Customer Reviews

When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: Tie-In Edition

5 star:		(43)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

When Heaven and Earth Changed Places is an extremely important book, particularly for those of us who have grown up and spent our lives in the USA, because it gives us something vital that we lack--the experience of living in a country where war is waged. Our world grows smaller every day, and whatever our government does elsewhere ultimately comes home to roost. This is in part because refugees like Ms. Hayslip, who wash up on our shores, become part of the fabric of our country; both the damage they suffer and the truimph they attain become part of the collective "ours." We can no longer afford to operate without empathy; those we kill are our neighbors, or at the very least, our neighbors' cousins. And so, this book is both important and timely.

'When Heaven and Earth Changed Places' is the autobiography of a woman who survives by wits, guts and sheer endurance the horrors of war and occupation--and, later, the horrors of emmigration to a bizarre new world and marriage to a different kind of war victim. It provides a rare and articulate window into the mind and heart of someone who was made to play, by circumstance, both ally and enemy. It should be mandatory reading for anyone trying to understand the Viet Nam war (or, as the Vietnamese more correctly call it, the American War), but it's far from some dry and bitter medicine that must be consumed with a pinch of the nostrils. It's an exciting story, extremely readable--a tale that is frightening, harrowing and, ultimately, heartening. The movie was decent, but the book is much better.

Susan O'Neill, Viet Nam Veteran and author, Don't Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Viet Nam

Le Ly Hayslip's first autobiography is fascinating, and also remarkable for offering a rare view of the "American War" from a woman who was once a young conscript with the Viet Cong.

I have many friendships with Vietnamese expatriates, and in contrast to Hayslip, they are unambiguous "southerners." Each family has compelling stories to tell of maltreatment, imprisonment, and persecution under the communist system, for real and supposed associations with the former South Vietnamese government. Hayslip's perspective is different from theirs but uniquely compelling in its own way, for she ultimately had enemies on both sides and few friends on either side, even within her own family.

She tells of sorrow, torture, failures, hardships and mistakes in such a way that I felt uncomfortably close to her at times. And while she has a genuine awareness of her own humanity and its many challenges, she leaves some difficult personal questions raised but unanswered. Nevertheless, I came away from the book with a much fuller perspective of Vietnamese culture and attitudes before, during, and after the war.

Although Hayslip is worth praising for her humanitarian efforts, she is but one of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese expatriates who continue to support the families they left behind. It's the strangest irony of the war's aftermath that communist Vietnam seeks the assistance of the very people it drove away.

The rarely reported legacy of the war is that the Vietnamese people -- including the Viet kieu (overseas Vietnamese) and so-called "northerners" and "southerners" -- continue to struggle with differences that still surface more than 25 years after the fall of Saigon. Hayslip's story shows that regardless of ideology or culture or geography, the war and its aftermath affected most Vietnamese in cruel and unpredictable ways.

"Le Ly Hayslip had always been in-between south and north, east and west, peace and war, Vietnam and America. It has been her life and fate to be in-between Heaven and Earth." When Heaven and Earth Changed Places is a story of a woman from a small village in Vietnam called Ky La. The author, Le Ly Hayslip, is just another victim of the Vietnam War. The brutality of the war created separation in her family, destruction of an individual, and distrust among formerly warm-hearted neighbors. She was born the youngest of six children in a close-knit Buddhist family. Throughout her childhood, the peace breaks into pieces due to the war. Le Ly, as a little girl, serves the Viet Cong fighters, and she is honored for courageously surviving tortures in prison when captured by the government. The book focuses on the individual¡¯s emotional and physical outcomes caused by the war. If one wants to know the reality of what the effects of the war are, this book is definitely recommended. As an Asian, I was attracted to the story of the life of this Vietnamese woman. As I read, I found there was something very extraordinary about her life that stirred my emotions. To the public, this story is well known through the movie, "Heaven and Earth." As the movie was enjoyed by numerous moviegoers, the book will be appreciated by people of all ages, especially those who are interested in the Vietnam War.

I visited the village of Binh Ky (Ky La) in mid 1969 while escorting a road sweep with members of Golf Company, 2nd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment. I was about to leave country, having served 18 months on an extended tour with the Navy Hospital at the Marble Mountains, NSA Station Hospital. I am very familiar with this area.

Though I don't doubt that Hayslip may be from Binh Ky (I have been back and seen her family tomb in the dirt poor hamlet), I do know that a good deal of what she tells in this book is pure fiction.

