Segment 1 Summary

The unnamed narrator, circa 1983, appears old with what others term a 'ravaged' face. She looks back over the years of her youth when she once was beautiful. Her face became ravaged when she was eighteen to twenty-five years of age; during that period she underwent rapid aging but since then has aged slowly, allowing most others of her age to catch up to her in appearances. When the narrator was fifteen and one half years of age she lived in what is today known as South Vietnam, then a French colony variously known as Chochinchina or French Indochina; the date being c. 1929. The narrator's family lives in Sadec but she lives in Saigon at a state-run boarding school and attends a French high school. The narrator's mother anticipates and fairly demands that the narrator complete a two-year study of mathematics after her initial...