“One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said, ‘I’ve known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged,”(p3)

A fifteen-year-old girl on the Mekong River is on a ferry from Sak Leh back to Saigon. Her mother runs a women’s college in Sa Lai, where she has a small residence for her vacation. She always took the car and the ferry from Sak Lek back to her boarding school in Saigon. Her family had come to Vietnam from France because of her father’s job transfer, and it had been a promising journey, but when he died, her mother had to open a girls’ college to support her daughter and two sons. When she was a child, her mother had spent all her savings to buy a piece of saline land in Cambodia. But the land authorities failed to tell her mother that the land, which was flooded by sea water for six months every year, was unsuitable for growing crops. Her mother and the locals prepared to build a dam, but were unable to do so until they went bankrupt.

On this river crossing at the age of fifteen and a half, the young girl befriends a wealthy Chinese businessman, a man twelve years older than her. One Thursday, the man takes her to a one-room apartment in the downtown area south of the city, where she gives up her virginity. The man is madly in love with her, and she needs his money for her bedridden mother.

In this work, the image of the “Chinese Lover” is obviously “mixed” in cultural identity, “feminized” in character and “servile” in behavior. “feminization” of the character’s personality and “slavishness” of the character’s behavior. When the girl and her lover meet for the first time, the rich Chinese businessman is dressed in a European-style suit and smokes an English cigarette as he gets out of his car. The young girl can tell at first glance that he is not white, but the man has studied in Paris, so he is able to pry at the young girl with all the details of the extravagant Parisian life. The man’s overseas experience and background greatly compensates for the racial gap in the young girl’s mind. At the same time, however, the man seems weak and lacking in masculine strength, a weakness that extends from the outside to the inside. He will moan and cry in a bad love; he wants to disobey his father’s order, but he keeps crying because he can’t find the strength of love to support him to overcome his fear. This also represents his inner sensitivity and his powerlessness to resist obedience and compromise. At the same time, we also see that he is only able to whisper his obedience and submission in front of his father.

My question is whether the complexity of identity that the author assigns to the male lover, i.e., the son of a wealthy Chinese businessman but with a background of studying in Paris, is a way to reflect the author’s ambivalence about different cultural identities, i.e., still having a sense of white superiority despite living in India?