controlling family; agreeing to become the man’s lover allows her to accomplish this.

“It’s as if this must be not only what she expects, but also what had to happen especially to her.”

In the moments before the narrator and her lover make love for the first time, the narrator considers the fatalistic mood she is in. She sees it as a sign that she was always meant to have a lover at such a young age for the sake of his money.

“I say that’s how I desire him, with his money, that when I first saw him he was already in his car, in his money, so I can’t say what I’d have done if he’d been different.”

After becoming lovers, the narrator confesses that her attraction to him is linked to wealth. She’s always seen him as a wealthy man and can’t say how she would have felt had he been poor.

“No one ever says thank you for the excellent dinner, or hello, or goodbye, or how are you, no one ever says anything to anyone.”

The narrator introduces her lover to her family. The narrator’s family is uncomfortable with their affair while also willing to accept the lover’s money.

“This is because he adores me, but it’s taken for granted I don’t love him, that I’m with him for the money, that I can’t love him, it’s impossible, that he could take any sort of treatment from me and still go on loving me.”

While at dinner with her family and the lover, the narrator remains firm in her intent to only use the lover for his money. Though this is spoken of between them, the lover cannot help but pine after her and continue to use his money to attract her.

“Because the only person my elder brother’s afraid of, who, strangely, makes him nervous, is me.”

The narrator’s elder brother asserts an abusive and absolute control over the entire family, including the narrator, who follows his lead in treating the lover poorly during family dinners. The only person able to claim power over the elder brother is the narrator herself, for reasons she does not fully understand.

“Then I said I agreed with his father. That I refused to stay with him. I didn’t give any reasons.”

The lover wants desperately to be with the narrator, but the narrator agrees with the lover’s father, that they cannot possibly be together. Disparity of race and financial class are the main reasons for their imminent separation.

“I too will enter into a state much worse than death, the state of madness.”

The narrator fears losing control of her mind because she has been raised by a mother with inconsistent mental stability. The “madwoman” in Saigon represents the threat of this possibility; as she chases the narrator down the street, the narrator considers that it would be better to die than to lose control of her mind.

“One day they’ll be told not to speak to the daughter of the teacher in Sadec any more.”

As gossip surrounding the narrator and her lover moves through Saigon, the narrator knows she is being ostracized by the other girls and women of the city., Her social reputation suffers because she is unmarried, young, and from a family not generally respected in the city.

“Do people really talk of disgrace?”

As rumors spread about the narrator and the lover, society begins to judge her (and her family, by extension) for her premarital affair. The narrator is not concerned but focused on using the lover’s money to claim independence.

“You do know it’s all over, don’t you? That you’ll never be able, now, to get married here in the colony?”

The narrator’s mother warns the narrator that her reputation has been harmed; the narrator won’t be able to meet a potential husband’s strict expectations.