Hayslip Le Ly - Child of War, Woman of Peace

ALSO BY LE LY HAYSLIP

When Heaven and Earth Changed Places
(With Jay Wurts)

A N A NCHOR B OOK
PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY
a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

A NCHOR B OOKS , D OUBLEDAY , and the portrayal of an anchor are trademarks of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

Child of War, Woman of Peace was originally published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1993. The Anchor Books edition is published
by arrangement with Doubleday,
a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hayslip, Le Ly.
Child of war, woman of peace / Le Ly Hayslip, with James Hayslip.1st Anchor Books ed.
p. cm.
1. Hayslip, Le Ly. 2. Vietnamese AmericansBiography. 3. RefugeesUnited StatesBiography. 4. Vietnamese Conflict, 19611975Personal narratives, Vietnamese. I. Hayslip, James. II. Title.
[E184.V53H38 1994]
973.049592dc20 93-21027

eISBN: 978-0-307-79057-6
Copyright 1993 by Le Ly Haslip and Charles Jay Wurts
All Rights Reserved

v3.1

To our ancestors

PROLOGUE
Song of the Sau Dau Tree

EPILOGUE
A Song of Tu and Dao

A LONG TIME AGO, before the world knew better, a young man went to war. Like his brothers, he traveled to all points of the compass, fought many battles, and saw many wondrous and terrifying thingsbut none so terrible as when, twenty-five years later, he returned to find his village abandoned.

The wind-swept streets were full of weeds and the once fruitful fields were bare and scabbed. The sky was red with dust and the riveronce filled with fishwas reduced to a murky trickle. Coconut palms stood like broken flagpoles, their fronds scattered by the summer monsoon; the farmers houses were collapsed or empty. Only a lone sau dau tree, ancient branches still green with peppers, stood on the riverbank to remind him of the world he used to know.

And remember it he did.

The soldier stretched out under the tree and turned his face to the empty streets. The spiders in their webs became old people gossiping in the shade; the scurrying lizards became children chasing after ducks; the swooping birds, lithe maidens carrying watercasting languorous glances at village boys chopping wood and mending carts. A dust devil spinning up from a bone-dry garden became dinner smoke rising from his mothers kitchen. As if part of the dream, an elderly woman dressed in black and thin as death hobbled up from a nearby shack.

The soldier jumped to his feet: first in fear that the figure was a spirit-guardian of the village graveyard, then to help the old woman gather peppers when he saw that she was real.

I used to live in this village, the soldier said, pleased to be helping now, instead of killing. My family lived there, where the ferry crossed the river. I used to drink coconut milk on hot days and listen to the ferry girl sing.

The old woman did not care for his stories and sullenly went about her labors. Your old house is ruined now, she told him bluntly, and the ferryboat ran aground and rotted when the armies dammed the river. The girl was raped and, with her fatherless child, fled to the city where she sings no more. And no coconuts grow since the trees were shot to pieces. Now everythings dried up and shriveled like me. If youre wise, youll run away before the sun goes down. The village isnt safe at night: too many ghosts. Too many ghosts!

With infinite sadness, the soldier watched the old woman hobble back toward her house. The sun sank lower and the shadow of the sau dau tree crept down the empty street to the place where his own house had stood in happier times. Suddenly, in a voice full of confidence and compassion, born of a soldiers triumphs but tempered with a soldiers regrets, he sang:

The sau dau tree stands in the sunset

Leaves flowing around you like river sand.

Wind and rain have followed my footsteps,

I have been too long la nuoc la cai

Lost and lonely in a foreign land.

Tu has been my shadow;

Dao has been my sun.

What fear can a darkened house hold

When it used to be your own?

The old lady turned and saw the man bathed in radiant light, twisted limbs of the sau dau tree hanging above him like a crown, glittering with life. Heat rose from the peppers in her basket and the scars of the years melted from her body and the birds became maidens and the lizards became children and the water flowed again and the ferry girl returned and the song she sang was the Song of the Sau Dau Tree.

Today, when exiles have been away from home too long and their eyes are cried dry and their mouths are full of dust, they need only look into the sunset and sing the Song of the Sau Dau Tree, and the ghosts that haunt them flee and the scars of the years melt away and the soil underfoot, wherever it is, becomes the soil of home. That which was halved becomes whole and they no longer fear the darkened house that used to be their home.

In May 1970, I stepped from the Pan Am airliner that had taken me from the hell my country had become to the heaven I hoped America would be. I was twenty years old with two sons, both by different fathers. I didnt speak much English, and my manners were better suited to peasant villages and Saigon street corners than a suburb of San Diego, which was to be my new homea place stranger to a Vietnamese farm girl than the dark side of the moon.

My background was not like that of my American neighbors. By age twelve I had lost two brothers and countless uncles, aunts, and cousins to the war. By age fifteen I had been in battle, captured, tortured by the South Vietnamese Republicans, and had been condemned to death and raped by the Viet Cong. By sixteen I was an unwed mother supporting my family on Danangs black market. By the time I was nineteen my father had committed suicide rather than involve me again with the Viet Cong, and I was married to de quoc My, the enemya middle-aged American civilian construction engineer, Ed Munroin the desperate hope that he would save me and my children from the war.

When he finally brought me to the United States, I learned quickly that the skills I needed to survive in the jungles and corrupt back alleys of my native land didnt count in U.S. supermarkets, department stores, and employment offices. The traffic signs I obeyed werent posted on crosswalks and freeways but were chiseled in my heart as Dao lam nguoi: natural law, universal law, the law of karma and life and death. I suddenly faced a world without ancestorswithout cause and effectwhere I had no yesterday and no tomorrow. I was in