The Lover

“Between eighteen and twenty-five my face took off in a new direction. I grew old at eighteen.”

The narrator discusses the way she looks crossing the Mekong River just before she meets her Chinese lover for the first time, in contrast to how she will age rapidly after age eighteen. The narrator’s preoccupation with her image embodies the novel’s theme of appearance.

“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.