hayslip, le ly

A memoir of Le Ly Hayslip in which she recalls her experiences during the Vietnam War as a young spy for the Viet Cong, and tells of her return to her country and family twenty years after escaping to America.

Le Ly Hayslip's extraordinary memoir of growing up in a war-ravaged Vietnam garnered high praise for the "passion and suspense" (San Francisco Chronicle) of its "searing and human account of Vietnam's destruction" (front page, New York Times Book Review). Now, Ms. Hayslip continues her remarkable autobiography, arriving in the United States as a young bride wise in the ways of war yet charmingly naive about the habits of "giant, round-eyed Americans." Told in exquisite. detail, Child of War, Woman of Peace is, in many ways, a timeless immigrant's tale. Ms. Hayslip recounts with humor and goodwill her apprenticeship as U.S. housewife in a land where kitchen sinks "swallow food," and neighborhood church ladies strive to save her "heathen Buddhist soul." Her uncanny ability to attract colorful characters - from con artists to despondent suitors - only muddles her search for the true peace she hoped America would grant her. Yet beneath Le. Ly's amusing view of America, her emotions are torn between the promise of her adopted country and the land - full of pain, but also the pleasures of an ancient and beguiling way of life - she left behind. "Home" is more than a place, she discovers: it is a state of grace. Le Ly's rediscovery of herself, as well as her quest to harmoniously join the two poles of her universe, is a story all Americans should read, and no reader will forget.

A memoir of Le Ly Hayslip in which she recalls her experiences during the Vietnam War as a young spy for the Viet Cong, and tells of her return to her country and family twenty years after escaping to America.

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.

Presents a biography of Vietnamese-born writer and founder of the Mother's Love Clinic in Vietnam, Le Ly Hayslip, and describes her childhood, immigration to America, and her personal struggles to live and raise her children.

An account of the Vietnam War by a child of the war who survived the horror, then fled to the U.S. to find peace.