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Le Ly Hayslip was born in 1949 in Ky La, a village near Da Nang, Vietnam. The seventh child in a peasant farm family, she received only a third grade education because she spent her childhood in the shadow of the Vietnam War, or "American War." Her brothers fought in both the Republican and Communist armies. By the time she was fourteen, she had endured torture in a South Vietnamese government prison for "revolutionary sympathies," had fallen under suspicion for being a government spy, and was sentenced to death by the Vietcong. But instead of killing her, her executors raped her, and she fled to Da Nang and then Saigon where she worked as a maid, black market vendor, waitress, and hospital attendant. More...

http://voices.cla.umn.edu/authors/LeLyHayslip.html (Voices From the Gaps)