Cultured Travel Guide Books - When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: Tie-In Edition |
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 959.70438
EAN: 9780452271685
ISBN: 0452271681
Label: Plume
Manufacturer: Plume
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 400
Publication Date: 1993-11-01
Publisher: Plume
Studio: Plume |
| Spotlight Customer Reviews: |
Customer Rating: 
Summary: A page-turner
Comment: This book is a page-turner, an amazing non-fictional look at the lives of people caught between the southern regime and the Viet Cong during the Viet Nam conflict. The protagonist herself gives an intimate view of her life that is too strange to believe.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Plight of DMZ Vietnamese during war
Comment: Recommended by my Vietnamese tour guide in October 2007, this book describes the dreadful plight of those Vietnamese families living on the border between North and South Vietnam in what the Vietnamese term the "American War". During the day, the villagers had to demonstrate allegiance to the South and at night the VC demanded their loyalty. The families would not leave their land as their ancestors are buried there. The authors, Le Ly Hayslip and her son James, describe her experiences in surviving the hell imposed upon her family by the opposing forces and her eventual emigration to the USA. The sequel, "Child of War, Woman of Peace", describes the difficulties she experienced as a Vietnamese in the USA.
Customer Rating:
Summary: thought provoking
Comment: An honestly told story by an author able to see both sides. This is a also a story of forgiveness. Her story is a heroic journey and the author gives the reader a perspective into the many ways the Vietnam War has affected Americans and Vietnamese Americans.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: a great coming up memoir.
Comment: Le Ly Hayslip has gone through one of the worst wars in American history. And she has lived. Past the rape, past the sexual inequality, past the emotional destruction of her family, past the threats and brushes with death. Le Ly Hayslip now is an accomplished author and owns several real estates throughout California.
This is a powerful memoir and I will not rob it of that. However, the only reason I gave it 3 stars (an "It was OK" rating) instead of 4 is because I feel that Hayslip could have cut out about... maybe 1/6th of the book out and nothing will have been missed. Not that it didn't relate to the story, but Hayslip does occasionally go off about this or that, her re-arrival back to Vietnam as an adult also heads towards the digressing end of the spectrum a lot of time and sometimes she goes from reporting her troubles and potential sympathy to just plain whining. Perfect for the college kid looking to dig as much quotes and intangibles to write an essay (as was I) but as a reader I felt it was too much.
Overall, still an excellent read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I get it now, Le Ly. Thank you.
Comment: Not having lived a very memorable life, my own writing has leaned toward fiction. Nevertheless, I tend to judge memoirs--and this is a good one--by the same standards I use for great literary fiction. One of those standards is the opener, or first line, in this case, "SUFFOCATE HER!" the midwife told my mother when I came into the world.
This is what we in the business call a 'zinger,' the equal of Camus' "Mother died today." or Melville's "Call me Ishmael." What a beginning! On trial for her life right from the git-go. This opener effectively signalled the continuous trials and potential consequences Le Ly would face for the rest of her life. She would have to come from stern stock if she were to survive, and her mother held her genetic end up with her smokin' response to the midwife, "I will bury her when she stops breathing. Now get out of here."
I have been a student of the Vietnam War since I first joined the Army as a chopper pilot in 1967--ironic because I've never set foot in that unfortunate land. I suppose I'm motivated by survivor's guilt. Anyway, Le Ly's fine memoir anchors a good bit of my newly won understanding of that longest and strangest of American wars. Coming from a Republican military family and growing up in the Cold War as I did, I believed at the time that everybody knew about and accepted the Domino Theory. And with my father a Korean War veteran (as well as WWII and Vietnam) I believed that any communists that were brazen enough to encroach from the north could be pushed back with a proper dose of American military muscle. I served in S. Korea myself many years after that war and things seemed to be plugging along rather nicely, thus preserving in my mind the validity of the Domino Theory. Then came Vietnam and the awful realization that we were not invincible. Hell, we got our butts kicked! Initial study from an unbiased source--General Westmoreland--suggested that America didn't lose the war, the South Vietnamese did. And he was right in a sense. Marvin the ARVN was quite content to sit back and let Joe slug it out with the VC and the NVA. I couldn't understand this. How could they take such a lackadaisical attitude about the fate of their nation when they had so much at stake? Did this mean they were for communism??? How could anybody with half a brain be FOR communism? I am not and never have been a practicioner of 'Jane Fonda logic' wherein if America makes a few mistakes, then the injured party must be lily-white, Q.E.D. I could see what rats the VC and NVA were. I knew they were just a front for a repressive dictatorship. Why couldn't the South Vietnamese see that? I was baffled.
Well, along comes a nice lady with the incongruous name of Le Ly Hayslip, who writes a book about those very South Vietnamese who didn't care about their government, or their nation (at least as we Americans tried to define it for them), or to my great surprise, communism or democracy or freedom (again as we defined that term). All they really cared about was getting the rice crop in and raising a few sons to do the same. Then the VC came into their village and beat everybody up, so they felt obliged to follow communism. Most of them didn't really know what that meant, but if the VC would stop beating them up, they'd learn a few songs and dig a few bunkers, then get back to the rice crop. The VC would leave and the Vietnamese Republicans would come in and beat them up again. So they were obliged to pay a few bribes and act 'patriotic' so the new bully would go away and again they could get back to the rice crop. This bizarre pattern only seemed normal to them. Throughout their recent past they had always been plagued by one bully or another--the French with their Morrocan allies, the VC, the NVA, the Republicans, the Americans--they were all the same to them. There was always somebody trying to get between them and their rice paddies. Deep down inside they were as apolitical as the grains of rice they were so diligently trying to harvest. You can eat rice. you can't eat dogma. The rice had fed them for generations. The VC et al. only fed them baloney. I get it now, Le Ly. Thank you.
--Ejner Fulsang, author of "A Knavish Piece of Work." Aarhus Publishing, 2006
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| Editorial Reviews: |
A Vietnamese woman describes her journey from war-torn central Vietnam to the United States, recounting how she endured imprisonment, torture, rape, near-starvation, and the deaths of members of her family. Reprint. Movie tie-in.
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