Epilogue- A Song of Enlightenment- Wisdom Through Experience

"I can only say what I myself have learned: that life's purpose is to grow. We have time in abundance- an eternity, in face- to repear our mistakes. We only need to correct them once, however- to learn out lesson and hear the song of enlightenment- to break the chain of vengeance forever. If we can do this personally, no matter how many others follow, our own hearts will at least find peace (366-367)."

Chapter Fourteen- Letting Go- Recollections

"For a glistening instant, Ky La dances before my eyes, then vanishes into memory (362)." This is the last sentence of the last chapter. After all she discussed in the book, all of it was but a dance, and then became a memory. I think the time I feel like this the most is at the end of summer. After I'm used to every day sleeping in late, going to movies and parks, bike rides daily, being away at my friends' houses days at a time, going to the mall, going to the pool, and eating frozen yogurt at Ella's, I all of a sudden switch back into school-mode and after the first week, all of a sudden the whole summer seems like a dream from which I'm waking up. Le Ly felt like this at the end of recalling her past, all of it seemed like a dream, rather than her day-to-day living. At this point in her life, she was able to let go of her present and let them turn into memories, like I will soon have to do with the coming end of summer.

Chapter Twelve and Thirteen- Finding a Family, Finding Peace- Growth

"You've come back, Bay Ly, and that's what counts. You've completed your circle of growth- the karma that brought you into the world. If you come back again. it will be part of another, new cycle- not the old one. Your past is now complete. The war for you is over. My destiny as your mother is fulfilled. Nuoc rong to nuoc lon, eh?- low tide to high tide. Poor to rich, sad to happy, beggar to fine lady- you've closed the circle of your life (314)." I decided to put chapters 12 and 13 in the same post because I think in both she is realizing that all of the pieces came together, she found her family, and she found peace. I thought it was interesting that Le Ly's mother said that she's closed the circle of her life. I didn't think the "circle" of someones life would be over until death. The way that Le Ly's mother was explaining the circle would I think give her a lot of hope because "her war is over".

Chapter Eleven- Almost in Paradise- Relief

"This is heaven! I thought. Strangers come to solve your problems even before you ask for help (275)!" Le Ly thought this when she started working at the hospital and Red, who welcomed her there, told her that he pretty much has her back. He told her, "Don't worry. You're not the first girl Sergeant Fingers has latched onto. His reputation is all over the hospital. He likes young women- especially those from the country who aren't too experienced. If he gives you trouble, let me know and I'll get you another assignment." Red's looking out for Le Ly gave her the feeling that, "she was almost in paradise". I think after all she's been through, that it's good for her to have someone that cares to show her the ropes at the hospital. I thought about how awesome it would be to have that kind of faith in humanity. I know my grandparents talk about "the good 'ol days" when neighbors supported neighbors and strangers tipped their hats, and I like to think about how that kind of gentleness and kindness toward one another is in today's society. I hate when people say, "this generation is such a mess", or "kids these days", because even though I do think it's different than it was 50 years ago, I still see demonstrations of watching out for your neighbors and sharing kindness and love in the world through charity and service.

Chapter Ten- Power on Earth- Ready Before I Knew It

"I cannot remember the exact moment I decided to leave Vietnam. But one day I became aware that everything I had done for the past few months had been a preparation for departure- a ritual leave-taking that meant little when those acts were considered by themselves but, when viewed together, were much like my father's own preparations in anticipation of his death (255)." In this quote, I inferred about what Le Ly was trying to get across here, and I think through this passage that she is implying a maxim. Abraham Lincoln once said, "The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time." I think Le Ly took her future on one day at a time and through the things she would have done normally, she was better prepared to leave Vietnam. I thought about my own personal life at this point, and I thought about how there were certain places in my life that foreshadowed and prepared me to better take on my life. There was one time, my freshman year when I went to Center Grove, that my best friend Sydni and I were going to go to Roncalli for a soccer game. We got so lost on the way up there, but once we got there i literally remember thinking, I've never thought about Catholic school before, a prep school would probably be a lot better than where I'm at. I loved Center Grove, but when I was introduced randomly by my parents the idea to switch schools, I had already had an inkling because I had literally just been there. Things ended up falling into place and I ended up going to Roncalli the next school year.

