This article was written by Pamela Payne
French writer Marguerite Duras spent some of her childhood in Sa Dec, a sprawling busy town in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. Here she set much of her autobiographical novel, The Lover. Published in France in 1984 and in its first English translation in 1985, The Lover has since been translated into more than forty languages. In its year of publication it won France's most prestigious literary award, Prix Goncourt.
In Sa Dec director Jean-Jaques Annaud shot much of his 1992 film, The Lover with Jane March as the waif-like French fifteen year old with the devastating sense of style and Tony Leung as her rich, elegant Chinese lover.
Aside from the fact that the French have long departed, not a lot has changed in Sa Dec since Duras' day. Warehouses, mostly old Chinese shop-houses, bulge with merchandise. Ancient river boats load and unload at the wharves built almost to the shop doors. A steady stream of porters lumps sacks and boxes into the jumble of these crammed premises.
Both the school where Duras' mother taught and the small house behind it where the family must have lived still stand. But there are no commemorative plaques nor proud signs pointing the way to the one time home of a famous daughter. "Marg Rite?" repeats the local police captain. He follows my gaze to the house across the river, nods vaguely. It's undoubtedly not the first time he's been asked but he can't imagine why Westerners are interested in the town's primary school.
In a sense, it's appropriate that the Vietnamese don't make a fuss of Duras. In her writing there's no sentiment, nor even cursory affection, for Sa Dec, nor for any of her childhood homes in Indochina. There's not the least nostalgia as she writes in The Lover for "those incredible places, always temporary, ugly beyond expression, places to flee from, in which my mother would camp .."
Before her eighteenth birthday, Duras left Indochina for France. From the age of 28 when she wrote her first novel, Les Impudents, until her death in 1996 at the age of 82, she published prolifically, effortlessly traversing literary genre novels, essays, plays, film scripts, journalism, autobiography. But only three works are wholly rooted in Indochina, The Sea Wall (1950), The Lover and, in 1991, a less successful reworking of The Lover, the The North China Lover.
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