1.

I tell him I’m going to introduce him to my family. He wants to run away. I laugh.

He can only express his feelings through parody. I discover he hasn’t the strength to love me in opposition to his father, to possess me, take me away.

2.

He often weeps because he can’t find the strength to love beyond fear. His heroism is me, his cravenness is his father’s money.

Whenever I mention my brothers he’s overcome by this fear, as if unmasked.

He thinks my people all expect a proposal of marriage. He knows he’s lost, done for already in my family’s eyes, that for them he can only become more lost, and as a result lose me.

3.

He says he went to study at a business school in Paris, he tells the truth at last, says he didn’t do any work and his father stopped his allowance, sent him his return ticket, and he had to leave. This retreat is his tragedy. He didn’t finish the course at the business school. He says he hopes to finish it here by correspondence.

4.

The meetings with the family began with the big meals in Cholon. When my mother and brothers come to Saigon I tell him he has to invite them to the expensive Chinese restaurants they don’t know, have never been to before.

5.

These evenings are all the same. My brothers gorge themselves without saying a word to him. They don’t look at him either. They can’t. They’re incapable of it. If they could, if they could make the effort to see him, they’d be capable of studying, of observing the elementary rules of society. During these meals my mother’s the only one who speaks, she doesn’t say much, especially the first few times, just a few comments about the dishes as they arrive, the exorbitant price, then silence.

6.

He, the first couple of times, plunges in and tries to tell the story of his adventures in Paris, but in vain. It’s as if he hadn’t spoken, as if nobody had heard. His attempt founders in silence. My brothers go on gorging. They gorge as I’ve never seen anyone else gorge, anywhere.

He pays. He counts out the money. Puts it in the saucer. Everyone watches.

7.

The first time, I remember, he lays out seventy-seven piastres. My mother nearly shrieks with laughter. We get up to leave. No one says thank you. No one ever says thank you for the excellent dinner, or hello, or goodbye, or how are you, no one ever says anything to anyone.

8.

My brothers never will say a word to him, it’s as if he were invisible to them, as if for them he weren’t solid enough to be perceived, seen or heard. This is because he adores me, but it’s taken for granted I don’t love him, that I’m with him for the money, that I can’t love him, it’s impossible, that he could take any sort of treatment from me and still go on loving me. This because he’s a Chinese, because he’s not a white man.

9.

The way my elder brother treats my lover, not speaking to him, ignoring him, stems from such absolute conviction it acts as a model. We all treat my lover as he does. I myself never speak to him in their presence. When my family’s there I’m never supposed to address a single word to him. Except, yes, except to give him a message. For example, after dinner, when my brothers tell me they want to go to the Fountain to dance and drink, I’m the one who has to tell him.

10.

At first he pretends he hasn’t heard. And I, according to my elder brother’s strategy, I’m not supposed to repeat what I’ve just said, not supposed to ask again, because that would be wrong, I’d be admitting he has a grievance. Quietly, as if between ourselves, he says he’d like to be alone with me for a while. He says it to end the agony. Then I’m still not supposed to catch what he says properly, one more treachery, as if by what he said he meant to object, to complain of my elder brother’s behavior.

11.

So I’m still not supposed to answer him. But he goes on, says, is bold enough to say, Your mother’s tired, look at her. And our mother does get drowsy after those fabulous Chinese dinners in Cholon. But I still don’t answer. It’s then I hear my brother’s voice. He says something short, sharp, and final. My mother used to say, He’s the one who speaks best out of all the three. After he’s spoken, my brother waits.

12.

Everything comes to a halt. I recognize my lover’s fear, it’s the same as my younger brother’s. He gives in. We go to the Fountain. My mother too. At the Fountain she goes to sleep.

In my elder brother’s presence he ceases to be my lover. He doesn’t cease to exist, but he’s no longer anything to me. He becomes a burned-out shell. My desire obeys my elder brother, rejects my lover. Every time I see them together I think I can never bear the sight again.

13.

