This is one of my favourite books. I bought a badly printed version off a beggar child in a Vietnamese bar because I felt sorry for him. I didn't expect to devour it! I have lots of books in storage but this one always comes with me when I move.

Le Ly's story helped me come more at peace at what I believe in - in regards to how to make sense of war when what we want is peace... and for me, justice. Her experiences showed the nuances of the sides of the VN war from both the North and South. It wasn't just US vs. VN, but family against family, struggling to keep each other together when politics and violence is trying to tear them apart. Highly recommend for anyone wanting to see the raw perspective of a woman who grew up during the war and survived in face of everything thrown at her.

I was so captivated by this story I was compelled to learn more about the war. It has been a long time since I thought about it. The victims are the innocent. The circumstances the war put these people through is unthinkable. The book does an excellent job of describing the day to day tragedies of the family and the struggle to survive during the war.

I accidentally read this book because Yuzuru Hanyu danced to "Heaven and Earth", music from a Japanese movie, and I googled Heaven and Earth and this showed up.

Then this book changed my worldview forever because it really shows you who suffers most in war; civilians, villagers, and people who have no power or stake in the fighting at all. This book made me a pacifist. Powerful people sit in safe, luxurious rooms, hundreds thousands of miles and a lifetime away from the danger they discuss, sheltered from the realities of how their decisions affect millions of peoples lives. It is easy to be numb to consequences you never need to confront, but I think all politicians should read this book before they are allowed to make decisions that lead to violence. None of the things Le Ly suffered through are justifiable. The book shows how not just Le Ly, but the future of her whole village was forever changed, destroyed by violence. The things she endured and the horror the war brought to her life is heartbreaking.

This book was hard to read at times, so I put it down and took a break from torture, rape, and the horrible deaths contained in its pages. However, it is DEFINITELY worth reading to get one woman's viewpoint of the situation in Vietnam during the sixties. I like that she seems unbiased. She does not particulary seem to take the side of the North, or the South, or the Americans. (Although she did become American, and seems patriotic to both Viet Nam and the U.S.)

If you live in a country where vitamins, chewing gum, and decent coffee are an every day part of life, this book will make you feel VERY grateful. It is really a book everyone should read....

La vita è un ciclo continuo, e più impariamo e siamo trasformati dalle nostre esperienze, più siamo pronti per un nuovo sconvolgimento.
La parte più facile di questo libro è la lezione che ci passa l'autrice attraverso il racconto della sua vita, imparare a scardinare la vendetta dal cuore, a perdonare per stare meglio.
La parte più impegnativa è che questa sua vita, raccontata senza indulgere nei problemi, ma passando loro attraverso, è stata davvero difficile. Racconto di una ragazza cresciuta in periodo di guerra, ma che da tutto ciò che è successo non è stata segnata, non è menomata nella vita normale, ma al contrario forgiata e concentrata sui valori più importanti. Una lezione forse più importante: che, come diceva Nietzsche, solo dal caos nascono le stelle danzanti.

16/52 ATY book challenge 2021, week 35: set in a country on or below the Tropic of Cancer
Goodreads Italia Monopoli: corso Impero per un libro legato all'oltretomba, per l'importanza del culto degli antenati e il loro ruolo attivo nella realtà contadina vietnamita
16/40 Iread book challenge Titolo con più di 5 parole
14/50 Popsugar reading challenge: title starting with Q X or Z

La guerra del Vietnam è una di quelle pagine della storia ancora ben conosciuta, grazie anche all'ampia copertura mediatica americana.
Sembra che con l'ultimo elicottero che lascia Saigon e la fine dell'impegno americano la guerra sia finita, invece non è così semplice. Nel mese di settembre 2021 ho deciso di approfondire questo tema sul mio profilo instagram (@sephreadstoo) con una serie di letture sulle Guerre del Vietnam di cui "Quando cielo e terra cambiarono di posto" è solo un primo assaggio. Gli altri libri in merito che consiglio sono "Vietnam Soul" e "Quando le montagne cantano"


Il primo consiglio di lettura è l'autobiografia di Le Ly, solo una bambina quando la guerra irrompe nella sua vita, portando via i suoi fratelli maggiori e facendo disgregare pian piano la famiglia.
è costretta a sottostare al buono e al brutto tempo delle varie fazioni, il Nord comunista, il Sud capitalista e gli americani, ed esserne sfruttata, subendo continue ingiustizie e tragedie che si concluderanno solo con la fuga negli Stati Uniti.

Dopo sedici anni in America, Le Ly torna nel Suo Vietnam per ritrovare la famiglia e fare i conti con il fantasma della guerra, un fantasma che ha continuato a infestare ogni angolo del paese e dei suoi abitanti.