1. Da Nang City was off limits to U. S. personnel from mid-1966 until the U. S. pulled out. There were no clubs to go to, no strip joints. All clubs were on bases. No one walked on the streets or lived in apartments in Da Nang. Those who worked there were transported there from their bases. All her stories about working in strip clubs frequented by Americans in Da Nang or meeting GIs prowling the streets are lies.

2. There were no U. S. personnel working at the civilian hospital in downtown Da Nang, as she claimed her lover Red did. I know, as I went to that hospital numerous times carrying wounded or sick Vietnamese civilians in our ambulances, and I toured the hospital several times. It was mostly open bay buildings with two or three to a bed, the families moving in beside the patients to cook for them while farm animals wandered around the facilities. Red is a purely fictitious character. As I stated earlier, no U. S. military personnel lived in apartments in Da Nang. There were some compounds where Americans lived, but they were guarded by Chinese mercenaries or other non-Vietnamese troops and you wouldn't just walk up and knock on the door of one of them. In her later book, Child of War, Woman of Peace, this facility becomes a Navy hospital in Da Nang. I was at the only Naval hospital in the entire I Corps, and it was at the Marble Mountains, not in Da Nang. There were barracks there, not apartments, and civilians were not allowed to visit them. And there was no Vietnamese guard at the "front door" or anywhere else on this compound. It was guarded by American Marines. This whole episode is pure fiction.

3. Hayslip claims to have traveled from Da Nang to the Marble Mountains twice, on foot, at night. This is not likely, given that the only way to get there involves crossing a river, the Song Han. The two bridges across the Han were guarded by Americans and no civilians crossed at night. There was a curfew in Da Nang. Boat travel was subject to artillery fire, monitored from the top of what called the Crow's nest, one of the Marble Mountains facing Binh Ky.

4. She claims her sister had an apartment at the Marble Mountains where Americans visited. I have film footage and still shots of this area and there are no apartments there, let alone one with a common indoor bathroom as she claims. In fact, the houses were all one story structures, almost exclusively shacks. This is another pernicious lie in which she paints an unflattering picture of Americans.

It is not clear why she has added so much fiction to this account, but my guess is that otherwise it would be very dull. All of the nonsense she has added is very disparaging to Americans, which could also be a reason for their addition.

These lies make me wonder how much of the rest of her tale is true. Her credibility is low for me. I corresponded with her briefly on the internet, but after I asked her to tell me how she got from Da Nang to the Marble Mountains by foot she stopped responding.

Nonetheless, it is a great read, but must be taken with a very healthy grain of salt.

I am 16 years old, and I do not like to read. But I started reading this book for a research project of mine. I am blown away by the 2 story's in this book. (The author as a little girl, and as a grown woman revisiting her home). I recommend this to anyone interested in the life of a vietnamese child during the war, or to anyone who loves asian culture.

...unless you've read this book. Hayslip is insightful, honest even about her own tragedies and mistakes, and beyond blaming or hating anyone. One of her desires is to help Vietnam war veterans find peace in their own hearts, and I think her book can help. I cannot believe how good this book is, and I strongly recommend it. I read 20 books this summer, and this was easily the best one!

I read this book because it was assigned for an English class. Half way through the book, I hated it because it was too brutal and unsettling for somebody who knew nothing about the Vietnam War. It's hard to believe how anyone could have experienced, and yet endured all that Le Ly went through. I didn't appreciate reading about the gory and cruel details that she experienced, but after reading half way through the book, I couldn't put it down either. In the end, I really learned something about the war that most of the younger generations today never learned.. and even if we did, it was probably from the grotesquely portrayed account by Hollywood films.

This is a good book, and I have learned something truly valuable. I will never think of Vietnam war or Veterans day the same way I did before I read this book.

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

I think it will always be difficult to nail down the myriad of reactions people have towards the Vietnam War. This book helps to bring another side to light...the war took place in the narrator's backyard. As she talks about playing both sides towards the middle, the reader learns about how she struggles as an adult to fully comprehend what her role was and is toward her native land. The book will make you grit your teeth, turn your head, want to cry and yet yearn for understanding about how this all happened.

OMIGOD! This is the best book that I have ever read. It is a stirring story about a Vietnameese woman who lived throught the Vietnam War, and moverd to the US. It is a fasinating story of empathy, and culture. It should be madatory reading for everyone.