My father's French, was born in Hanoi, the son of the French governor and resident mayor of Saigon. That's when the French were there, before the Americans came, before my grandfather was captured by the Japanese,
when colonial life was at its apogee and Vietnam was called "Indochine."

Shortly after giving birth to my dad, my grandmother died. My grandfather married his Vietnamese concubine and served as governor in Vietnam and Cambodia while my father was taken back to France to be properly raised and educated--a young, raging, orphaned prince in the making, right on the brink of falling colonial grandeur.
     

       
My mother was born in Macao, of nine children, and, like most baby girls in poor families, "should have been fed to the pigs." To escape poverty and the
tragedy of an arranged marriage, she fled to Hong Kong and Vietnam, transporting suitcases full of cash across mined fields in a pretty dress and high heels for Belgian entrepeneurs smuggling funds in and out of the country. A risky venture, but the only way she could ever dream of earning enough dowry to marry the man she loved, who after fathering two children with her and taking the money, married a woman of higher rank and fortune instead. She pursued him to his village, lit firecrackers under his window and woke up the entire population. She got her money back, but not her heart. Back in Hong Kong, when unable to make ends meet, her landlord offered her a grace period in exchange for sexual favors, she rubbed her face full
of peanut shells till she bled, turned her tears to the moon and swore that never again would she ever be broken by a man. She had not met my dad yet. They met in a dance hall in Saigon, where she worked as a dance hostess. He had a law degree and had returned to Vietnam to study journalism and avoid World War II. She was through with men and wanted
nothing to do with him. He had never forgiven his father for marrying his Asian concubine and now was being rejected by one. He put a detective on her and
went on a hunger strike until she agreed to marry him.

She did. He was a knight in shining armor, rich, handsome, romantic, the son of the French governor, and even offered to adopt her two children.
      

      
My older brother was born in Saigon, I was born in Orleans, France, and my younger brother in Dakar, Senegal, where we lived in a huge white mansion with lots of servants. Then we moved back to France, where the colonial days were clearly over and money got tight. But my dad was back on his turf and my mom, the minority, with no allies or power, a long unpaid debt about to be paid.

First thing he did was take her two Chinese children and board them in an orphanage as far away as he could. Then he fired our nanny and throned back in his aunt, the sister of his deceased mother who had also raised him, soon disappearing to countless soirees at the mayor's house where my mother was not invited.

But resilient and used to starting over, my mom borrowed money from my grandfather and opened a fashionable Chinese restaurant, the only one in the
region. It became a huge hit, especially among American officers stationed at a nearby base. Now the prime breadwinner of the family, she proceeded to take tennis lessons and ordered shoes and dresses in every color, popular for her wit and charm among Americans who were not as picky as the French bourgeoisie and aristocracy. My father was livid. His career took a
dive, distant assignments not permitting him to keep a tight leash on my mother's new bloom and independence.

Soon it was war all over again, with her threatening divorce after his numerous jealous rages and beatings, and him to dispossess her from her children and send her back to Vietnam, "a worthless whore like he found
her."

Psychic and physical guerilla warfare all the way. Vicious and relentless. And I grew up right in it. Not just front row seat. I was the territory,
disputed prize and weapon. Trampled, betrayed, violated, ambushed, misused and abused, kidnapped back and forth endlessly, mostly to be hidden in orphanages and hotel rooms, my loyalties bribed, force-fed rice
by one, French bread by the other, and who-do-you-love-most till I felt nothing at all. I ran away for the first time when I was five, my little
brother in one hand, pot and matches in the other (to boil potatoes like in a storybook I'd read about an orphan). My dad was in a state, reliving the traumas of his own childhood, foaming at the mouth with failed imperialistic rage, and my mother was fighting back with third world rebellion on the rise, hiring an American lawyer and plenty of young, dashing American officers for bodyguards.

