mother's dowdy appearance coincides with her own daring comportment--dark red lipstick, pleated skirt, man's fedora, gold lamé shoes. The mother, at once educated and socially artless, is oddly proud of her daughter's appearance, anticipating that "perhaps one day she'll find out how to bring in some money. That's why, though she doesn't know it . . . the mother lets the girl go out dressed like a child prostitute" (Duras, 1986, p. 24).
If the tropical heat and the family's poverty create a feeling of hopelessness, the environment of Indochina is, for colonials in general, by turns socially liberating and socially demanding. Thus the children "learned . . . to keep quiet about the ruling principle of our life, poverty" (Duras, 1986, p. 60). Even if the family must eat garbage, it is "cooked and served by a houseboy" (p. 7). Even though the mother expects her daughter to get a math degree, she also tells her that she need not achieve anything (socially) there (the same would not be true in bourgeois France).
But the familial and social signals are confusing. The 15-year-old, for her part, is already artful and already so interested in making money that she "knows how to divert the interest people take in her to the interest she takes in money. That makes her mother smile" (Duras, 1986, p. 24). Indeed, the mother smiles at the prospect that the girl may be able to bring money into the household. But the social stigma of a prostitute in the family also occasions dramatic confrontation:
My mother has attacks during which she falls on me, locks me up in my room, punches me, undresses me . . . says she can smell the Chinese's scent . . . 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 (Duras, 1986, p. 58).
Taking money to be a motivating factor in the love affair helps explain...