My lover’s denied in just that weak body, just that weakness which transports me with pleasure. In my brother’s presence he becomes an unmentionable outrage, a cause of shame who ought to be kept out of sight. I can’t fight my brother’s silent commands. I can when it concerns my younger brother. But when it concerns my lover I’m powerless against myself.

14.

Thinking about it now brings back the hypocrisy to my face, the absentminded expression of someone who stares into space, who has other things to think about, but who just the same, as the slightly clenched jaws show, suffers and is exasperated at having to put up with this indignity just for the sake of eating well, in an expensive restaurant, which ought to be something quite normal.

15.

And surrounding the memory is the ghastly glow of the night of the hunter. It gives off a strident note of alarm, like the cry of a child.

No one speaks to him at the Fountain, either.

We all order Martells and Perrier. My brothers drink theirs straight off and order the same again. My mother and I give them ours. My brothers are soon drunk. But they still don’t speak to him. Instead they start finding fault.

16.

Especially my younger brother. He complains that the place is depressing and there aren’t any hostesses. There aren’t many people at the Fountain on a weekday. I dance with him, with my younger brother. I don’t dance with my elder brother, I’ve never danced with him. I was always held back by a sense of danger, of the sinister attraction he exerted on everyone, a disturbing sense of the nearness of our bodies.

17.

We were strikingly alike, especially in the face.

The Chinese from Cholon speaks to me, he’s on the brink of tears, he says,What have I done to them? I tell him not to worry, it’s always like that, even among ourselves, no matter what the circumstances.

18.

I’ll explain when we are together again in the apartment. I tell him my elder brother’s cold, insulting violence is there whatever happens to us, whatever comes our way. His first impulse is always to kill, to wipe out, to hold sway over life, to scorn, to hunt, to make suffer. I tell him not to be afraid. He’s got nothing to be afraid of. Because the only person my elder brother’s afraid of, who, strangely, makes him nervous, is me.

19.

Never a hello, a good evening, a happy New Year. Never a thank you. Never any talk. Never any need to talk. Everything always silent, distant. It’s a family of stone, petrified so deeply it’s impenetrable. Every day we try to kill one another, to kill. Not only do we not talk to one another, we don’t even look at one another. When you’re being looked at you can’t look. To look is to feel curious, to be interested, to lower yourself. No one you look at is worth it.

20.

Looking is always demeaning. The word conversation is banished. I think that’s what best conveys the shame and the pride. Every sort of community, whether of  the family or other, is hateful to us, degrading. We’re united in a fundamental  shame at having to live. It’s here we are at the heart of our common fate, the fact  that all three of us are our mother’s children, the children of a candid creature  murdered by society. We’re on the side of the society which has reduced her to  despair. Because of what’s been done to our mother, so amiable, so trusting, we  hate life, we hate ourselves.

21.

My mother didn’t foresee what was going to become of us as a result of  witnessing her despair. I’m speaking particularly of the boys, her sons. But even  if she had foreseen it, how could she have kept quiet about what had become her  own essential fate? How could she have made them all lie—her face, her eyes,  her voice? Her love? She could have died. Done away with herself. Broken up  our intolerable community. Seen to it that the eldest was completely separated  from the younger two.

22.

But she didn’t. She was careless, muddle-headed,  irresponsible. All that. She went on living. And all three of us loved her beyond  love. Just because she couldn’t, because she wasn’t able to keep quiet, hide  things, lie, we, different as we all three were from one another, all three loved  her in the same way.

• • •

23.

It went on for a long time. Seven years. When it began we were ten. And  then we were twelve. Then thirteen. Then fourteen, fifteen, Then sixteen, seventeen.

It lasted all that age, seven years. And then finally hope was given up.

Abandoned. Like the struggles against the sea. From the shade of the veranda we  look at the mountains of Siam, dark in broad daylight, almost black. My mother  is quiet at last, mute. We, her children, are heroic, desperate.

24.

My younger brother died in December 1942, during the Japanese occupation.