Guns flashed, chairs flew, phones torn out of the wall, hand to hand combat and police sirens to the rescue while I ran to the bakery down the street and
hid under the pastry racks, stuffing myself full of chocolate eclairs or locking myself in the bathroom for days. One time I joined the Joan of Arc parade
instead and fell right in step with the drums in my pajamas, delirious as hell, and quickly caught up to the front where the young maiden in armor, mounted on a white horse, led the whole parade. I could almost touch the horse's tail, drunk with joy and applause, when my father's arms rudely snatched me out and locked me up in the car. I had a fit and swore that
when I grew up I would marry an American and ride off on a white horse like Joan of Arc, which earned me a handsome pair of slaps.

The custody battle lasted five years. My father won and drove my mom out of town, took her children and most of her money too. She snuck into my boarding house one night to give me chocolate marshmallows, my American favorites, and a dress covered with roses, which I never got to wear, only austere uniforms. She'd cut her hair very short, almost like a man, and kept smiling at me with her red, red lips, even though she was crying under her dark sunglasses and it was night. She said, "Mothers never abandon
their children, take care of your little brother," kissed me and left under the hard gaze of the dean. I could feel her lipstick mark burning a hole in my
cheek, proof that I had a mother too, a right to exist and be on this earth. I wanted to keep it there forever, but I quickly wiped it off so no one would
laugh at me when I walked back into the study hall. I never saw her again, till much later a letter from America got through to me by neglect of new personnel. She'd been trying to reach me for years, but my mail was censored and confiscated by my dad. I was ecstatic. My dad had recently remarried and agreed to let me go to America to study English for one school year. I never returned.

* * *

A bashful, intense fifteen year old in pleated skirt, bred on Tolstoy, Faust, Beethoven and the best, I landed in America via skid row the San Francisco
Greyhoiund bus depot, Chinatown gambling dens and the Hong Kong Cafe in Willows, California, where there was no French Lycee and no sunken bubble bath as my mother had promised me in her letters. Instead she introduced me to my stepfather, an eighty year old Chinaman she'd married for her papers and a life insurance policy. He ran the bar downstairs. Mostly
comatose farmers with crew cuts, menthol cigarettes burning by themselves in plastic ashtrays. I was the waitress upstairs, for fat housewives in
muumuus, men in oversized jeans that hung low and showed the crack of their ass, handful of shrieking kids who poured ketchup on their chow mein, then popped their gum back in afterwards. Dean Martin Christmas carols on the stereo year around. Hardly the billboards or what I had imagined from
behind my boarding school walls. No, that America didn't exist in Haight Ashbury's Summer of Love either, yuppies passing for hippies when I damn well knew most of them would go home one day, unlike those who were born in the ghetto and had to remain. The Vietnam war was at it all over again, with tear gas, peace, love, LSD and all that, soon a red rose on the lapel of my black leather motorcycle jacket, pockets full of razor blades which I used to stash under my boyfriend's mattress, just in case I got up the courage to end the pain once and for all. I was so young, so gullible, so lost, with only paper-thin walls to protect me from the jungle out there. No, that America didn't exist when I eloped on my sixteenth birthday, got caught by the cops, only to be sold back to my husband by my mom for sixteen hundred bucks. It didn't exist when I gave birth alone nine months later because it was my husband's first day on the job, interns with rubber gloves sticking their hands inside my body by the half dozen.

It didn't exist when my husband confessed he'd gotten me pregnant for fear of getting drafted. It didn't exist when one day he didn't come home, then stuck a gun to my head when I filed for divorce. It didn't exist when I joined Women's Lib, quit Women's Lib, joined "the movement," quit "the movement," worked two fulltime jobs to go to college, failed the English entrance test, got in anyway, won best short story and an art scholarship to the Art Institute one year later, hitch- hiking to school with my baby in one arm, art portfolio and books in the other, and not enough hands when it rained, all before I had turned nineteen.

It didn't exist for a long time after that either. But it existed in my dreams, in the feverish prayers of a six year old in an orphanage, in the burning heartache of a teenage mom, in everything, everyone I loved, in every painting I painted, every poem or story I wrote. It existed because I needed it to exist and I was determined to find it, like sugar at the heart of a thorny rose.

it was either that or else amputate. And surely no one could live without a heart.