1943

1943 is the temporal frame through which several of the narrator’s most consequential memories are recollected: the fifteen-and-a-half-year-old girl’s crossing of the Mekong River, her encounter with The Lover from Cholon, the family’s poverty and danger, and the later deaths and separations that give the year a retrospective gravity. It is not presented as a stable chronological backdrop so much as a charged point in memory, repeatedly approached through images, omissions, and consequences that become fully legible only years afterward.

The Year of the Mekong Crossing

1943 is inseparable from the ferry crossing of the Mekong River. The narrator places herself at fifteen and a half, travelling from Sadec toward Saigon at the end of a school vacation, after her mother has seen her onto the native bus and entrusted her to the driver. The bus carries her in the front section reserved for white passengers, while the journey passes through the hot, monotonous climate of southern Indochina. At the ferry between Vinh Long and Sadec, she gets off and goes to the rail to look at the river and its tributaries moving through the flat plain of mud and rice. The crossing becomes the decisive image of 1943 precisely because no photograph records it. The narrator imagines that a picture might have been taken, but the event seemed too slight to attract anyone’s attention, and no one could have known in advance how important it would become. The absent photograph therefore acquires a paradoxical authority: its failure to exist allows the image to represent an absolute rather than merely preserve an ordinary visual moment. 1943 is consequently remembered through an image that is both vivid and materially absent.

Encounter and Social Threshold

During the crossing, the girl meets The Lover from Cholon, an elegant Chinese man travelling toward Saigon in a Morris Léon-Bollée limousine. His position is defined by both wealth and colonial racial hierarchy: he belongs to the small group of financiers of Chinese origin who own working-class housing in the colony, while she is a poor white schoolgirl wearing The Man’s Fedora and Gold Lamé High Heels. His nervousness registers the social danger of approaching a white girl across the boundary separating Chinese and white communities. The meeting changes the girl’s immediate future. After she enters the black car, the ordinary world of the native bus, its driver, its passengers, and the family in Sadec gives way to limousine travel and elegant restaurants. The transition brings privilege without security. She anticipates permanent regret for what she has gained and lost, including the bus, the bus driver, the old women chewing betel, the children on the luggage racks, and the family’s oppressive silence. The year thus turns a journey across water into a passage between social worlds, although the passage never produces a secure new identity.

The Affair and Its Hidden Costs

The relationship develops rapidly in 1943. The Lover from Cholon comes every day to collect the girl from high school and return her to the boarding school; on a Thursday afternoon, the weekly half-holiday, he drives her to his modern but dark studio in Cholon. She experiences neither hatred nor repugnance, and the absence of those responses becomes an early sign of desire that she does not yet know how to name. Their sexual relationship is shaped by fear, secrecy, and unequal resources. He worries that his relationship with so young a girl could send him to prison, and he instructs her to continue lying to her mother and The Elder Brother. The girl’s poverty becomes part of the affair’s defensive logic. She treats her family’s lack of money as protection against another lawsuit by her mother, whose previous legal struggles over the failed land purchase have ended badly. Meanwhile, The Lover from Cholon’s wealth is connected to his father, who owns the money and spends his days attached to an opium pipe. The lover’s care is intimate and possessive: he gives the girl showers, washes and rinses her, applies her make-up, dresses her, and fears that she will meet another man. Yet the relationship remains exposed to the law, racial taboo, age, family shame, and the approaching separation that will eventually make his body unable to respond to hers.

Family, Death, and the Retrospective Year

The year’s meaning is enlarged by events that the narrator recalls through later knowledge. A photograph in the courtyard of the house in Hanoi is associated with despair and with the final months of the narrator’s father, who is sent back to France for health reasons, briefly takes a new post in Phnom Penh, and dies in less than a year. The narrator’s mother remains in Phnom Penh, in the former royal palace overlooking the Mekong, where she fears the grounds at night and makes her children sleep together in the same bed. Before the telegram arrives, she believes she knows of her husband’s death through a frightened bird calling in his office; a few days later she sees an apparition of her own father. These episodes establish the family’s intimate association between memory, signs, and death. The narrator also remembers the death of her younger brother through a telegram from Saigon whose wording she can no longer recover. She cannot decide whether it said that he was dead or that he had been recalled to God, but the fact of his death overwhelms every other perception. The loss is experienced as a sudden, universal pain and as an outrage against the discovery that his body had contained an unnoticed immortality. In this recollection, 1943 is not simply a date attached to biography; it is a point at which the family’s private catastrophes become metaphysical, transforming an individual death into a failure of the entire world to recognize what had been present. The year is also tied to the family’s continuing moral disorder. The Elder Brother steals from servants, from the mother, from Dô, from the younger brother, and from the narrator; he gambles, uses money for opium, and exploits the mother’s resources. After her death, he manipulates the will, accepts a grossly unequal inheritance, and later steals the narrator’s food rations and fifty thousand francs. These later acts cast the household remembered around 1943 as a structure of silence in which affection, fear, dependence, and exploitation coexist. The narrator’s refusal to expose him is itself part of the family’s shame: the theft is not mentioned because acknowledging it would humiliate him.

Separation, Return, and Narrative Afterlife

The emotional consequences of 1943 culminate in departure. When the narrator’s voyage is fixed, The Lover from Cholon gradually loses sexual potency; he says that his body can no longer make love to the body about to leave. Although they decide to stop seeing each other, he continues waiting outside the high school in his black car, his head turned away in humiliation. At the port, the departing ship gives three long blasts, is towed toward the middle of the river, and sounds another farewell before moving under its own power toward the sea. The girl cries without allowing her family to see, because he is Chinese and the social code says that such a lover is not one for whom a white girl ought to weep. The memory of separation reappears during the voyage. On an ocean crossing, the narrator hears of a seventeen-year-old passenger from Sadec, the son of the district officer, who has thrown himself into the sea without leaving a farewell letter. The ship resumes its journey at dawn, and the empty sea and the abandoned search become another form of parting. On a later night, a Chopin waltz prompts the girl to imagine killing herself in the same way; instead, she weeps and recognizes that she may have loved The Lover from Cholon more deeply than she had understood. The music retrieves a love that had been submerged within the affair and makes the sea a medium of both death and belated recognition. Years after the war, after marriages, children, divorces, and books, The Lover from Cholon phones the narrator in Paris. She recognizes him immediately by his voice. He says that he wanted only to hear hers and tells her that he still loves her and will love her until death. The telephone call does not restore the relationship or undo the separation established in 1943, but it confirms the persistence of its emotional force. The year survives through recurrence: in the missing photograph, the ferry image, the deaths, the ship’s farewell, the remembered voice, and finally the narrator’s writing, which turns an unrecorded crossing into an enduring literary absolute.