Heaven and Earth Chapter 1

By the time I finished the first chapter of Le Ly Hayslip's memoirs, I was completely fascinated by her story; in fact, I finished reading When Heaven and Earth Changed Places in about six days. I found the short, frequent stories about her childhood very interesting, particularly because they were so different from my memories as a child. Obviously, Vietnamese people experience different lives and have different cultures than Americans, and I could not really connect with many instances she wrote of because of those vast differences.
Le Ly's village had songs or proverbs for nearly everything that occurred in daily life; her father sang songs about the government, politics, and the war, while her mother voiced clever proverbs preparing her children for independent life.
These proverbs are Adages, which are familiar proverbs or wise sayings.

• "That's why I tell you and your sisters dung gan dan ong-stay away from the man, eh?"--- Le Ly's mother was part of a society where they believed God to impregnate women, and he signaled this to them by having men come near; therefore, she advised her daughters to stay away from men unless they were married.
•    Other common village proverbs were: "Ga trong nuoi con! (There goes a rooster who thinks he can hatch chicks!)," "Better to sell cheap than not sell at all!," and "Mau len lam co di!" (Do you think that grass will pull itself?).

I found the customs the inhabitants of Ky La, Le Ly's childhood village, had established for marriages also very interesting.  "In fact, wife-beating was so common it was accepted as a necessary way for men to blow off steam and, oddly enough, keep the family together...We accepted wife abuse without condoning it--as an unfortunate but sometimes inescapable part of life, like hard work and disease."  Le Ly included this passage to show that her parents and the other elders of society were in charge, well respected and therefore rarely contradicted.
The concept of arranged marriages demonstrates just how different this society is from our society as Americans.  It immediately brought me back to the eighteenth century English society where parents arranged marriages for their children based on wealth and social status.