Segments 2, 3, 4 Summary

The narrator considers telling stories and the act of writing. Writing was unconscionable and inexplicable to the mother who fancied her daughter to be a mathematician. Although any social milieu changes, writing remains. During middle age the narrator drank heavily which unmistakably contributed to her ravaged face. At the age of fifteen and one half, the narrator travels from her home in Sadec to her school and boarding in Saigon, taking a ferry across the Mekong River. She rides a bus that boards the fairy, and she sits in the front of the bus in a section reserved for white passengers. During the voyage, she becomes bored and exits the bus to stand by the railing on the ferry. This moment in time—this river crossing—becomes an absolute image forever fixed in the narrator's mind as an absolute moment in...