The Lover

The narrator believes that her beauty is not like other women’s, and that she can appear as she desires to anyone: “What I want to seem, I do seem, beautiful too if that’s what people want me to be” (18). She compares herself to the other women living in the colony with disdain. She understands her developing sexuality in relation to the appearances that these women put on. The narrator regards her mother as separate from the general group of women living in the colony. She is both intensely ashamed and protective of her mother; she describes leaving her mother as an “escape” and “obsession.” The narrator claims to have written about her childhood before; she struggles to remember what she might have left out, in particular the contradictory love and hatred for her mother.

When the narrator eventually leaves Vietnam for France, she becomes distanced from her family. Her younger brother dies in December of 1942, some years since the narrator has been in Saigon; this event marks the narrator’s separation from her mother. Though her mother visits the narrator and the narrator’s son in France in 1949, the narrator remarks that: “There was nothing left to reunite” (29). The narrator’s elder brother’s control over their mother, his inability to support himself, and his abuse contribute to their mother’s eventual death, which the narrator aims to separate herself from.

The family’s poverty in Vietnam encourages the narrator to pursue money as an absolute goal and to “divert the interest people take in her to the interest she takes in money” (24). On the morning of the ferry and meeting her lover, the narrator’s mother expresses pride at the narrator’s appearance and frugality of dress.

On the ferry, the narrator watches as the man from the limousine approaches her on the ferry deck. He seems nervous, which the narrator attributes to the fact that he is Chinese, from Fushun: “There’s the difference of race, he’s not white, he has to get the better of it, that’s why he’s trembling” (32). They talk and the man says that he knows her mother, the headmistress at Sadec, known for purchasing an estate with poor land. He has just returned from studying in Paris. The man offers to drive her to the boarding school. He is 27 years old.

In the car, the narrator is pleased to think that she can manipulate the man into loving her: she will no longer have to take the bus to school but can be driven around Saigon in his limousine. The man describes his father, a wealthy man whom the narrator immediately suspects won’t allow his son to marry a young white girl. The narrator considers her act of getting into the man’s car as her first act of independence: “she’s excluded from the family for the first time and forever” (35).

Each day the man drives her from the boarding school to the French high school. On a Thursday, when she has a half-day, he brings her back to his impressive, affluent home. She anticipates what he desires and is prepared to become his lover, as the relationship is “also what had to happen especially to her” (36). Once at his house, he confesses that he loves her to distraction and accepts that she can never love him in the same way. She begs him to treat her like the other women he brings to his home. Though momentarily shy, he makes loves to her, and afterward they talk about the near poverty her family lives in. She confesses to desiring him because of his money and that having finally achieved her mother’s worst expectation for her is a relief. They go to an expensive Chinese restaurant in the city and eat dinner.