“My father told me my job was to stay alive and keep an eye on things. I didn’t understand,” humanitarian and author Le Ly Hayslip recalls. She was 12 when the “giant dragonflies,” military helicopters, landed in the fields and war came to Ky La, her peaceful village in central Vietnam.
For Hayslip, who spent her youth tending water buffalo and working alongside her family in rice paddies, everything changed that day.
“I wanted to be like the woman warriors in our history, whom all the children knew from poems and songs. They were brave, leading the Vietnamese against Chinese invaders. No, my father said in his gentle way, I would not save our village that way. Instead, I must have babies and I must live to tell the story of what had happened to anyone who would listen.”
Today Hayslip, 48, an American citizen and mother of three sons, is a speaker, writer and “bridge builder” who understands her father’s advice. She has saved and savored her village heritage, not by fighting for it, but by helping to build schools and orphanages, establishing health clinics and creating new links between the invaders and invaded after the madness of war.
It took 25 uprooted years of trying to stay alive and caring for her children, however, before Hayslip found the wisdom in her father’s admonition.
Hayslip’s personal watershed of understanding came 10 years ago. She was visiting the land where her umbilical cord and the bones of all her ancestors are buried. “I was waving goodbye to some American vets who had traveled part of the way with me. Some of them, too, were beginning to transform memories of pain and terror to feelings of acceptance and forgiveness.”
Hayslip reflected on her childhood paradise lost and on the tangle of horror and hope over the subsequent years that had too often left her in a muddle.
“Suddenly, I knew there is no magic; we discover soul meaning and work out soul debt alone. I let go of the rejection of what had happened and saw how to learn from it. Suddenly I was peaceful in the middle of it all.”
Hayslip finally realized the meaning of her father’s words. “I was supposed to be healer, not a martyr or warrior.”
She had traveled through the crossfire of South and North Vietnam, American and Vietnamese cultures, capitalism and communism, paranoia and ignorance, abusive relationships and single-parent responsibility for her sons. Pulling herself up to a halt, in a life that seemed to lurch from one identity to another, she also discovered new meaning in something her mother had told her.
“Be nan chong troi, holding up the sky with a stick, cannot bring you happiness.” Hayslip smiles tranquilly, reflecting on her mother’s metaphor. “I tried to hold up sky by resisting the forces that shaped my life. I tried to be one thing after another in responding to my fate. I went for the West high heels, short skirts; I went for the makeup. I left my village lessons behind. But happiness came when I accepted living in between, where I could see all sides.
“We are not supposed to escape, leaving behind who we have been or what we are at our roots.” Hayslip alternately grins and wrinkles her brow as she continues, “Accepting to be in the middle, not fighting to be somewhere or someone else, showed me human possibility.”
Incorporating the lessons from her past, she set out to do her part to create a more just, more compassionate world. Rejecting resentment and intolerance, Hayslip keeps busy building bridges of understanding. Friends from the U.S. and Vietnam, both of whom might once have called her the enemy, are crossing them.
Two autobiographical books, “When Heaven and Earth Changed Places” (Penguin, $12) and “Child of War, Woman of Peace” (Penguin, $12.95), chronicle her sojourn of doubts and desires with disarming candor. Readers are involved intimately, if uncomfortably, in the painful outcomes of political and cultural chains that shackle justice and common sense. Through the books, she is telling what happened, just as her father told her to do. Books seem a remarkable feat for a person with only a 3rd-grade education.
Raped instead of killed at age 12 by young communists who believed she was a collaborator, she sought refuge and work in the family of a wealthy, married South Vietnamese industrialist. He impregnated her when she was 14, and she was turned back to the streets. To support her new son, she became a petty black marketeer near the American military operations at China Beach.
Thinking she finally had found a safe haven, she came to San Diego as a young wife of an older civilian American contractor in 1971. “A haven, no; another place to learn, yes.”
She was widowed twice by alcoholic, gun-toting American husbands, each of whom fathered another son with her. Working as a housekeeper, foster parent, setting up a restaurant, she supported her children but was swindled out of hard-earned little nest eggs.
