An elderly French authoress, while writing her memoirs, is narrating the story of her first love. The year of that story is 1929, the place southern Indochina. Her mother and her two brothers lived in the house that came with the mother's poor paying teaching job, while she, across the Mekong River, lived in a boarding school dormitory in Saigon. The girl had an uneasy relationship with her family, largely because of her mother's inexplicable favoritism of her eldest brother, who was selfish, egotistical and thieving. The girl and her younger timid brother secretly wished he was dead. That year, she began a relationship with a Chinaman, who she met on the Mekong River ferry. He was western educated in Paris, came from a wealthy family and as such money was no issue for him, and had never worked a day in his life. They entered into their sexual relationship nervously if only because of the taboo associated with a relationship between races, and people of their respective ages (the girl lying and telling him that she was seventeen despite being fifteen, while the man telling her he was thirty-two). As time progressed, they were more open to the world at least about having a relationship. Her family disapproved of what they knew she was doing, while still savoring the Chinaman's showering of money at them. They talked openly to each other about their non-existent future, as she could never marry a Chinaman, and he was already betrothed to a woman from a wealthy family, she who he would not even meet until the wedding ceremony. But both began to think that there was the possibility of a future "them", driven by their passion and desire.