Child of War, Woman of Peace by Le Ly Hayslip

Author:Le Ly Hayslip [Hayslip, Le Ly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: United States, History, General
ISBN: 9780307790576
Google: r9ERRxodoK8C
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1993-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Like rice seedlings, planted row by row, my resources slowly grew. Alan and Victor split Dennis’s insurance benefit, which gave them each a nest egg for education and emergencies. The mortgage insurance gave me the choice of paying off the house or receiving a lumpsum payment. I took the money, since the monthly payments of $375 were quickly looking like a bargain in California’s heated real estate market.

The “death van,” as I thought of it, was paid off by Dennis’s auto insurance, but I couldn’t bear to keep it one minute longer. I ran an ad and sold it to the first caller. We fared much better when the “accidental death” portion of the auto insurance was settled: a check for forty thousand dollars, which I used to satisfy the rest of our creditors.

With my worldly debts paid, I turned my thoughts to the things I owed the spirit domain. I had avoided the Buddhist temple since Dennis’s death because I felt bad for disregarding my monk’s advice. True, I had taken Dennis back, but my patience ran out after a single year—a drop in the ocean to the cosmic god. Still, I wanted to mend those fences.

My su received me graciously, as he always did. Instead of lecturing me on my responsibility for Dennis’s death, he simply asked if I “wanted to do anything for the temple”—penance for whatever was still troubling me. I said yes, and was given a list of chores: from the menial—sweeping up—to the more significant, stuffing envelopes and helping with the temple’s outreach program. Since I now had some extra cash, I made a larger than usual donation with the hope that some of it would go into improving the shrine, which was the centerpiece of every temple and the way visitors gauged the health and generosity of the local Buddhist community.

Word now began to pass in the Vietnamese community that the Hanoi authorities were letting individual packages get through to needy families. I began sending “care packages”—boxes of good American clothing, food, and drugstore medicine—to Tinh, my niece in Danang, who I figured had the best chance of any relative to survive the Communist purges. She had also been used by various branches of our family to keep in touch, so if anyone knew how to reach my other relatives with gifts, supplies, and letters from America, it would be her. My relief packages went unacknowledged, but still I persisted. Co cong mai sat, co ngay nen kim—with perseverance, one can whet a piece of iron into a needle.

Thinking about Tinh and my family gave me the courage to dig out the notes about my childhood I had transcribed on lined paper a few years before. I didn’t know how long our money would last and I would have to go back to work, so I decided to use this rare “vacation” to finish what I had started.

The task was much bigger than I supposed.

Because of my third-grade education, writing was tedious: making

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