I’d left Saigon after graduating from high school in 1931. He wrote to me just  once in ten years. I never knew why. The letter was conventional, made out in a  fair copy in careful handwriting without any mistakes. He told me everyone was  well, the school was a success. It was a long letter, two whole pages.

25.

I  recognized his writing, the same as when he was a child. He also said he had an  apartment, a car, he told me the make. That he’d taken up tennis again. That he  was fine, everything was fine. That he sent his fondest love. He didn’t mention  the war, or our elder brother.

26.

I often bracket my two brothers together as she used to do, our mother. I say,  My brothers, and she too, outside the family, used to say, My sons. She always  talked in an insulting way about her sons’ strength. For the outside world she  didn’t distinguish between them, she didn’t say the elder son was much stronger than the younger, she said he was as strong as her brothers, the farmers in the  North of France. She was proud of her sons’ strength in the same way as she’d  been proud of her brothers’. Like her elder son, she looked down on the weak.

27.

Of my lover from Cholon she spoke in the same way as my elder brother. I  won’t write the words down. They were words that had to do with the carrion  you find in the desert. I say, My brothers, because that’s what I used to say too.

It was only afterwards that I referred to them differently, after my younger  brother grew up and was martyred.

28.

Not only do we never have any celebrations in our family, not a Christmas  tree, or so much as an embroidered handkerchief or a flower. We don’t even take  notice of any death, any funeral, any remembrance. There’s just her. My elder  brother will always be a murderer. My younger brother will die because of him.

As for me, I left, tore myself away. Until she died my elder brother had her to  himself.

29.

At that time, the time of Cholon, of the image, of the lover, my mother has  an access of madness. She knows nothing of what’s happened in Cholon. But I  can see she’s watching me, she suspects something. She knows her daughter, her  child, and hovering around that child, for some time, there’s been an air of  strangeness, a sort of reserve, quite recent, that catches the eye.

30.

The girl speaks  even more slowly than usual, she’s absent-minded, she who’s usually so  interested in everything, her expression has changed, she’s become a spectator  even of her mother, of her mother’s unhappiness, it’s as if she were witnessing  its outcome. There’s a sudden terror in my mother’s life. Her daughter’s in the  direst danger, the danger of never getting married, never having a place in  society, of being defenseless against it, lost, alone.

31.

My mother has attacks during  which she falls on me, locks me up in my room, punches me, undresses me,  comes up to me and smells my body, my underwear, says she can smell the  Chinese’s scent, goes even further, looks for suspect stains on my underwear,  and shouts, for the whole town to hear, that her daughter’s a prostitute, she’s  going to throw her out, she wishes she’d die, no one will have anything to do  with her, she’s disgraced, worse than a bitch. And she weeps, asking what she  can do, except drive her out of the house so she can’t stink the place up any  more.

32.

Outside the walls of the locked room, my brother.

He answers my mother, tells her she’s right to beat the girl, his voice is  lowered, confidential, coaxing, he says they must find out the truth, at all costs, must find out in order to save the girl, save the mother from being driven to  desperation. The mother hits her as hard as she can. The younger brother shouts  at the mother to leave her alone. He goes out into the garden, hides, he’s afraid I’ll be killed, he’s afraid, he’s always afraid of that stranger, our elder brother.

33.

My younger brother’s fear calms my mother down. She weeps for the disaster of  her life, of her disgraced child. I weep with her. I lie. I swear by my own life that  nothing has happened to me, nothing, not even a kiss. How could I, I say, with a  Chinese, how could I do that with a Chinese, so ugly, such a weakling? I know  my elder brother’s glued to the door, listening, he knows what my mother’s  doing, he knows the girl’s naked, being beaten, and he’d like it to go on and on  to the brink of harm. My mother is not unaware of my elder brother’s obscure  and terrifying intent.

34.

We’re still very small. Battles break out regularly between my brothers, for  no apparent reason except the classic one by which the elder brother says to the  younger, Clear out, you’re in the way. And straightway lashes out. They fight  without a word, all you can hear is their breathing, their groans, the hollow thud  of the blows. My mother accompanies this scene, like all others, with an opera of shrieks.

35.