Hostile Fire in Little Saigon : Subject of ‘Heaven and Earth’ Finds Herself on Unfriendly Ground

From the moment she sat down to write her memoirs more than 10 years ago, Le Ly Hayslip knew she would place herself under attack from the Vietnamese American community for revealing how she lived her life in Vietnam.

It was a life that included aiding Vietnamese Communist soldiers, working as a prostitute and marrying an American.

As she penned her life story, the author, whose books are the basis for director Oliver Stone’s latest movie, “Heaven and Earth,” knew her life would never be the same. But she thought she was ready.

Then, last week, Hayslip arrived at a business complex on Bolsa Avenue in Westminster’s Little Saigon with her mother and sisters, who were visiting from Vietnam. The reception that awaited her made Hayslip realize that she was not quite prepared to face the wrath of some expatriates, who believe she has betrayed their cause.

Dozens of people were marching in the parking lot, waving the red-and-yellow flags of the former Republic of Vietnam, screaming epithets and protesting her family’s appearance in a community the demonstrators called the “capital of Vietnamese refugees.” The presence of a former call girl and the “Viet Cong sympathizers” was not wanted, the protesters repeatedly blared through bullhorns.

Instead of facing the media there to interview her, Hayslip shielded her bewildered, tearful family and scuttled them away from the hostilities.

“I had expected tough questioning when I accepted the invitation” from a local Vietnamese television station, Hayslip said. “I didn’t expect the threat of violence. I didn’t expect that Vietnamese people would greet my mother and my sisters with their words of hatred and anger. I wasn’t prepared for that. I wasn’t ready for it.”

Sitting on a bed in a seaside motel one day last week, Hayslip candidly and calmly discussed her reaction to the unexpected protest and explained why she is working with the Hanoi government through her East Meets West Foundation, which sets up medical clinics in rural Vietnam.

Seated beside Hayslip on the double bed, her mother and sisters chewed on fresh betel nut leaves, stared off into the distance and sometimes wept as they quietly listened to her.

Hayslip, 44, said she understands why the protesters were angry. She knows that because “Heaven and Earth” is the first mainstream movie about the Vietnam War from the perspective of the Vietnamese people, some Vietnamese Americans are offended that it is seen through the eyes of a Viet Cong collaborator.

“Heaven and Earth,” Stone’s third movie about the Vietnam War, chronicles Hayslip’s life, as it was shaped by the war. As a teen-ager, Hayslip served as a lookout for the Viet Cong. She was eventually captured by government soldiers and tortured. She turned to prostitution to support herself and later married an American who brought her to the United States.

“I was a young girl and I believed in a cause my ancestors, my family and my village believed in,” Hayslip said. “The Viet Cong lived in the fields of my village. They told us Vietnam should be a united, not separated, country.

“When you live in a place where (American and South Vietnamese) soldiers search your home in the daytime and Viet Cong soldiers hide in your village during the night, how do you choose what is right and what is wrong?”

Hayslip chose the Communists, the protesters believe, and for that she would always be a pariah to them.

Her detractors said they also object to Stone’s sympathetic portrayal of her “immoral” background--she sold sexual favors to American soldiers--and claim the movie reinforces the stereotype some have of Asian women as bar girls and prostitutes.

In explaining why she chose the path she did, Hayslip began with her childhood: “I was born in a poor village to a poor family. I was illiterate. I tended oxen and planted rice in the paddies. To keep me strong and working, my family shaved my head so the hair wouldn’t weigh me down and make me weak.”

As an adult during a time of tumult and economic instability in her homeland, Hayslip said, she had no other way of earning a living for herself and her toddler son other than to sell cigarettes, liquor and marijuana on the black market.

“When that wasn’t enough, I sold myself,” she added. “Do people think I actually wanted to become a prostitute? There was a war and I had to survive during that war. I did what I could to survive.”

Even if they could somehow disregard Hayslip’s past, the protesters said, they cannot ignore her present, namely the fact that she advocates the United States lifting economic sanctions against Vietnam.

They also accuse Hayslip of working with the current Communist regime because Hanoi allows her East Meets West Foundation to build medical clinics in rural areas of the country.

“I am not a Communist,” Hayslip said, “but I can’t deny that I want normalization in Vietnam because I think it is time. And I can’t deny that I have met with officials from Hanoi to talk about what East Meets West could do for the sick and wounded who are poor and who live in areas where there are no hospitals.”

Hayslip, who has made 16 trips to her homeland since 1986, points out that it is a place where the countryside is ravaged and people are starving, a situation that is perhaps lost on the opponents of normalization. She just wants to do something to help, she said.

“The people against normalization, they’re saying let the country go hungry so that the government must finally beg for outside help and then, the government could be overthrown,” she said.

“Me, I say if you help people who are weak, they will eventually become stronger and they will stand up and fight. But until they gain strength, they can do nothing.”

Hayslip said it was necessary to meet with officials from Hanoi, to secure their approval before her foundation could provide medicine and modern medical technology for peasants too poor to pay for them.

“Yes, I sat down with the Communists to ask for their permission for me and the people from my foundation to come into the country,” she said. “I have to do what I think is right for my people.”

On the emotional and sensitive debate over normalization of relations between the United States and the regime in Vietnam, Hayslip and her detractors acknowledged that there may never be common ground.

“To reach a middle ground, the people involved would have to willingly forgive and learn about the other side and try to understand their side of the argument,” Hayslip said. “Right now, I don’t think that is possible.”