Chapters Eight and Nine- Sisters and Brothers, Daughters and Sons- Innocence Lost

"I pull back and put my own hands over my mouth to hide my shock, Hai's eyes go blank- as if the recognition behind them has been purposefully switched off then go immediately back to work. When the crowd of buyers has thinned, and still without looking at me, she says,
'Please-for the love of god- go home!'
'I- I can't!' Tears are streaming down my face.
'Where are you staying?' She sorts her snails with a vengeance.
'I am at Tinh's-'
'Good. Go back to Tinh's and wait. But for god's sake- get out of here! Take pity on us- please let us live a little longer!' (218)"
I chose to include this dialogue because I really think Le Ly, for the first time feels completely unwelcomed into her family. She finally reunites with her oldest sister, Hai, and she finds that instead of being welcomed with open arms, she is shunned and is seen as a threat. To feel this kind of rejection after being fearful of going home in the first place must have been hard for Le Ly. On top of that, I think in Hai's eyes, Le Ly did a lot of damage to the family and brought dishonor to their name. I think Hai was most scared that Le Ly would bring all of her troubles and perceptions of the world with her, and that those perceptions would completely distort all that Hai had known to be true about the world. I think Hai also doesn't have as much experience from her travels that Le Ly does, and she may not be as open to her experiences, at one point, she said, "Get out of here! Take pity on us- please let us live a little longer!" What Hai was talking about when she said she wanted to live a little longer, was that she wanted to live without the impurities of change that came with Le Ly being there.

Chapter Seven- A Different View- Unrepairable Damages

"Houses could be rebuilt and damaged dikes repaired- but the loss of our temples and shrines meant the death of our culture itself. It meant that a generation of children would grow up without fathers to teach them about their ancestors or the rituals of worship (195)." I thought this was a very significant epiphany in the chapter. When Le Ly went back to Ky La to visit her father and potentially raise Hung there, she had a very sickening feeling, as if she wasn't welcome in her home village. She had a "growing sense of dread" in the form of a lump in her throat when she realized that all of the chaos and pain and destruction that had happened in Ky La was in no comparison to the struggle the future generation would have with recovering everything lost during the war. The value of everything that was lost, all of the shrines and temples important to the village and to their religion, were all damaged to the point of irreversibility. There is a hiatus in history that people have to fill with stories, knowledge of the past, and traditions that they manage to remember. Even that would be a problem, as said by Le Ly, "[...] a generation of children would grow up without fathers to teach them about their ancestors or the rituals of worship." I think that this point is a painful epiphany to realize about one's home village. The thought that some of the village's most important and sacred memories and rituals would be forgotten is a depressing realization Le Ly had to see.

Chapter Six- A Question of Faith- A Life Without Family

"Hearing this, my father decided that a life without his family was not worth living. When he was finally released, he bought a box of rat poison in Danang and consumed it with a final meal at our house. Fortunately, his hereditary "warrior physique" was stronger than his spirit and the poison only sickened him." In this passage, I thought about how Le Ly's father was so lost without his family that he wanted to take his own life. I thought about the line, "his hereditary 'warrior physique' was stronger that his spirit," and I thought about how lucky it was for him to have survived. I couldn't decide whether I thought about him now as a coward, or as a victim to his family's situation. I think it would have been another significantly tragic moment in Le Ly's life for her so-loved father to commit suicide, but for him to take that strong of an action to say he'd rather have his family than life itself, was a rather beautiful motion. I think overall in the literary work, that Le Ly's father was a round character in the sense that he changed so much from what he was originally and at the beginning of the story. He comes from a background that expects him to have a warrior-like disposition about everything, but eventually he tried to give up by taking his own life. I think that it is very fortunate that his background may have saved his life in this instance. His warrior physique wouldn't put the poison past him as a fatal incident, and that is what saved him from himself and left Le Ly with a father.

Chapter Five- Losing Love- Empathy

"My mother acted thunderstruck when she heard Lien's accusations; not so much to show humiliations, which was expected, but from what seemed to be genuine sorrow- empathy form one woman to another who knew what betrayal was like (136-137)." In this passage, Le Ly has just learned that Anh's wife is the wife of the father of her child. Le Ly's mother empathizes with Anh's wife when she realizes that her daughter has betrayed her. The hurt Lien had to feel, on top of being very sick, is a pain that Le Ly's mother knew well. At this point I imagined how Le Ly felt in committing adultery. Le Ly wrote that Anh avoided her the day after they made love, out of guilt she supposed. Le Ly shrugged it off even with the negative mood now associated with Anh's and her relationship. She didn't really regret sleeping with a married man and went on with her daily chores. Even when Lien confronted Le Ly about her husband's infidelity, she seemed more worried about Anh and getting kicked out of the house rather that the emotional damage she had done to a family and a marriage. When Le Ly's mother found out of the situation between Le Ly and Lien, she begged with every strategy she could come up with that they might not be kicked out of the house. She verbally shrunk Le Ly's very existence down to nothing in proposal for Lien's mercy. In the end, Lien kicked Le Ly and her mother out, just as I would have done. I think that especially with Lien being sick, she needs her husband's full support and attention now more than ever, and to have Le Ly and Anh's baby in the picture would be a distraction and a huge inconvenience for the family Le Ly and Anh had just hurt.

