I\u2019m wearing a dress of real silk, but it\u2019s threadbare, almost transparent. It used to belong to my mother. One day she decided the colour was too light for her and she gave it to me. It\u2019s a sleeveless dress with a very low neck. It\u2019s the sepia color real silk takes on with wear. It\u2019s a dress I remember. I think it suits me. I\u2019m wearing a leather belt with it, perhaps a belt belonging to one of my brothers. I can\u2019t remember the shoes I used to wear in those days, only certain dresses. Most of the time I wore canvas sandals, no stockings. I\u2019m speaking of the time before the high school in Saigon. Since then, of course, I\u2019ve always worn shoes. This particular day I must be wearing the famous pair of gold lam\u00c3\u00a9 high heels. I can\u2019t see any others I could have been wearing, so I\u2019m wearing them. Bargains, final reductions bought for me by my mother. I\u2019m wearing these gold lame shoes to school. Going to school in evening shoes decorated with diamant\u00c3\u00a9 flowers. I insist on wearing them. I don\u2019t like myself in any others, and to this day I still like myself in them. These high heels are the first in my life, they\u2019re beautiful, they\u2019ve eclipsed all the shoes that went before, the flat ones, for playing and running about, made of white canvas.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not the shoes, though, that make the girl look so strangely, so weirdly dressed. No, it\u2019s the fact that she\u2019s wearing a man\u2019s flat-brimmed hat, a brownish-pink fedora with a broad black ribbon.<\/p>\n
The crucial ambiguity of the image lies in the hat.<\/p>\n
How I came by it I\u2019ve forgotten. I can\u2019t think who could have given it to me. It must have been my mother who bought it for me because I asked her. The one thing certain is that it was another markdown, another final reduction. But why was it bought? No woman, no girl wore a man\u2019s fedora in that colony then. No native woman, either. What must have happened is: I try it on for fun, look at myself in the shop-keeper\u2019s glass, and see that there, beneath the man\u2019s hat, the thin awkward shape, the inadequacy of childhood has turned into something else. Has ceased to be a harsh, inescapable imposition of nature. Has become on the contrary, a provoking choice of nature, a choice of the mind. Suddenly, it\u2019s deliberate. Suddenly, I see myself as another, as another would be seen, outside myself, available to all eyes, in circulation for cities, journeys, desire. I take the hat, and am never parted from it. Having got it, this hat that all by itself makes me whole, I wear it all the time. With the shoes it must have been much the same, but after the hat. They contradict the hat, as the hat contradicts the puny body, so they\u2019re right for me. I wear them all the time too, go everywhere in these shoes, this hat, out of doors, in all weathers, on every occasion. And to town.<\/p>\n