Segment 14 Summary

The gradual decline of the family, the mother's focus on the older brother, and the older brother's stranglehold upon the younger children, evolved over a period of about seven years. The narrator's resistance, from age ten to seventeen, was like toiling against the sea. The younger brother died in 1942; the narrator completed high school in Saigon in 1931. The younger brother wrote only one letter to his sister during the entire time of their lifelong separation after high school. The letter was banal and did not speak of any hardships, simply stating that all was well and that he had taken up tennis.

The older brother entirely dominated the younger brother and ruled with fear and violence. The mother interpreted her sons as definitive ideals, almost as caricatures, and the family was entirely dysfunctional in numerous ways. In addition, the mother was profoundly manic-depressive...