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harried, overworked volunteer, took that one baby out of the hundreds that she had seen orphaned at the camp, because the infant girl looked so pretty to her. Her husband, a surgeon who never volunteered for refugee work again after putting in three months at the camps, reluctantly allowed his wife to bring the baby home to Avignon with them. Eventually they adopted the girl, when it became clear that they could not have babies of their own. But he never allowed her to use his family name. He gave her an invented surname—Laguerre, the child of war.
    An Linh’s earliest memories were of Avignon, the medieval stone city with the bridge that had collapsed centuries ago and had never been rebuilt; it still went only halfway across the peaceful Rhone River. She spent many an afternoon at the crumbling edge of the old bridge, in the shadows of the chapel built upon it, straining her eyes to study the farther bank of the river. To her child’s understanding, the other side of the river was her other life. Her Asian mother was there, she imagined.
    She saw her French father as cold, aloof, unbending. As she grew older she realized that he treated her with formal propriety but never regarded her as his daughter. Slowly, An Linh began to understand that he had allowed her into his home because of his wife, An Linh’s French mother. He loved the woman and could deny her nothing that was in his power to give. He simply did not have the power to love a child who was not his own.
    But as distant as her adopted father was, her French mother was warm and close. To An Linh, she was the woman Monet painted, the mother who personified love and safety and happiness, the slim lady smiling tenderly in the afternoon sunshine of summer. She was Canadian by birth, a Quebecoise who had fled from the convent in which her parents had enrolled her and spent her life atoning for the guilt she felt at abandoning God. She had met the man she would marry, the proud, handsome son of a wealthy vintner, while she was at nursing school in Aix-en-Provence and he was an intern. They honeymooned in Paris while she talked him into volunteer work in Indochina.
    To be a beautiful Oriental child growing up in Avignon was not without pain. When An Linh started school, the French children called her Arabe or Africaine . The Algerian and Moroccan children called her Chinoise .
    She was ten years old when the American astronaut flew out to meet the approaching alien spacecraft and somehow stayed aboard it instead of returning home with his Russian cosmonaut pilot. An Linh watched the rocket’s takeoff on television, but within a few days the story disappeared from view, just as the American himself drifted farther and farther away from Earth on the alien’s retreating ship.
    As An Linh grew into her teen years and began to menstruate, she suddenly saw her adopted father in a different way. He was a man, and she realized that now he was watching her as a man watches a woman. She was terrified, and all the more so because she could not bring herself to tell her French mother about this shocking secret.
    She realized also that her mother was aging. While her father grew more handsome and distinguished with each year, her mother was visibly fading. Her golden-brown hair was turning dull, mousey. The sparkle in her eyes dimmed. She seemed tired, slow, withdrawn.
    They sent her to the university at Aix, where An Linh studied journalism and quickly learned that sex was the greatest equalizer in the world. Among the students she was no longer the stranger, the outsider, the alien creature who did not belong. Even her nickname of La Chinoise became a term of admiration instead of mockery. She traded boyfriends with the other girls, eager to make them like her. She did well in her classes, so well that she could afford to avoid the male faculty members who pursued her.
    By the end of her first year, as she rode the bus back toward Avignon, through the gentle hills dotted with