I'm already old……"
This is the classic opening of "The Lover".
In this semi-autobiographical novel, the twilight Duras recounts the profound and hopeless love between a poor French girl and a wealthy Chinese man in fragmented whispers .
The poverty, the helplessness of the family, the marginal status in the society, and the attachment to Chinese men, which are repeatedly and deeply portrayed in "The Lover", formed the precious "Vietnamese complex" of Girls' Generation Duras. This complex is worth remembering for a lifetime.
I have a wonderful relationship with Duras . First, a dream about Duras pushed me to The Lover. Then there is Saigon, the background city in the novel, which led to a trip to Vietnam.
January 2020, Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon City), Vietnam. After two hours of being robbed by a biker party, I was hiding in the hotel with a wry smile: If this is also a "bad relationship" between me and Saigon, Duras and "The Lover", then it is worth writing about it...
01 Story Summary
A ferry on the lower Mekong River in 1929.
A French girl (Duras), who will turn 16 in half a year , is taking a ferry back to the boarding school on the other side of the Mekong River. She leaned against the railing and stared at the river in a daze, so as to dispel the tropical heat and boredom. At this moment, a strange Chinese man came to her side.
After a few chats, the man offered to let the driver take her back to school - so the couple met in Saigon, French Indochina.
The girl and her Chinese lover quickly "fall in love", and she follows him to the mansion for rendezvous, bathing, playing, and having sex, often not returning home at night.
The school notified her mother, but the poor mother was overjoyed to buy all kinds of cheap jewelry for her, "packaging the girl into a real bitch " and trying to sell her daughter as a commodity to the Chinese.
But the lover's family would not accept such a white woman. They arranged a marriage for him and found a "decent" northern fiancée. Weak Chinese lovers dare not resist the arranged marriage.
This hopeless relationship ended when a Chinese lover sponsored the Duras family to return to France. Until one day, more than fifty years later , she borrowed a phone, that familiar voice...
The most simple understanding of this story is that it is a kind of abnormal love , a battle of desires between a young girl Duras and a Chinese lover .
But the memorable aspect of the story is Duras' personal style :
She doesn't shy away from describing pain, she doesn't shy away from talking about desire, and her descriptions of sex and love are unabashed. She does not stick to stereotypes or follow the traditional norms of society. She resists the secular society with her body and actions , expressing her indulgent, breaking boundaries and restraint, tragic, fruitless and even moral love.
02 The birth of "lover"
A 15-year-old poor white girl and a 27-year-old rich Chinese young master , even if there are various gaps between the two, it is impossible for them to intersect in all aspects, but what makes them inextricably linked? Or even produce "love"? Let's analyze it from a girl's point of view:
Cold family relationships:
Duras' mother once bought a piece of land in Cambodia with all her savings, but was deceived and eventually went bankrupt. The mother took revenge on the girl for all suffering and misfortune , beating and insulting her. The eldest brother is a drug addict. He always steals his mother's money to buy drugs and beats up his family, but he is doted on by his mother.
The second brother is weak under the bullying of the elder brother, but he is the only relative she loves. Unfortunately, the second brother died of illness when he was a teenager. Living in such a turbulent environment, she lacked love, and lacked an object who could care for her and care for her. At this time, the Chinese appeared in front of the girl.
Absence of Fatherhood:
Duras' father died when she was four years old, and for her, paternal love was a luxury. The two older brothers in the family were supposed to be the projection objects of the desire for father's love, but they were two extremes: the older brother often resorted to violence against her. She first pinned her love on her weak and sick little brother, and then felt a paternal love from her equally weak Chinese lover. The emotion is wonderful, it fascinates her, it sinks her. She became obsessed with his smell, his body, his money, everything about him.
Personality drives, physiological needs and material temptations:
Like the personal style of Duras mentioned above. Her "rebellious spirit" ran through her life, as she herself put it:
All my life I have struggled with feeling different.
She has a unique personality, arrogant and enthusiastic. Wear a men's Panama hat and never give in to your family's discipline. She is not afraid of strange things , and her exploration of sexuality is also excited and bold, which set the tone for her later ride in a Chinese man's black car to his mansion.
In addition, material factors are not surprisingly one of the reasons for the development of this romantic relationship. The Duras family of Girls' Generation is extremely poor, and she has no resistance to the Chinese lover who wears big diamonds and luxurious clothes.
When the mother learned that her daughter had a wealthy Chinese lover, she secretly rejoiced while calling her daughter a "little prostitute" .
