The protagonist's departure from her mother and family

The protagonist's departure from her mother and family is not a single journey but a rupture that gathers several thresholds: leaving the household after her younger brother's death, crossing the Mekong River as a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old schoolgirl, entering the black car of the Chinese man, and eventually moving toward a life in which the family survives chiefly as material for writing. Its decisive consequence is emotional as much as geographical: she declares that her mother and brothers have died for her, and that she has left them.

Cause and Family Rupture

The immediate cause is the death of the protagonist's younger brother in December 1942, during the Japanese occupation. He dies in three days from bronchial pneumonia after his heart gives out. The protagonist identifies that day as the point at which everything came to an end and says that it was then that she left her mother. The death does not merely remove a sibling; it destroys the remaining structure of inquiry and attachment. Afterward, she no longer asks her mother questions about their childhood or about the mother herself, and she no longer knows how the family survived its debts to the Indian moneylenders.

The family's earlier life is represented through prolonged humiliation and silence. The moneylenders sit for months and years in the little parlor in Sadec, wearing white dhotis, while the mother weeps and insults them from her room, ordering them to leave. Their calm persistence turns the household into a scene of suspended defeat. Against this background, the younger brother's death becomes the event that makes departure final rather than temporary: the protagonist does not simply leave an unhappy home but withdraws from a family system already marked by debt, fear, and failed protection.

The family also lacks the rituals that might have contained loss. There are no celebrations, no Christmas tree, no embroidered handkerchief, no flower, and no observance of death, funerals, or remembrance. The absence of ceremony leaves grief without a public form. The protagonist therefore describes the family through categorical judgments rather than shared mourning: the Elder Brother remains a murderer, the younger brother dies because of him, and she herself tore herself away. Until the mother died, the Elder Brother had the mother to himself; departure is consequently also a refusal to remain within that arrangement of allegiance and blame.

The Threshold of Departure

The narrative places the protagonist's separation within a chain of physical crossings. The remembered image begins on a ferry crossing the Mekong River, where she is fifteen and a half, in a hot and monotonous season with no spring or renewal. The image lasts for the entire crossing, making the river a prolonged threshold rather than a brief backdrop. She is still a child in age, yet the crossing carries her toward a social and erotic world beyond the family's immediate control.

On the far side, the black car produces another form of separation. The protagonist enters it and experiences a sudden, barely visible distress as the light over the river dims and the surroundings seem to become slightly deaf or fogbound. She resolves that she will never again travel by a native bus, imagining instead a limousine to high school, elegant restaurants, and a new existence measured by what has been gained and lost. The decision is bound to regret: the bus, its driver, the old women chewing betel, children on luggage racks, and the family in Sadec all remain within the field of what she has abandoned.

The movement away from home becomes concrete when the Chinese man comes each day to collect her from high school and return her to the boarding school, then takes her on a Thursday afternoon to his apartment in Cholon. He stops the black limousine just short of the boarding-school entrance so that no one will see him. She runs inside without looking back, where Hélène Lagonelle is waiting and asks where she has been. The protagonist says only that she did not return to sleep there; she does not explain, and Hélène does not ask. This evasive return shows that departure has already created a private life that cannot be translated into the language of school or family.

Consequences and Emotional Severance

The protagonist's physical departure is accompanied by a harsh transformation in memory. After the deaths of her mother and two brothers, she says that it is too late even for memories. She no longer loves them, cannot remember whether she ever did, and has lost the scent of her mother's skin, the color of her eyes, and nearly all sense of her voice. Even the mother's laughter and cries have disappeared, apart from the occasional softness produced by evening weariness. The language of leaving therefore reaches backward: the family is not only absent from the protagonist's life but progressively erased from sensory recollection.

This erasure is paradoxically what allows narration to begin. Because the mother has become something that can be written without difficulty, the protagonist can write about her at length, as though the person had become cursive writing. The departure thus converts family intimacy into literary material. What could not be questioned or commemorated within the household can be arranged, examined, and repeated in prose after emotional attachment has been exhausted.

The separation also produces an explicit desire for solitude. After returning from the river and thinking about the Chinese man and Hélène Lagonelle, the protagonist recognizes that she has never been alone since leaving childhood and the family of the hunter. She sees writing beyond the present moment, stretching across the desert-like form of her life. Solitude is not presented as comfort or social success; it is the condition in which she can perceive the shape of a life no longer organized by the family.

Departure, Loss, and Return

The family break is inseparable from later departures. The protagonist leaves Saigon after graduating from high school in 1931, while the younger brother remains connected to the family and writes only once in ten years. His formal letter mentions that everyone is well, that the school is successful, that he has an apartment and a car, and that he has taken up tennis again, but it omits the war and the Elder Brother. The letter's careful completeness conceals the family's fractures rather than repairing them.

The separation from the family is also mirrored by the departure from the Chinese lover. After the date of the protagonist's voyage is fixed, his body can no longer respond to hers; he says that he is dead, while his gentleness remains intact. They decide not to see each other, but the decision proves impossible, and he continues waiting outside the high school in his black car. At the port, the departing ship gives three long blasts, is towed into the middle of the river, and sounds its farewell again as the town and harbor darken. The protagonist cries without allowing her mother or younger brother to see, because the lover is Chinese and such grief is socially forbidden. The ship's departure repeats the earlier ferry crossing on a larger scale, turning private separation into an irreversible passage.

Years later, after marriages, children, divorces, and books, the Chinese lover phones the protagonist in Paris. He recognizes their former bond immediately and tells her that he still loves her and will love her until death. The call does not restore the family, the lost lover, or the past, but it demonstrates that departure has not erased every relation. The voice brings back the voice of China, while the protagonist's writing and the lover's knowledge of it place the old separation within a later life shaped by memory, publication, and survival.

Narrative Significance

The departure functions as the book's central threshold because it joins historical catastrophe to personal self-creation. The younger brother's death occurs during occupation, but the protagonist experiences its consequence as a private extinction of the mother and both brothers. The event is therefore neither a clean liberation nor a triumphant coming-of-age. It leaves behind horror, silence, guilt, and the knowledge that no reunion can restore what has been broken.

Its form is deliberately recursive. The protagonist crosses the Mekong, enters the black car, returns secretly to the boarding school, leaves the family, boards a ship, and much later receives a telephone call in Paris. Each movement promises a new belonging, yet none fully completes the transformation. The departure remains an ongoing condition: a life built by moving away, and a writing practice that returns repeatedly to the people and places from which the protagonist has severed herself. In that sense, leaving the mother and family is the action that makes the later book possible, while also ensuring that the past remains its most persistent subject.