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Segment 1

• An unnamed narrator who appears old with a "ravaged" face, looks back over the years of her youth when she was beautiful.

• The narrator recalls the time when she was fifteen and a half and her family lived in French Indochina.

• The narrator's family includes two older brothers, one who is cruel and one who is fearful, and a mother who attempts to plan the narrator's future.

• The family is poor but remain high in society because they are white French colonists in a mostly non-Caucasian nation.

• Everyone in the family is dead before the narrator begins telling their story.

Segments 2, 3, 4

• The narrator recalls the ferry ride where she meets the lover; the ride becomes a moment in time that is forever fixed in the narrator's memory.

• The narrator's outfit is described; it serves to turn the narrator from girl to woman and sexualizes her.

• After the...

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