Entre le ciel et la terre

by Le Ly Hayslip

Paperback, 1993

Status

Available

Call number

959.70438

Series

Heaven and Earth (1)

Genres

Publication

Seuil (1993), Broché

Description

It is said that in war heaven and earth change places not once, but many times. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places is the haunting memoir of a girl on the verge of womanhood in a world turned upside down. The youngest of six children in a close-knit Buddhist family, Le Ly Hayslip was twelve years old when U.S. helicopters langed in Ky La, her tiny village in central Vietnam. As the government and Viet Cong troops fought in and around Ky La, both sides recruited children as spies and saboteurs. Le Ly was one of those children. Before the age of sixteen, Le Ly had suffered near-starvation, imprisonment, torture, rape, and the deaths of beloved family members-but miraculously held fast to her faith in humanity. And almost twenty years after her escape to Ameica, she was drawn inexorably back to the devastated country and family she left behind. Scenes of this joyous reunion are interwoven with the brutal war years, offering a poignant picture of vietnam, then and now, and of a courageous woman who experienced the true horror of the Vietnam War-and survived to tell her unforgettable story.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member julierh

an excellent account of the vietnam war from the other side. this is the true story of a young girl who experienced the war in a very immediate way. it's very good.

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LibraryThing member dianemb

This was a very illuminating memoir of a woman who was raised in Vietnam during the civil war.It describes in great detail the life of those living in small villages as well as those in the cities. Often life was unbearable as the people were caught between the two sides of the conflict. They could

be arrested and tortured on a whim. Surprisingly enough, this book even tells of some good things that the Americans did. The people of Vietnam thought they were fighting for freedom, but is that what they got in the end?

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LibraryThing member dreamreader

I read this book when it first came out, and was reminded of its affect on me as I started reading The Lotus Eaters. The latter, written on the basis of research rather than personal experience, failed to engage me. One woman's harrowing tale of survival nakedly exposes the futility of that long

and senseless war.

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LibraryThing member julierh

an excellent account of the vietnam war from the other side. this is the true story of a young girl who experienced the war in a very immediate way. it's very good.

LibraryThing member ecw0647

Part of the problem reading history is that sometimes one tends to look at the overall picture; the strategic view, rather than the impact of an event on the individual Le Ly Hayslip has recounted her family's personal experiences during the Vietnam war from the perspective of those caught in the

middle. Her story portrays the agony of the destruction of a centuries-old way of life and the ruination of a country. The village she lived in, Ky La, was just a tiny fanning village, one surely no one has heard of. Yet, the village's ordeal, first from the French, followed by the nocturnal terror of the Viet Cong, and finally the rain of American explosives totally obliterating its existence, was shared by much of the country. Pitted against the horror of modern warfare the family and village life disintegrated. First suspected of being a member of the Viet Cong, she was imprisoned and tortured by the South Vietnamese. Upon release the Viet Cong assumed she had become a collaborator and added her name to the death list. As she ran away from the village her allegiance to traditional values faded, she bore an illegitimate child, took American lovers, and under duress became a black marketeer. She worshiped at the "shrine of the street-smart and the shrewd, not at the altar of my ancestors." Despite it all, she despairs not for the future, but has tried to break through the cycle of vengeance and. now works for the East Meets West Foundation, an organization which hopes to reconcile the differences between the two countries.

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LibraryThing member bobbieharv

Read this while I was in Vietnam. Very interesting and horrific personal account of growing up during the American War, as they call it, by a woman who as a child both worked for and was tortured by the Viet Cong (and by the Republcans). She was amazingly enterprising during all of this. I admired

her courage but was put off by her terrible taste in men!

She ended up in the States by virtue of her marriage to a much older man, returning to Vietnam to find her estranged mother and sister.

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