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.