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.