The lover claims that he is in love with the narrator the narrator claims that she desires him for his money. The lover is bound to obey his father if he wishes to have access to that money. The lover’s own significant fortune is tied to the business dealings of his father. They cannot afford new clothes or to leave the colony, but because they are white, they are in no danger of running out of food. There they have sex, and the narrator describes to him the poverty her family lives in. He begins driving her from her boarding school to high school each day, until eventually they return to his house. They talk briefly before leaving in his car. The lover, a wealthy and influential Chinese man living in the colonized city, notices the narrator on the ferry and approaches her. This is moments before she meets the lover for the first time and begins an affair with him. In the image, her 15-year-old self crosses the Mekong River on a ferry wearing a secondhand dress, heeled shoes, and a man’s hat. She holds it in her mind from her youth in French-colonial Saigon. The narrator begins by describing an image of herself. This plot summary follows the timeline of events the novel covers and not the discontinuous timeline presented by the narrator. It has discontinuous narration that follows the narrator’s free associative thought process.
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