A Different View

After Le Ly had bought her own house, she decides to go visit her father in Ky La.  She is overwhelmed to find the village has been nearly destroyed by the war and that her father is in a deathly state.  He tells of the enemies torturing him after they found his bunkers.  Le Ly sets out to find the soldiers that are required to give her father attention, but a translator tells her to leave because they won't help her.  After looking around the village and finding many people she knew as a child had grown up and moved away.  She went to the hill where her father took her as a child, but this time it was a bleak picture of the land that was destroyed by the war.  The author uses pathos to make the reader connect with the world in the book through pity.  "Of those villagers who remained in Ky La, many were disfigured from the war, suffering amputated limbs, jagged scars, or the diseases that followed malnutrition or took over a body no longer inhabited by a happy human spirit."  Le Ly goes to her father and begins to speak angrily about the war.  Her father tells her that she needs to fight the battle of raising a good son.  Awhile after Le Ly returns to her house in Danang, she receives news that says her father has killed himself.  The story flashes forward to the present, when Le Ly is reunited with her niece, Tinh.  Tinh tells of what the new government has done to their family.  The streets of Hayslip's previous home has become overpopulated and the streets are crowded yet they have no cars.  She realizes that she has to negotiate the price of a car or house, while these people had to trade from meal to meal.  She then thinks back to her fathers funeral.  They had to get special permission to gather in large numbers.  She discussed the process of his funeral and the mourning process the family went through.  Her fathers death again allows the reader to connect with the family through a death in their family and thinking back to their mourning process.