The narrator’s favorite image of herself is on the ferry in Saigon moments before she meets the lover. She wears a man’s hat and secondhand outfit she regards as sensual and original. The hat symbolizes the interconnectedness of exterior and interior worlds. The narrator is poor and yearns for independence. She knows that a man must provide her with wealth and the ability to distance herself from dependence on her family. To wear a man’s hat to attract a man presents a nested sexuality; the narrator is physically beneath this representation of masculinity. The hat was “another markdown, another final reduction” (12); it combines themes of sexuality and money into a single item, which the narrator uses to alter her external world.

From an early age, the narrator expresses her desire to work as an author. She has a free associative style and wants to write about aspects of her childhood she has yet to describe in words: “Sometimes I realize that if writing isn’t, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it’s nothing” (8). The narrator focuses on describing her own life and how she has used her appearance to become the woman she wants to be at the time of writing: that is, a wealthy woman living comfortably in Paris.