The inspiring story of an immigrant's struggles to heal old wounds in the United States, this is the sequel to When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, Le Ly Hayslip's extraordinary, award-winning memoir of life in wartime Vietnam.
“One of the most important books of Vietnamese American and Vietnam War literature...Moving, powerful.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer In these pages, Le Ly Hayslip—just twelve years old when U.S. helicopters landed in her tiny village of Ky La—shows us the Vietnam War as she lived it. Initially pressed into service by the Vietcong, Le Ly was captured and imprisoned by government forces. She found sanctuary at last with an American contractor and ultimately fled to the United States. Almost twenty years after her escape, Le Ly found herself inexorably drawn back to the devastated country and loved ones she’d left behind, and returned to Vietnam in 1986. Scenes of this joyous reunion are interwoven with the brutal war years, creating an extraordinary portrait of the nation, then and now—and of one courageous woman who held fast to her faith in humanity. First published in 1989, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places was hailed as an instant classic. Now, some two decades later, this indispensable memoir continues to be one of our most important accounts of a conflict we must never forget.
The youngest of six children in a close-knit Buddhist family, Le Ly Hayslip was twelve years old when U.S. helicopters landed 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. In this harrowing selection from the memoir of a girl on the verge of womanhood in a world turned upside down is 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. A Vintage Shorts Vietnam Selection. An ebook short.
An unforgettable Voyage... Memoir of an 8-year old "boat person" who fl ees post-war communist Vietnam in search of a father and brother rumoured to have escaped to the West. Braving sea storms and pirates in a overloaded fi shing boat, Hiep and her younger sister are rescued by British sailors and interned in a series of horrifi c Hong Kong refugee camps. Surviving by their wits, these displaced children of the sea create their own primitive society amid the dispirited and desperate adults awaiting sponsors in the U.S. At the age of eight in 1979, the Vietnam-born actress and her seven-years-old sister were separated from their parents and left their village in central Vietnam as boat people. Their mother and older brother stayed behind with her other children. The sisters lived in refugee camps in Hong Kong for three months, where they were reunited with their father. They then immigrated to California before reuniting with their fi ve other siblings. Her mother fi nally reunited with the family four years later. Hiep was a premed student at UC-Davis, majoring in physiology, when she came to the open casting call with one of her sisters for the Oliver Stone fi lm Heaven & Earth (1993) that was being held at San Jose State University because several of her friends were doing it for fun. She was one of the sixteen thousand Vietnamese Americans seen by casting scouts for the fi lm and was the one, out of the thousands, who got the starring role of Le Ly Hayslip. Despite having no acting experience, she had half-dozen callbacks before she was fi nally chosen to play the role of Le Ly Hayslip between the ages of thirteen to thirty-eight. Since that time, She acted in several fi lms and television shows. She has graduated from college. She was the owner and operator of the China Beach Vietnamese Bistro in Venice, California. She is now owner and Chef of Le Cellier Restaurant Wine Bar in Marina Del Rey, California. complications from stomach cancer on Dec. 19, 2017 in Los Angeles Hiep passed away. She was 46. Above all, Hiep is the proud mother of two. Author Hiep Thi Le Co-founder Jill Powell "Since I've know her from, Hiep always turned something negative into a positive. As a child, she faced her dangers, adversities and self doubts with an innocence and sense of adventure which refl ects the true resilience of refugee children separated from their families and left to fend for themselves." -Le Ly Hayslip (Heaven and Earth ) "Most of us 'come-of-age' not just once, but many times as we navigate life's passages. Hiep's harrowing, true-life journey from innocent village girl to street-wise refugee--told with charm, humor, and precocious wisdom--turns a boat-person's Lord of the Flies into a true Vietnamese Exodus: the portrait of a blossoming young American painted with a bamboo brush. Like a river fl owing to the sea, Hiep's story sweeps us past many amazing people, places, and events that most of us can scarcely imagine. It's a voyage you won't want to miss." - Jay Wurts, coauthor of When Heaven and Earth Changed Places
The inspiring story of an immigrant's struggles to heal old wounds in the United States, this is the sequel to When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, Le Ly Hayslip's extraordinary, award-winning memoir of life in wartime Vietnam.
