LITERATURE AND FILM ANALYSIS

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THE SPIRIT OF HEAVEN AND

EARTH by Le Ly Hayslip with Jay Wurts

D on’t let anyone tell you that movies are make believe. Movies possess a

spirit, just like the actors in them and the people they portray. These

actors walk and talk and have adventures and relive old lives, and,

although on screen they are thin as air, the beams of light they ride can penetrate

to our hearts. They allow us to see what before we could only imagine. They

make the unreal, real. So don’t let anyone tell you that Hollywood movies are

make believe.

For six months, from August 1992 through January 1993, I helped Oliver

Stone and his talented crew bring the ghosts from my past back to life. From as

early as 1991, when I first began talking to Oliver about his screenplay, he

showed a father’s concern not just for the health and appearance of his new off

spring, but for its spirit, too. He knew no story about the Vietnamese could be

complete if he showed only our beautiful land and handsome people and all the

suffering we’d been through. To tell the whole story, he must also explore the

world inside.

When shooting began in Phuket, Thailand, on October 19, 1992, Oliver

took me aside and, like my father had done so many years ago, gave me my new

mission.

“Ly,” he said, “your job as technical advisor will seem very familiar.” He

jabbed a finger toward my face, “It will be just like going to war! Before we

shoot a scene, you tell me if things look okay—the way you remember them or

the way they ought to be. After I say cut, you tell me how things turned out”

This assignment seemed simple enough. But I soon learned that if I said,

“Oh, my father would have looked out the window before he said that—to see if

anyone was listening,” or “The MPs wouldn’t have let those b1ackmarkct girls

to.!

so close to the compound,” he would call everyone back and re-shoot the scene. After a few of these episodes (and some irritated looks from the hard-working crew), I discovered the difference between comments that truly helped our “off spring” to grow and those that merely stopped the show. A mother may see many things, but she doesn’t necessarily have to tell “papa” everything she saw.

More typically, after an intense scene was over, Oliver would look, at me and if I had tears in my eyes, he would say, “Okay, we got it. Next setup!” I had become the production’s official “tear meter.” People would simply consult my face the way they looked at light gauges and electrical dials to see if more work was needed. After a while, the spirit of my story had spread to everyone—crew, actors, and extras alike. Even my tears were no longer necessary. The Americans became in their hearts Vietnamese. The Vietnamese became in their hearts American—found themselves viewing their own life stories with new eyes. Physically, everyone gave 200 percent, and our “spiritual gauges” went off the scale. When a scene was good, we would all cry together and everyone knew that the ghost-child to whom we were all godparents was assuming a life of its own.

To prepare for the film, I had taken Oliver; Joan Chen, and young Hiep Thi Le—whom I quickly came to look upon as a daughter—and several members of the crew to my village, Ky La, in Vietnam. Like a thirsty man, Oliver soaked up every detail of village life and asked for more. He met my mother, and in their halting conversation, closely monitored by escorting officials, I saw pass over his face the shadows of ten-thousand mothers and ten-thousand sons who had given themselves to the war. I watched little Hiep become a Ky La farmgirl as she toiled beside her Hollywood Mama Du in the leech-filled paddies behind my old house. When we left the village, we were a family ready to start a great adventure.

This spiritual energy gradually affected everyone on the set in Thailand, where my village and Da Nang of the 1960s had been painstakingly reconstruct ed. He even asked me and some of the extras to sleep a few nights in the eerily accurate reproduction of my old home so that it would “feel” more lived-in by me and my family’s guardian spirits. In fact, we camped on the set for a week.

Since the local Buddhist monks were not empowered to bless the set, Oliver had me say a prayer for luck each morning before we started work. Once, on a very cloudy day, he asked, “Ly, do you think it’s going to rain?” He was concerned about finishing an outdoor scene and apparently thought I had some special phone line to Mother Nature.

I replied, grinning, “Give me twenty minutes, okay? I’ll go consult my Father!” I said this the way many Vietnamese refer to Mr. Sky, the father of us all. I took a short walk—just to take a break from all the bustle—and saw that

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the heavy Southeast Asia clouds were a bit too silvery to make us wet—at least very early in the day.

I went back to the set and told Oliver in a joking voice, “The heavens say the rice needs water, but they appreciate your work and will wait until sunset to begin the rain.”

Oliver listened to this intently, then turned and shouted orders like a general in battle. After several hours of great activity, the day’s shooting was completed just as the first raindrops began to fall.

To this day, I don’t know if Oliver took my little joke seriously or if he had simply gotten good at indulging me with a straight face. Of course, I did “con sult the heavens” as I said I would, and an old Ky La farmgirl is seldom wrong about the weather. Still, who really knows why Mother Nature does the things she does?

