1931

1931 marks a decisive point of departure in The Lover: after graduating from high school in Saigon, the Narrator leaves the colonial world of her childhood and begins the movement toward France. The year is therefore less a self-contained episode than a threshold in the chronology of education, family separation, erotic memory, and eventual literary self-creation.

Education and Departure

1931 follows years in which the Narrator’s mother insists that a secondary education and then a mathematics degree will secure her daughter’s future. The Narrator lives and sleeps at a state boarding school in Saigon while attending the French high school, an arrangement that places her between institutional worlds: colonial education, the boarding school, and the unstable family household. Her graduation fulfills part of the future her mother has planned, but it also makes departure possible. The Narrator later states that she had left Saigon after graduating from high school in 1931, beginning the separation from the city and family that structures her retrospective account.

Family Circumstances

The departure occurs against the background of a family whose prospects are repeatedly improvised rather than secured. The mother keeps redirecting her children toward possible futures: the younger brother is sent through successive bookkeeping courses from the Universal Correspondence School, while the Elder Brother spends several years in France studying at a technical school. The mother’s plans are interrupted whenever she is posted elsewhere, and the course is repeatedly abandoned and begun again. By 1931, education has thus become both an obligation and an instrument of escape, even though it cannot resolve the family’s poverty, violence, or failed hopes.

The Narrator’s departure also belongs to the family’s pattern of forced dispersal. The Elder Brother has already been sent away because his presence is dangerous to the other children, while the younger brother remains tied to the family’s precarious future. Leaving Saigon does not produce a clean emotional separation: the Narrator continues to define herself against the family’s silence, the mother’s despair, and the Elder Brother’s violence. Her later recollection of 1931 consequently turns a biographical date into evidence of a longer tearing-away.

Relation to the Cholon Affair

The year is also important because the Narrator’s departure eventually becomes the condition of separation from the Lover from Cholon. Their relationship has developed through the colonial transportation network linking the Mekong, Saigon, Cholon, and the sea route to France. The Lover from Cholon belongs to a wealthy Chinese financial family, while the Narrator is a young white girl from a poor French colonial family. Their intimacy is already constrained by age, race, wealth, family authority, and the Chinese-white marriage taboo.

The voyage from Indochina to France lasts twenty-four days on the liners of Messageries Maritimes. Once a ship reaches the Saigon River, the passengers are symbolically in France even before the long sea passage is complete. This geography makes 1931 a hinge between two worlds: the Narrator is still formed by Saigon, the boarding school, and the Mekong crossing, yet she is being carried toward the metropolitan country that structures her education and social identity. The Lover from Cholon cannot accompany her openly; he fears being seen with the very young white girl, and the departure therefore exposes the limits imposed on their relationship by colonial society.

Retrospective Consequences

The significance of 1931 is constructed retrospectively rather than narrated as a simple dated present. The Narrator remembers the year alongside later events, including the younger brother’s death in December 1942 during the Japanese occupation, the family’s continued silence, the Lover from Cholon’s grief, and their eventual telephone reunion in Paris years after the war. The date therefore gathers consequences that were not visible at the moment of departure.

When the Narrator later recalls her relationship with the Lover from Cholon, leaving becomes both an external journey and an emotional betrayal. After the date of departure is fixed, his body loses its former potency, as though it refuses the body that is about to go away. They decide to stop seeing each other but cannot maintain the decision; he continues waiting outside the high school in his black car. At the port, the ship’s long siren blasts, the tugs draw it into the river, and the Narrator weeps without allowing her family to see because he is Chinese and such a lover is not considered worthy of public grief. The departure associated with 1931 thus becomes inseparable from concealed mourning.

Literary and Historical Meaning

1931 also functions as a threshold in the Narrator’s later identity as a writer. The book repeatedly connects leaving Indochina with the possibility of writing: the girl who is educated according to her mother’s practical plans eventually becomes the woman who declares that she wants nothing more than to write. The movement away from Saigon creates distance from the family and colonial setting, but it does not erase them; instead, it gives the later writer a place from which to reconstruct their poverty, violence, desire, and racial hierarchies.

In this sense, 1931 is both a historical date and a formal device. It anchors the Narrator’s remembered chronology while opening a narrative space in which childhood, erotic love, war, migration, and authorship can be seen together. The year does not complete her transformation or provide a stable homecoming. It begins a prolonged passage whose final form is literary: the lost world of Saigon is carried into France and made available for remembrance, interpretation, and writing.