“One of the most important books of Vietnamese American and Vietnam War literature...Moving, powerful.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer In these pages, Le Ly Hayslip—just twelve years old when U.S. helicopters landed in her tiny village of Ky La—shows us the Vietnam War as she lived it. Initially pressed into service by the Vietcong, Le Ly was captured and imprisoned by government forces. She found sanctuary at last with an American contractor and ultimately fled to the United States. Almost twenty years after her escape, Le Ly found herself inexorably drawn back to the devastated country and loved ones she’d left behind, and returned to Vietnam in 1986. Scenes of this joyous reunion are interwoven with the brutal war years, creating an extraordinary portrait of the nation, then and now—and of one courageous woman who held fast to her faith in humanity. First published in 1989, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places was hailed as an instant classic. Now, some two decades later, this indispensable memoir continues to be one of our most important accounts of a conflict we must never forget.
The youngest of six children in a close-knit Buddhist family, Le Ly Hayslip was twelve years old when U.S. helicopters landed 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. In this harrowing selection from the memoir of a girl on the verge of womanhood in a world turned upside down is 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. A Vintage Shorts Vietnam Selection. An ebook short.
Crossing distinct literatures, histories, and politics, Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America reveals the intertwined story of contemporary Asian Americans and Latinxs through a shared literary aesthetic. Their transfictional literature creates expansive imagined worlds in which distinct stories coexist, offering artistic shape to their linked political and economic struggles. Long Le-Khac explores the work of writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Karen Tei Yamashita, Junot Díaz, and Aimee Phan. He shows how their fictions capture the uneven economic opportunities of the post–civil rights era, the Cold War as it exploded across Asia and Latin America, and the Asian and Latin American labor flows powering global capitalism today. Read together, Asian American and Latinx literatures convey astonishing diversity and untapped possibilities for coalition within the United States' fastest-growing immigrant and minority communities; to understand the changing shape of these communities we must see how they have formed in relation to each other. As the U.S. population approaches a minority-majority threshold, we urgently need methods that can look across the divisions and unequal positions of the racial system. Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America leads the way with a vision for the future built on panethnic and cross-racial solidarity.
Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) examines how the Vietnam War has continued to serve as a stage for the shoring up of American imperialist adventure and for the (re)production of American and Vietnamese American identities. Focusing on the politics of war memory and commemoration, this book retheorizes the connections among history, memory, and power and refashions the fields of American studies, Asian American studies, and refugee studies not around the narratives of American exceptionalism, immigration, and transnationalism but around the crucial issues of war, race, and violence—and the history and memories that are forged in the aftermath of war. At the same time, the book moves decisively away from the “damage-centered” approach that pathologizes loss and trauma by detailing how first- and second-generation Vietnamese have created alternative memories and epistemologies that challenge the established public narratives of the Vietnam War and Vietnamese people. Explicitly interdisciplinary, Body Counts moves between the humanities and social sciences, drawing on historical, ethnographic, cultural, and virtual evidence in order to illuminate the places where Vietnamese refugees have managed to conjure up social, public, and collective remembering.
In this highly original and inspired book, Espiritu bursts the binaries and shows us how the tensions of race, gender, nation, and colonial legacies situate contemporary transnationalism. Conceptually rich and empirically grounded, Home Bound blurs the borders of sociology and cultural studies like no other book I know. Kudos to Espiritu for this boundary-breaking tour de force!"—Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, author of Domestica: Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence "A singular achievement. Not only does it cast light on the deep historical entanglements of immigration and imperialism, citizenship and race, and gender and subjectivity in the United States, but by highlighting the varied voices of Filipino Americans, it also calls attention to their creative potential to make a home under some of the most inhospitable conditions. Theoretically rich, empirically grounded, and lucidly written, this book marks a major advance in our attempts to understand the 'specter of migration' haunting the world today."—Vicente L. Rafael, author of White Love and Other Events in Filipino History "Home Bound combines excellent ethnography of the Filipino experience in the U.S. with a brilliant and devastating critique of traditional scholarship on immigration. Espiritu's analysis of how the vectors of identity articulate with one another is particularly cutting-edge."—Sarah J. Mahler, author of American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins "Using a critical transnational, feminist, and historical perspective, Espiritu insightfully and sensitively analyzes the meaning of home, community, friendship, love, and family for Filipino Americans. In the process, she unveils what these immigrants can tell us about gender, race, politics, economics, and culture in the United States today."—Diane L. Wolf, author of Factory Daughters: Gender, Household Dynamics, and Rural Industrialization in Java "Espiritu makes an outstanding contribution to our appreciation of the dynamics of immigrant cultures within the political economy of transnationalism."—Lisa Lowe, author of Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.