Vi assicuro, non è un libro che dimenticherete facilmente. Qui più che mai si vede quanto sia flebile il concetto di "buono o cattivo" e di come possa oscillare in base alla sopravvivenza o alle circostanze. Una donna semplice che si è ritrovata in una guerra più grande di lei che le ha dato così tante pene è un esempio di coraggio e resilienza da non dimenticare.


Il libro termina con un appello:

"Voi che avete letto questo libro non avete vissuto un’esistenza come la mia (...) 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."

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.

This book is a nonfiction autobiography of one woman's life in Vietnam during the war. This contains much tragedy as this woman returns to her home country after having lived in the U.S. for a while. She toggles back and forth from her reunion with her family that stayed in Vietnam and the memories she had while growing up in a war torn country. There are scenes that were hard to get through. There was so much rape in this. It was so sad that this was someone's reality.

This book posed some serious questions. It had my mind reeling. War changes people. It molds them and forces them down paths that wouldn't have been on their radar otherwise. What were they capable of doing to survive?

This book greatly helped me to understand the history and Vietnamese perspective of the conflict that ravaged Vietnam from the 1950s into the 70s. The resilience of Le Ly Hayslip and her messages of the importance of compassion and forgiveness are very inspiring.

Le Ly Hayslip lived a life as a peasant in Ky La, a small village near Danang in the center of Vietnam. Her family taught her the ways of their culture - to love and honor family, traditions and their ancestors. Her father taught her to sacrifice one’s self for freedom. Her mother taught her about humility and the value of working hard - that it was not a disgrace to work like an animal on their farm. From the age of 12-15, Le Ly fought for the Viet Cong against American and South Vietnamese soldiers. The peasants like Le Ly’s family were taught to believe the ideas set forth by the Viet Cong and they believed and assumed all they heard was true. They believed the Viet Cong meant freedom, independence and happiness because Uncle Ho promised that the Communists would look after your rights and interests. Those loyal to the Viet Cong and Uncle Ho were brainwashed basically.
Even when things were at their worst—when allied forces devastated the countryside and the Viet Cong themselves resorted to terror to make us act the way they wanted—the villagers clung to the vision the Communists had drummed into us.

Le Ly remained in Vietnam until 1970, 5 years before the war’s end, having lived most of her young womanhood living the horrors of war. In 1986, she made a trip back to visit her family that she had left behind. For 16 years, she lived in San Diego and made a new life as a Vietnamese-American, not a complete part of either world. Seeing her family again was difficult and the new Vietnam she witnessed was as if the war had never actually ended. The people living under Communist rule were still as poor or poorer than they had ever been. Le Ly was writing this memoir and her remembrances of her life in Vietnam are beautifully and devastatingly described here. She does not leave out any details of her life. The details are many and the stories are horrifying. The memories spliced into her visit in 1986 are so smoothly and expertly written. Her experiences are too numerous to write about here and are best meant for readers to experience them as she tells them. I highly recommend this memoir if you are interested in reading of the war from the perspective of a young woman who made a way for herself out of the atrocious war zone.

In the prologue, Le Ly writes to the American GI who reads her book:
I have witnessed, firsthand, all that you went through. I will try to tell you who your enemy was a why almost everyone in the country you tried to help resented, feared, and misunderstood you. It was not your fault. It could not have been otherwise. Long before you arrived, my country had yielded to the terrible logic of war. What for you was normal—a life of peace and plenty—was for us a hazy dream known only in our legends. Because we had to appease the allied forces by day and were terrorized by Viet Cong at night, we slept as little as you did. We obeyed both sides and wound up pleasing neither. We were people in the middle. We were what the war was all about.
Your story, however, was different. You came to Vietnam, willingly or not, because your country demanded it. Most of you did not know or fully understand, the different wars my people were fighting when you got here. For you, it was a simple thing: democracy against communism. For us, that was not our fight at all. How could it be? We knew little of democracy and even less about communism. For most of us it was a fight for independence—like the American Revolution. Many of us also fought for religious ideals, the way the Buddhists fought the Catholics. Behind the religious war came the battle between city people and country people—the rich against the poor—a war fought by those who wanted to change Vietnam and those who wanted to leave it as it had been for a thousand years. Beneath all that, too, we had vendettas between native Vietnamese and immigrants (mostly Chinese and Khmer) who had fought for centuries over the land. Many of these wars go on today. How could you hope to end them by fighting a battle so different from our own?
The least you did—the least any of us did—was our duty. For that we must be proud.

Great intimate look at why some joined the North in the war and what some had to endure just to survive. Also, was a great way to start a dialogue with my parents about their own experiences and what they thought about the narrative in this book.