Le Ly Hayslip
Le Ly Hayslip is a Vietnamese-American author and humanitarian known for her efforts in promoting healing and reconciliation after the Vietnam War. Born in a small village near Da Nang, Hayslip faced significant adversity throughout her early life, including imprisonment, trauma, and the loss of family members due to the war. She later immigrated to the United States, where she began to advocate for victims of war through her writing and humanitarian work. Hayslip founded the East Meets West Foundation in 1987, which aimed to provide medical care and educational resources in Vietnam, and she has been instrumental in building clinics and rehabilitation centers.
Hayslip's autobiographical works, particularly "When Heaven and Earth Changed Places," brought attention to the Vietnamese experience during the war, highlighting the suffering endured by ordinary villagers caught in the conflict. Her writings have been significant in both Vietnamese and American contexts, fostering understanding and empathy among veterans and civilians alike. In addition to her initial foundation, Hayslip established the Global Village Foundation, which focuses on educational and medical assistance across Southeast Asia. Throughout her life, she has engaged in ongoing dialogue about peace, cultural preservation, and the complexities of life in post-war Vietnam, making her a notable figure in both literary and humanitarian realms.
On this Page
Le Ly Hayslip
Vietnamese-born American writer and humanitarian
- Born: December 19, 1949
- Place of Birth: Ky La, Vietnam
Advocating forgiveness and healing on both sides in the wake of the Vietnam War, Le Ly Hayslip created humanitarian organizations to build clinics, schools, and rehabilitation centers in Vietnam with the assistance of American veterans and other donors.
Early Life
Le Ly Hayslip was born Phung Thi Le Ly, the sixth child of Vietnamese peasants in the village of Ky La (later Xa Hoa Qui) near Da Nang, where she lived until the age of fifteen. A premature baby who survived against great odds, she was called con troi nuoi (she who is nourished by God) by the villagers. From her father, Phung Trong, she learned to revere her family, her ancestors, and Vietnamese tradition. Her mother, Tran Thi Huyen, taught her humility and the strength of virtue. Hayslip attended a village school through the equivalent of the third grade, her formal schooling cut short by the Vietnam War. From the age of twelve, she supported and worked for the Viet Cong against the American and South Vietnamese (ARVN) armies. Her two brothers also served Ho Chi Minh: Bon Nghe as the leader of a North Vietnamese army reconnaissance team and Sau Ban as a soldier (he was killed in South Vietnam by an American mine).
In her autobiography, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman’s Journey from War to Peace (1989), Hayslip describes how the people of her village were forced to labor for government soldiers by day and assist the Viet Cong by night. Such a schizophrenic existence led to her imprisonment and torture by the ARVN as well as a traumatic death sentence and rape at the hands of the Viet Cong.
Forced to flee her village, Hayslip first took a job as housekeeper for a family in Da Nang and then went with her mother to Saigon, where her sister Lan was living. There, Hayslip and her mother found positions as servants to Anh, a wealthy textile factory owner who impregnated her when she was sixteen. Her first child, James (Hung), born in 1967. Anh paid for their return trip to Da Nang, where Hayslip, with her baby and mother, lived with Lan, who worked in a bar.
Hayslip’s father, Phung Trong, remained in the village to keep watch over their ancestral land and shrines, but he became more and more depressed over the war’s effects on the village and his family, particularly his daughters. Lan by then was earning money as a sex worker, while Hayslip sold cigarettes and drugs on the black market. When her father died by suicide, the family risked their lives to give him a traditional funeral. In a moment of shame, she accepted four hundred dollars to have sex with a soldier but did so knowing that the money would support her family for a year. She worked as a nurse’s aide at the Nha Thuong Vietnamese Hospital in Da Nang and later as a cocktail server at a Korean-owned nightclub.
Life’s Work
Hayslip’s life in the United States began when she married Ed Munro, a sixty-year-old construction worker who sought a young Asian-born wife who would care for him in his old age. Attracted by his promise of education for her son James “Jimmy” and the opportunity to escape from Vietnam, Hayslip consented. Her second son, Thomas “Tommy,” was born before they left.
