The touching story of a girl growing up in Vietnam during the war. It's amazing what she lives through. She is threatened by the Viet Cong, the Republicans, and the Americans. She is raped, tortured, starved, manipulated, and taken advantage of. But she's a fighter. She grows up, marries an American man and moves to San Diego with him. As an adult, she revisits her hometown and her family in Vietnam. The only thing I didn't like was the jumping back and forth between her childhood and the present. And I would have liked to hear more about her life after moving to America.

This was a difficult read, yet I highly recommend it! If you don't know much about what the civilians in Vietnam went through during the "American War"...as they call it, then you should read this book. Hayslip has endured, and has left a fantastic piece of non-fiction remind us of the sacrifices of war.

Recounting her Vietnam childhood during wartime as well as relaying details of a trip back to the country, her first since her departure in 1979, Hayslip provides valuable insight into the plight of Vietnamese torn between the Viet Cong-of which she was a member for a time-and the Republic. She effortlessly and vividly conveys family life such as gender roles, ancestral worship, and the everyday routines of village life. At the same time, Hayslip depicts the depravity of soldiers on each side of the conflict. Although she is not the first writer on the Vietnam War to note the destruction wrought by defoliants, she is the only one I've read who really laments the ecological costs of war. Ultimately, she urges compassion and reconciliation. While I'm very glad to have read this book for the content, I was not as impressed by the writing style. I found it to be at times melodramatic and some of the metaphors unsophisticated or obvious.

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Brutally honest, yet tender. Wrenching, sometimes horrifying, yet ultimately uplifting, this is Le Ly Hayslip's story of growing up in the midst of the Vietnam War and eventually moving to the U.S. — interwoven with her return 16 years later to see the changes in her homeland and be reunited with her family.

Even though nearly 50 years have passed, Hayslip's story resonates because it still happens to other young people in other parts of the world, and because it's vital to the forgiving and healing that she experienced and that she wants others to experience as well.

After watching the movie I just had to read the book.
This book gives us an inside look at what it's like to live in a time of war. I would have never had the strength to survive half of what this woman went through.
She survived beatings in violent interrogations, and gang rapes just to name a couple of the horrors in her life.
Then she comes to America. You would think her nightmare would be over, but there she finds a new one.
I'm really looking forward to reading her sequal and I hope that she has found peace at last.

I'm a huge fan of war-related stories because they often evoke so much emotion in a reader. This is one of my favorites. It takes place during the American occupation in Vietnam and follows the story of a once-young woman who falls victim to the many negative aspects of the war. She eventually makes her way to America. Naturally, one would imagine that a Western life would bring an end to her suffering but instead, she hits an even lower point in her life. It's a tear-jerker, to say the least and a very thoughtful revelation of life as it was during those times.

Reading for my Vietnam Travel Seminar. I would recommend this for anyone who's read a little bit of literature about the Vietnam war from the U.S. perspective, as this book gives you the Vietnamese perspective.

The first 90 pages or so go a bit slow as she sets up the culture and establishes what it means to be a poor village farmer in Vietnam. And then horrible things start to happen, and don't stop happening until the end. The author's village, Ky La, is forced to declare loyalty to one side during the day and another during the night. People are killed simply for associating with the wrong people or saying the wrong thing, and everyone lives in fear. Le Ly joins the Viet Cong as a young girl because she wants to protect her heritage from invaders, but she makes it clear the war to her is just a game. Her time with the Viet Cong is short lived after several arrests that involve torture and then a double rape. Le Ly then has to struggle to keep herself and her mother alive away from their village and eventually escape Vietnam with her young sons as the war escalates.

The book goes back and forth between the past and the present as Le Ly returns to Vietnam to find what's become of Ky La and her family, and she uses the events of both time periods to transition between the two. These transitions are not done in the most artful way possible (some of them use headings), but they aren't clunky or painfully obvious, either. The book definitely has an agenda: Le Ly has a foundation and is a peace activist and wants to bring America and Vietnam closer together. The agenda only really becomes obvious in the prologue and epilogue. I think she could have approached her subject more artfully, as the plug for her foundation at the very end makes it feel almost like the narrative was an elaborate sales pitch, but I honestly don't think those two short sections get in the way of the rest of the book.

After listening to an abridged version while in Vietnam, I am very glad that I took the time to read Le Ly's entire memoir. Her remarkable experiences during the American war and her return 16 years later inspire readers that "...we are all in the same boat, we must all help each other...and our journey never ends."

DNF

This book really should have been fascinating. But something about the writing made it tedious and it failed to grab my attention.

About half way through I realized what it was that I didn’t like about the writing. All of the stories she told about life during the war sounded made up. They sounded like something an undergrad in a creative writing course came up with. I had this thought after reading a passage that was basically this: “we flew to Da Nang and my mother was talking with a wealthy woman on the flight. The woman invited us to her house once we reached Da Nang. When we got there I went for a walk around the neighborhood. Some ruffians attacked me. Suddenly an American helicopter appeared and scared them off. I never looked at helicopters the same way again.”

Eye. Roll.

I don’t mean to say I doubt the author and her experiences. It is just the way the story is told, so much of it has the feel of being made up.

Intertwining the story of coming back to visit her family and village just didn’t work for me. It made the story of her time during the war feel very choppy and repetitive. Something horrible happened, I got through it. We moved. To the 80s: I felt nervous, then I felt anxious, then I felt nervous again. Insert uninteresting detail. I get nervous. Back to the war: The Viet Cong came back. Something bad happened. We moved. Repeat.

È il memoir di Bay Ly, la sesta figlia di una famiglia di contadini vietnamiti abitanti nel villaggio di Ky La, e il suo tentativo di sopravvivere alla guerra, alle violenze da parte di entrambe le fazioni, ai sospetti e a una vita durissima per una bella ragazza vietnamita in un paese occupato in cui tutti sembrano volersi approfittare di lei. Bay Ly non è una stupida, ma gli uomini non sono certo teneri con lei. Tuttavia, Bay Ly nel 1970 riesce a fuggire via dal Vietnam e approda a San Diego in California con i suoi due figli.
Sedici anni dopo, fa ritorno in Vietnam per rivedere la sua famiglia - sua madre, in particolare - e ripercorre la sua vita difficilissima, da cui è riuscita a sopravvivere per un caso fortunato, al contrario di tanti altri che non ce l'hanno fatta.
Voi che avete letto questo libro non avete vissuto un’esistenza come la mia. Per grazia del destino o del cielo, non sapete com’è difficile sopravvivere, anche se ora potete averne un’idea. Non piangete per me: io ce l’ho fatta, e ora sto bene. Ma in questo momento milioni di altri infelici, in varie parti del mondo, vecchi e giovani, uomini e donne, al pari di quanto è accaduto a me, vivono per sopravvivere. Nemmeno loro hanno chiesto le guerre che li hanno fagocitati. Chiedono soltanto la pace, la libertà di amare e di vivere pienamente la loro esistenza, nient’altro.

A very interesting story about a woman growing up in Vietnam during both wars. Her story helped me understand exactly why My Lai happened. It's an especially good book to read if you are planning to visit Vietnam.

The modern story, interspersed among the history I found less interesting. When I read it again, I'll just skip that part.

This is a fascinating story about Vietnam, the war, growing up during war and fighting to survive. Le Ly's life was horrific - no doubt about it - and yet she has managed to find peace and holds no grudges. Makes one very greatful to have a better life that is far away from the chaos of war. It was so interesting to read about Vietnam and to get a picture of what life would have been like for the American soldiers. It made it so much easier to understand why the war lasted so long and why it was unwinnable (from the American perspective). A good, interesting, educational book.