In spite of greed and aggression she encountered, Hayslip’s motherly instincts kept her on a compassionate course. Successfully she raised her sons. Jimmy is a special education teacher; Tommy has been working in film since helping out in Oliver Stone’s adaptation of Hayslip’s story in “Heaven and Earth,” and Alan lives with Hayslip while attending college.
Motherly instincts gave direction to her new calling in the mid-1980s. Hayslip created the East Meets West Foundation for a world of people still suffering because of the Vietnam War.
“I wanted to help children, families and veterans left broken in the aftermath of so many years of war. This work falls naturally to women.”
Hayslip sees women as essential healers and peacemakers.
“When I travel around the world, especially in poor countries, I see the man going to the bar, the man in meetings doing business deals and official things. I see the woman working in the field, baby sitting next to her, her animals behind her. I see her making sure her husband and children have food and water, herbs for when they are sick and milk so they can grow. I think this woman is the mother of the world; this woman can teach us.
“Today the human laborer is so separated from Mother Earth and how and why things grow. Machines harvest, trucks take food to supermarkets and people buy. But they do not see, feel, understand the relationship that comes from planting one grain of rice or one peanut and watching it multiply itself into a kilo to be shared.”
These are essential human experiences, says Hayslip, who often uses Vietnamese metaphors and stories to explain her perspective.
“If you know how to eat, you can be full, but it won’t cost a lot of money; if you know how to cover up, you will get warm without expensive clothes. That old Vietnamese saying means the individual can meet their real needs if they first think about the purpose and outcome of what they do. Consider what you want to harvest before planting!”
The bounty of Hayslip’s investments are visible and growing. This fall a small ancestral temple will join the Village of Hope for displaced and disabled children, the Peace Village Medical Clinic and School and the Mother Love Health Clinic as creations of the East Meets West Foundation. Other foundation projects include the Revolving Loan Programs, a Family Emergency Relief Fund and the annual Bridge of Peace Awards.
“Thousands of children and families have begun building new lives, and soldiers from there and here sit and talk with each other as human beings,” Hayslip says.
“Vietnam can be a symbol for the world. Learn the lesson that when you finish fighting, it is done, over. We can hate what governments did, but we can’t hate individuals caught in this. When there is no enemy, you can find a friend,” Hayslip says. “Discovering our charity is our gift and our job.”
Hayslip is concerned about what she sees in a modernizing, Westernizing Vietnam.
“Vietnam you see in my first and second books was a country so poor, it needed so much help. But as the West started to let money come in, so many crooks, so many cons, so many dishonest people appeared that politeness and culture become lost. This Western market is teaching them how to be cutthroat, completely ruthlessly.
“When I took classes in the United States to help me learn business so I could do better for my family, I disliked the way my teacher made business seem like dog-eat-dog. Even when I was a child in the black market business, it wasn’t like that. You had to build trust, relationships.”
A lack of appreciation for traditional values, cultural roots and continuity is exacerbating this, Hayslip says. This problem is the same for Vietnam, for the Vietnamese community in the United States and for the world at large, she adds.
“The older I get, the more I return to the wisdom of my village. In Vietnam we say the leaves grow, fall back down and become compost to support the roots and help the trees make more leaves. The same with water that comes from the mountain. It goes into the river, comes to the village, goes out to the sea and becomes rain so that it can return to the mountains. We must return to nourish our roots, to know our roots.”
Hayslip’s third book — she’s negotiating with a publisher — will be about village wisdom in a global world and the spiritual lessons learned by just staying alive and watching, as her father told her to do.
“As a Buddhist, I believe what we are really looking for is spiritual growth. Then we recognize who we are, where we come from and what we are here for. On a human-being level, my mission is to be a mother, do a job. On a soul level, I must learn lessons, love every single moment of life, enjoy every breath, love every human being, so that little by little my soul will come out, like a rose opening.”
Asked if she is a spiritual leader, she laughs.
“Teacher, maybe, not preacher.
“Men have found a hundred little ways to get the details wrong. It is not faith in men, but in God and all the miracles we see in babies being born and birds squawking across the sky that we must pay attention to, so we can help ourselves.
“People cannot expect magical transformation by another’s work or words. No, each person must pick themselves up, stop blaming fate or others, or expecting someone else to fix things for them.”