Arriving in the United States in 1970, Hayslip adjusted with difficulty to life in San Diego, California, with her in-laws. When Munro’s job prospects failed, they returned to Vietnam and Munro took a construction job at An Khe. There, Hayslip fell in love with an American officer, Dan DeParma, who was instrumental in helping her and her children flee An Khe during a major battle in 1972. Shortly afterward, Munro, Hayslip, and the children returned to the United States, where Munro died of pneumonia.
After the death of her first husband, Hayslip hoped to find happiness with DeParma. Because DeParma was reluctant to divorce his wife, however, she married Dennis Hayslip, who made a heroic trip to Vietnam to rescue her sister Lan and her children as South Vietnam was falling to the Communists in 1975. They also adopted refugee children from Vietnam. However, Dennis manifested an unstable personality, which found an outlet in fundamentalist Christianity and compulsive gun collecting. During this time, Le Ly began to turn more frequently to Buddhism in search of spiritual comfort and enlightenment. Angered by her resistance to Christianity, Dennis kidnapped their son Alan, Le Ly’s third child, and threatened her life. Following a court order that banned him from his wife’s household, Dennis died accidentally while burning charcoal in a closed van. After his death, Le Ly sought to pacify his angered spirit through Buddhist rituals and find peace of her own. Her thoughts turned to the possibility of returning to her family in Vietnam.
Terrified of the Communists and fearful of right-wing Vietnamese in the United States, yet resisting the efforts of the Central Intelligence Agency to co-opt her as a spy, Hayslip traveled to Vietnam in 1986 to visit her family. She found a desperately poor country where people were still starving and the war was still going on in the hearts and minds of everyone there. Although her brother Bon would not eat the American food she had brought, her mother and sister welcomed her lovingly. Nevertheless, it was Anh, the father of her first son, who encouraged Hayslip not to settle again in Vietnam, as she had contemplated, but to “help people overcome the pain of war to learn trust where they feel suspicion; to honor the past while letting go of it; to learn all these things so that they, in turn, may teach.”
After returning to the United States, Hayslip went to Hawaii to marry DeParma, who was by that time divorced from his wife. Once she arrived, she discovered that he intended to become an arms merchant and had little in the way of personal assets. The marriage never took place, since Hayslip refused to be allied with anyone who marketed weapons and was so obviously interested in her money. Through taking community college courses and attending workshops and spiritual retreats, Hayslip had educated herself and gained considerable business acumen. Her financial knowledge had accrued from her experiences in various settings: an assembly-line position at National Semiconductor, an aborted attempt at starting her own delicatessen, a partnership in an Asian restaurant, real estate transactions, and experimentation with the stock market. Yet it was in meeting and talking with American veterans who flocked to the restaurant that Hayslip realized how desperately in need of healing they were.
Determined to use her assets to build a clinic in Quang Nam province, Hayslip acquired licenses from the US State Department, assembled medical equipment and supplies, and established the East Meets West Foundation in 1987. She was assisted in her efforts by Cliff Parry, a wealthy individual later convicted as a professional swindler. Disillusioned once again, Hayslip resolved to set about making humanity the love of her life.
Hayslip sprang to national prominence with the publication of her first book, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, published with the help of writer Jay Wurtz. In it she chronicles her life as a peasant during the Vietnam War in and around her village of Ky La near Da Nang. One of the first publications to give expression to Vietnam experiences in the ten-year war, her book stunned Americans of all political persuasions with the truth that many villagers were tortured and oppressed by both sides in the war. The book received praise from critics and soon was included in comparative literature and Asian studies courses at universities. As Eva Hoffman wrote in a review for the New York Times, “This is one of those stories that defeat moral attitudes; to read it is to look at both the vibrantly alive face of 'the other side' and the deadly heart of war. All one can do is gaze, and perhaps bow one’s head at the terrible sorrow and pity of it all.”