As part of his strict insistence on accuracy and getting at the truth inside the story, Oliver used many non-actor Vietnamese for both featured parts and extras. Most of these people were refugees from what used to be South Vietnam who were driven out by the war and who are now living in Thailand. They all carried with them the spiritual baggage of every refugee: grief for lost loved ones, terri ble memories of sights no eyes should see, unutterable longing for their home land. Their tears spontaneously joined our own, as did their laughter when the script spoke of happier times.

One old man, who was raised in Central Vietnam and had fought on the side of the French in the early 1950s, told me (after performing in the scene where legionnaires burned my father’s house) that he now finally realized, near the end of his life, what the war was really like for us peasants.

I think Heaven and Earth will have a similar impact on the Americans who see it, especially women. They will be surprised at how much of themselves they see in the young girls and old ladies who used to seem so strange, alien, and exotic. Today, most young women in Vietnam, like most women in America, know about each other only what survivors of the war care to tell them. We are separated not so much by an ocean, but by time and wounded souls.

Of course, as I have learned from my life in the U.S., American women have many advantages over their Vietnamese sisters. They can learn from books, magazines, TV, and movies—and just by looking around!—what women can accomplish: things that most Vietnamese girls cannot, through ignorance, even dream about. As peacetime contact between Vietnam and the United States increases in coming years, both village girls and American women will have a chance to learn other ways of looking at the world. From this new shared per spective, perhaps, we will learn to judge one another not by the standards of our own lives, but by those things shared by women at all times and in all places.

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Through this film, too, Americans will learn that the Vietnamese, like themselves, became the way they are because of how they were raised—how they think about themselves, what they believe about others, how they deal with growing up and growing old. They will also see how those views can change. They will learn that introducing two cultures through the matchmaker of war was not the best path to compassion and understanding. If they had a husband or son or brother who went to Vietnam, they will learn a little more about the people who helped or opposed them, and what our land was like before the shells began to fall and the gunfire began to rattle.

In short, when you see this film, you will feel a bond with the people who made it, and through the wonder of this connection, feel new compassion for the people whose lives it depicts.

So don’t let anyone tell you that movies are not real. How else can mere flickering light reach so far down into the human soul?

And soul, I believe, is what Oliver’s movies are all about. He told me he makes his films the way a father raises a child: doing the best he can to nurture it and make it strong—to give it a sense of humanity and its own life force—then letting it go to find its way in the world. Oliver has given us many strong “sons” this way. I am pleased and honored that, with Heaven and Earth, he has now also raised a daughter worthy of his warrior’s heart.

Finally, I have been asked many times to compare the movie to the books, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and Child of Wa Woman of Peace, on which it is based. The best judge of this, of course, is one who experiences them both with fresh eyes, but a mother always has her opinions.

For me, books are an umbilical cord to the mind through which nourish ment passes to the heart and soul. The film, however, is like a great warm blan ket or a splash in the icy sea. In a darkened theater, it surrounds us and domi nates our senses. In the space of minutes we laugh and cry and feel pulse-pound ing excitement. All emotions come to the surface—breathtaking beauty and absolute horror, all mixed. While a book gives us time to think about our feel ings, a movie makns us feel without giving us time to think. Reflection only comes later. People whose souls are changed by books usually know why. People whose lives are affected by a movie only discover it later on. In this way, movies are very much like life. How can people call them make believe?

Because of this, I ask people who see Heaven and Earth to take a few min utes afterward, at a quiet time and place, to think about what they saw and felt. We have shared a journey and witnessed many terrible and wondrous things. Looking over our shoulders, then glancing ahead, we can see that the steep path we have ascended is really a road to a better future.

For the people of modem Vietnam, the war has ended but the blessings of peace have yet to appear. Some two million Vietnamese on both sides were

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killed during the war, leaving over 130,000 amputees, 300,000 orphans, and an equal number of MIAs behind. Ten percent of South Vietnam’s surface area was doused with over seventy-one million liters of toxic chemicals, including eigh teen million gallons of Agent Orange. Can you imagine what these chemicals would do to prime farm land in Georgia, California, or Ohio? On top of that, the fifteen-and-a-half million tons of munitions dropped on my country have turned almost fifteen-and-a-half million acres of once-lush tropical forest into desert. Approximately half of Vietnam’s children are clinically malnourished, and a lit tle more than that number have dropped out of primary school to scavenge a liv ing as farmers, street kids, and beggars.

The Mother’s Love Clinic and Peace Village Medical Center (built near Ky La with Oliver’s assistance and sustained with the help of thousands of others) treats some forty thousand patients each year, but this is like a grain of sand on China Beach. Some people, including many Vietnamese government officials, see new and expanded contact with America—even returning Vietnamese American Wet Kieu—as another “foreign invasion.” These souls neither think nor feel but only suffer and deserve our compassion. If my books and this movie mean nothing else, it is that the world has seen suffering enough. If the circle of vengeance caused by the Vietnam War—and all wars, everywhere—is ever to be broken, it must certainly begin with us.

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