Chapter Four- Losing the Way- Hope

"Although I did not realize it at the time, that flight and those feelings brought with them something else, something I had never experienced in Ky La, something even my wonderful parents- who knew everything about life and duty- could not, for their own heavy burdens, give me: the simple feeling of hope (114)." At this point in the book, Le Ly finally starts feeling more than the destruction and hell of war. She takes a step past what her parents have always taught her, and looks into the future with a new hope that she hasn't really felt before. I think at this point in the book Le Ly gains back some of her footing, and feels a sense of peace while on the airplane to Saigon. Taking off from Ky La, she said that she felt as if she were leaving all her previous tragedies behind her. Le Ly's disposition in this text was uplifting in the sense that she had come to some sort of internal peace about her extremely new and life-altering destination. Her confidence and hope in the new situation gave comfort to her anxious emotions when arriving in Saigon. Here, I think, is where her point of view on the world changed the most, all because of her hopeful and open mind.

Chapter Three- Open Wounds- Horror

"What had been saved a lifetime for my husband had been ripped away in less time than it takes to tell. Most horrible of all was that the act of making life itself had left me feeling dead. The force of Loi's twisted soul had entered me and killed me as surely as his knife. He could shoot me now-I wouldn't even feel the bullet (93)." In this passage, I really thought about how deeply Le Ly associated her sick and twisted experience with Loi with death itself. When Le Ly says, "the force of Loi's twisted soul had entered me and killed me as surely as his knife", to me, it says a great deal about her strength in being able to get back up on her feet. The act of Loi left her feeling worthless to the point that she would not even feel the physical pain of a bullet. Getting back up on her feet must have been one of the hardest pains Le had to overcome, even in her long list of tragedies.
When Le Ly went on to say, "Most horrible of all was that the act of making life itself had left me feeling dead", I thought about the crime out of hate that Loi had committed in the place of something that was supposed to be beautiful and produce life. Instead of sex as a unifier or for the creation of life itself, he made it into a disgusting appearance of hatred.

Chapter Two- Fathers and Daughters- Roles in the Family

In the second chapter Le Ly starts out talking about her father: her relationship with him, the way he disciplines, his story-telling. Le Ly explained her father as one of the more "liberal" fathers in the village. When her mother left home to go visit Uncle Nhu, Le Ly and her father had a special bonding time that was uncommon for a father and a daughter. Le Ly's father taught her to make a wood duck and a doorstop out of scraps of wood, and while looking back, Le Ly thought, "This was unheard of- a father doing these things with a child that was not a son (29)!" Le Ly felt lucky to have this kind of relationship with her father. While sitting under a tree that same day, her father told her a story of a woman named Phung Thi Chinh, who led Vietnamese fighters against the Han. Phung Thi Chinh, in one battle, delivered a baby, tied it to her back, and cut her way through the Chinese with a sword in each hand. Le Ly's father spoke of her with great admiration, despite their village's traditional belief on women's roles in families. Her father even said to her, "follow in her footsteps", which meant a great deal to Le Ly. She even foreshadowed her future in the book by saying, "Only later would I learn what he truly meant."

Chapter One- Coming Back- Going Back in Time

While reading through this first chapter, I was mostly drawn to how Le Ly, her family, and her neighbors perceived the world. In this book, Le Ly goes back in time to remember what exactly happened in her home village in Vietnam. What it seemed like she remembered most and made a point to write about in the first chapter, were the "devils" who invaded her village. The "devils", were of course army men invading on their homeland to destroy communism. Le Ly said this in her first occurrence with the "devils", "Once, we were playing in the dusty street when people began to scream and thunder broke from a sunny sky. The ground shook as in an earthquake and giant snakes with many heads coughed loudly. Although I didn't see them, I knew they were snakes because the villagers shouted that the 'devils' were coming back (3)." In this passage, Le Ly understood from a child's perspective what exactly the invaders were. When people screamed about the devils, Le Ly took their words literally. What we as students of this literature interperet as a metaphor, Le Ly, as a child, understood the snakes as reality.