Around that time Hayslip also traveled to the Soviet Union with Youth Ambassadors of America to learn about communism and the Cold War. Then visiting Vietnam, Hayslip talked with Hanoi officials about her clinic project, burned incense at her father’s shrine in Ky La, and visited various assistance projects supported by Vietnam Veterans of America. On her return to the United States, she enlisted the aid of the Veterans-Vietnam Restoration Project, endured the wrath of some individuals in the Vietnamese American community, and earnestly began to raise money for the clinic. On a third trip, she won permission to build a clinic at Ky La. A public announcement by Vietnamese officials eased relations between Hayslip’s mother and villagers suspicious that her mother was hiding money from her “American” daughter. On a fourth trip, accompanied by an American news crew, Hayslip took her sons with her, allowing James to meet his father, Anh, for the first time. With the financial help of film director Oliver Stone, who became interested in Hayslip’s story and her project, the Mother’s Love Clinic was opened near Ky La in 1989. In her speech to the assembled crowd, Hayslip stated that “America made me a citizen and has let me come back with these presents which she gives you freely and without reservations. What she wants more than anything, I think, is to forgive you and be forgiven by you in return.”
A second project of the East Meets West Foundation was the creation of a twenty-acre rehabilitation center for the homeless and handicapped at China Beach, the site where 3,500 Marines landed in Vietnam to begin the American buildup in 1965. A full-service medical center and a school were among the center’s efforts to break the circle of vengeance that kept the countries of Vietnam and the United States, as well as individuals, locked in paralyzing hatred. Hayslip’s vision was one of reconciliation and spiritual connection.
A second book, Child of War, Woman of Peace, appeared in 1993, chronicling Hayslip’s arrival in the United States as the wife of an American much older than herself, a second marriage, and fulfillment of her long-held dream to create the East Meets West Foundation to fund projects that would assist both her own people and the American veterans who were still suffering from their war experiences. Oliver Stone’s film Heaven and Earth (1993), an adaptation of Hayslip’s first two books for the screen, tells her story as the third film in his Vietnam trilogy (the first two films were Platoon, 1986, and Born on the Fourth of July, 1989). However, Stone’s film does not convey the transformative vision by which Hayslip has healed her own painful war memories and enabled thousands more to regain spiritual energy through love, mutual understanding, and cooperation. (Hayslip has a cameo role as a jewelry broker.)
After settling in San Francisco, Hayslip continued to serve as executive director of the East Meets West Foundation, a charitable relief and world peace organization that funds health care and social service projects in Vietnam. She devoted much of her time to raising money for the foundation through lecture tours, book signings, and newsletters that kept donors apprised of projects completed and needs still to be met. Working together to coordinate the foundation’s efforts with those of other grassroots organizations offering material assistance to Vietnam, Hayslip also encouraged veterans to help with various privately funded assistance projects in that country. The foundation, for example, dispatched mobile medical units, established a medical center at China Beach near Da Nang, and provided reconstructive facial surgery for people with disabilities.
In 1998, Hayslip resigned from the East Meets West Foundation and, a year later, started the Global Village Foundation, serving as its director. This second humanitarian nongovernmental organization (NGO) provides educational opportunities and medical help to Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries and presents its annual Bridge of Peace Award to those who work for world peace. The foundation finances construction of schools, village markets, libraries, homes, medical clinics, playgrounds, and vocational training centers and programs promoting dental hygiene and literacy in remote villages. It has also worked together with other NGOs to provide medical supplies, clothing, and food for disaster relief. One of its most visible initiatives has been the Mobile Library Project undertaken in collaboration with the Da Nang Department of Education and Training to bring portable boxes of donated books to rural schools. Hayslip’s family has also participated in the efforts. Her third son, Alan, worked at a school in Da Nang for several years before returning to the United States to work with Stone on a documentary, and her eldest son, James, often helped her in her writing projects.
Hayslip continues to visit her homeland frequently. In 2000, she was in a delegation to promote good will and trade; along with former president Bill Clinton and then-senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, she took part in a ceremony to sign a trade agreement between the United States and Vietnam. In 2007, Hayslip returned to her natal village to be with her mother, aged 102, as she died in the hospital.