Because for a period of time in the future, this Chinese lover, whom they despised, will support the family. A girl who lives in distress, looking for a rich lover is her long-term goal. Therefore, this "love" is not simple from the beginning.
03 Lover's Love
The portrayal of this Chinese lover may be due to a deep-rooted racial discrimination in ideology. Duras deliberately repeatedly emphasized her Chinese lover's weakness in the text , whether it is physical or spiritual. Seeing her 15-and-a-half-year-old carcass clean of young teeth, this undeveloped virgin land, made him weep between some moral struggle and lustful excitement .
And she longed to use his wealth to gain the respect of her family from her Chinese lover.
She brought her family to dinner with him, but they were just as dismissive of the rich yellow-skinned as she was—except when the Chinese took the money to check out.
He also has a psychological advantage. Because of his wealth and the established fact of encroaching on young girls. During the candlelight dinner, he announced with a condescending smile:
"I can't marry you because you're not a virgin anymore."
She took the time to gobble it and replied with a smile: That's great, I don't like Chinese anyway.
Having said that, her sense of superiority was stabbed. So she hugged her little brother and danced more intimately, twisting her crotch between the little brother's legs, showing her sexual charm recklessly, in order to let the Chinese understand that she didn't care.
He took her away. At the mansion, where they had sex, he slapped her, sexually venting and warning: she was attached to him.
The girl asked without changing her face: How much do you think I am worth?
The Chinese threw the money to her and said sympathetically, "Tell me, I came to you for the money."
She did so.
He laughed self-deprecatingly.
At this moment, he has needs for her beyond sexual desire. After occupying a woman's body, a man always desires to rule her soul and explore her thoughts.
For girls, admitting "love" is more shameful than admitting money. So she also used to say "I am for money."
The Chinese sponsored their family to return to France. The last part is at the ferry terminal - where they first met. She whimpered silently, watching the black line cars on the shoreline drift away.
Under the stars of the Indian Ocean, on the ferry to France, the girl realized:
"Later, she cried because she thought of the man on the bank, because she couldn't tell for a moment if she had loved him , if she had loved him with love she had never seen, because he had disappeared from history , as water disappears into sand, because only now, at this very moment, from the music thrown into the sea, did she find him, find him."
Only then, as the full text draws to a close, have they thoroughly transformed simple sexual gratification into possible love.
04 Epilogue
Duras is good at writing destructive love tragedies, and this sense of destruction comes from her family. The unbearable mother, the disputes between the brothers, the love and hate brought about by the poverty and embarrassment of life, the new birth and the destruction, all are the precipitation of Duras' love and hate in his life. Destruction, for her to resist.
Only the frail Chinese lover who wept when she took away her virginity, who washed her body, brought a trace of consolation that was like a suspended straw in the colonial era, and came across time and across the destruction.
French colonial girls and young Chinese men, both of whom are on the fringes of society .
Neglected in the family, the girl who is in a "foreign land" by blood will eventually return to mainland France one day in the future, and the feudal family with a prominent Chinese lover will never allow its son to marry a nasty "white prostitute" . So, the fate of parting was doomed from the first time she got into the black car.
So the two reached a tacit consent and consensus, which is a common sense of destiny:
Precisely because they knew that this relationship would have no results, there would not be too much pressure, and they stepped out of the conventional love mode, but cherished each other even more.
Is love itself a passion? Is it the original desire? Maybe.
Perhaps love should be a kind of resonance, a tacit understanding, a sincerity. Fifty years later, he was able to characterize this love, write about it, and introduce him to the world as L'amant (lover) - even if he died at first.
The fifteen-year-old girl Duras does not have the ability to perceive and respond to love, and she has not even left the turbulent and destitute home. Let the reader be sure that this "lover" relationship and love is the seventy-year-old Duras who is full of enthusiasm - an old man who adapts her memories of her girlhood:
The hot and humid Saigon, the restless Mekong River, the end of her youth, the memory of her poverty and her first man: the "Chinese lover".
Through the cleansing of the exhausted soul after decades, the long-buried love entanglement is revealed. She was sure that it was love , the love of despair in times of hardship, the love of destruction, and she wrote:
"I'm getting old, and one day, in the hall of a public place, a man came up to me, he introduced himself, and he said to me:
'I know you and I will always remember you. Back then, you were very young and everyone said you were beautiful. Now, I'm here to tell you that, to me, I think you're more beautiful now than when you were young, when you were a young woman, with you I love your devastated face now more than your face then. '"
—— "The Lover"
This article was first published on the public account: A certain field came to boil poisonous chicken soup
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