Her purpose is to heal, to tell what it was and is like to be nothing more than the dust of the earth in the eyes of men who carry weapons and to rise from that dust a functioning, generous, alive being. She has an individuality, a story to tell, a purpose. She is an American now, a Southern Californian. Peasant child, she becomes successful in the world of capitalism and returns to her home in Vietnam with a book in mind.
She struggles, survives, marries one American, then another. Later, and not because of the rape, she has a child out of wedlock. It’s real.Īt the same time her life is the stuff of a mini-series-or would be if television ever learned to view Eastern lives as fully human and not simply as a part of the scenery behind Western lives. Le Ly Hayslip’s narrative of her life as a child in a Vietnamese village overrun by the French, the Viet Cong, the Republican Army of South Vietnam, the Americans, the Viet Cong, the Republicans, the Americans, etc., etc., etc. But its overarching theme-that the innocent victims are not nameless people but individual human beings-is an essential message in a world that measures history by its wars and body counts. These are strong words about a book that has some troubling flaws. It may speak most piercingly to Asians and Amer-Asians, especially Amer-Asian children, but it should be heard by any man-and especially any woman-who cares about life on our planet. It should be required reading in military colleges and in high schools and universities looking for broader, more personal interpretations of geo-politics. Le Ly Hayslip’s memoir of the War in Vietnam is not the book that will split the world in two, but it is that kind of book. Millions of us are waiting for that day, watching for it, nurturing its possibility. It is said that on the day when some one woman, any woman, finally succeeds in telling the truth about her life, the world will be split in two.
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