In 2005, the Asian Pacific Islander Caucus of the California State Assembly was just about to present her with an award in recognition of her work, when conservatives in the Vietnamese community, objecting to her overtures to the government in Vietnam, succeeded in scuttling the event. In 2007, From War to Peace and Beyond, a half-hour documentary about her life by Bill Wineskin, immediately earned four nominations for local Emmy Awards. The following year, the Carnegie Corporation of New York recognized Hayslip among its 2008 Great Immigrants honorees.
In 2016 Hayslip was treated for breast cancer. She went on to coproduce the female-focused documentary Woman I Phu Nu (2024) with her son Thomas. The film highlights the wartime experiences of Hayslip, another writer, a former prisoner of war, a spy, and former Ho Chi Minh Trail volunteers.
Hayslip has written about her life in two cultures online and traveled widely, giving talks on her life and on humanitarian causes and raising money for her philanthropy. In 2022 she published an opinion piece about and was interviewed regarding her observance of the Vietnamese Lunar New Year and her hopes for its preservation among Vietnamese Americans.
Significance
Out of the chaos, hardship, and upheaval of her early life, Hayslip developed courage and self-reliance that allowed her to launch her efforts to heal the physical and emotional wounds left by the Vietnam War at a time when such efforts were viewed with great suspicion. Drawing on her own reserves as a survivor, Hayslip has written two autobiographical memoirs to document the war experience from a Vietnamese perspective. Although her memoirs had a mixed reception among the highly political and polarized Vietnamese community in the United States, Hayslip struck a sympathetic chord among many American veterans of the Vietnam War. Furthermore, as one of the first sources describing the war’s effects from a Vietnamese point of view, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places had widespread influence both because it has been a source for scholars studying Vietnamese exiles and because it frequently has appeared on reading lists for university courses in Asian studies, multicultural literature, and history. In forming the East Meets West Foundation, Hayslip built a bridge between her native country and her adopted country that would allow individuals in Vietnam and the United States to understand one another more completely and to effect a more lasting reconciliation than could be provided by diplomatic agreements.
Bibliography
Abramowitz, Rachel. “The Road to 'Heaven.’” Premiere, vol. 7, 1994, pp. 46–50.
"About Le Ly." Le Ly Hayslip Official Website, lelyhayslip.com/about/. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.
Dorland, Gil. Legacy of Discord: Voices of the Vietnam War Era. Brassey’s, 2001.
Duong, Lan P. Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism. Temple UP, 2012.
Earl, William. “‘Woman I Phu Nu’ Documentary Explores Impact of Vietnam War on Women.” Variety, 3 June 2024, variety.com/2024/film/news/vietnam-documentary-woman-i-phu-nu-le-ly-hayslip-thomas-1236022731/. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.
Hayslip, Le Ly. “A Vietnam Memoir.” People Weekly, 18 Dec. 1989, pp. 147–50.
Hayslip, Le Ly. “Letting Go.” Light at the End of the Tunnel: A Vietnam War Anthology, 3rd ed., edited by Andrew J. Rotter, Rowman, 2010, pp. 443–53.
Hayslip, Le Ly. “Heaven and Earth Le Ly Hayslip.” Interview. Vietnam AsiaLife, 1 Jan. 2013.
Hayslip, Le Ly, and James Hayslip. Child of War, Woman of Peace. 1993. Anchor, 2011.
Hayslip, Le Ly, and Jay Wurtz. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. 1989. Doubleday, 2012.
Janette, Michele. “Phung Thi Le Ly Hayslip.” Asian American Autobiographers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Guiyou Huang, Greenwood, 2001, pp. 111–14.
Klapwald, Thea. “Two Survivors Turn Hell into ’Heaven and Earth.’” The New York Times, 19 Dec. 1993, sec. 2, p. 22.Reno, Jamie. “Remembering Vietnam: Le Ly Hayslip Looks to Obama and Kerry with Hope.” Yahoo News, 20 May 2016, www.yahoo.com/news/remembering-vietnam-le-ly-hayslip-1432367129821238.html. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.
Wolff, Margaret. In Sweet Company: Conversations with Extraordinary Women about Living a Spiritual Life. Jossey-Bass, 2004.