In this paper I study two major themes in Marguerite Duras’s Indochinese texts — i.e. the works set in French Indochina during colonial rule and inspired by the author’s own childhood: Un barrage contre le Pacifique (1950), L’Éden cinéma (1977), L’amant (1984) and L’amant de la Chine du Nord (1991). The themes that interest me in particular are interculturality and transculturality. The first term involves contact and interaction between cultures — in this case focus is on the white and the nonwhite population in the colonial society. By the second term I mean the crossing of cultural boundaries and the various kinds of assimilation with “the Other” that appear in Duras’s texts. I show how Marguerite Duras describes French Indochina as a thoroughly hierarchic and even racist society, founded on white domination and on the strict separation of ethnic communities. The only tolerated contact between the two groups is that of the white master and the coloured servant. In different ways, the author illustrates how the colour of the skin, in this milieu, becomes the most important factor in an individual’s identity construction. However, at the same time Duras lets us see how this colonial law can be broken. I take the central textual motif of an interracial relationship between a young French girl and her Chinese lover as a starting point for my investigation of transculturality in the works — where fusion and hybridisation become key concepts.