Open Wounds

In the third chapter of When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, the main character, Le Ly Hayslip, begins to change.  The occupation of the village by both the Viet Cong and the Republicans continues.  Le Ly gets arrested because she is (correctly) suspected by the Republicans of signaling to the Viet Cong that their army was moving into the area.  After a very short time spent in the jail, Hayslip's brother-in-law again comes to get her out.  When she returns to her village, she is treated like a hero for spoiling the enemy's plans and she even had a song dedicated to her.  Conflict ensued in the village and a nearby village, and Hayslip and a friend were arrested for being caught hiding in a trench during an exchange of gunfire.  The soldier recognized Hayslip from an earlier incident, and decided to send both girl to My Thi, a torture camp run by the army.  Hayslip was interrogated severely at the camp and tortured through the use of electrical wires, ants, and water snakes.  After only three days in the Vietnamese equivalent of Alcatraz, Hayslip's mother was able to negotiate her freedom.  The deal was only able to go through because a relative of their family was in the army.  But upon her return to her home, she found that many people had written her off as a traitor.  She was unable to tell why she was let out of the prison so quickly because the family would lose even more by letting the Viet Cong know they had blood in the Republicans.  The role of the limited narrator is clearly felt by the emotional swings of the chapter.  The reader feels the highs of the party when Hayslip is a hero, but immediately feels isolated and alone when she is treated like scum by her own people.  "As soon as we entered the village, I could tell everything had changed.  People- even old neighbors- avoided my glance, then stared at me as I passed.  That night, the Viet Cong held a rally, but the messenger didn't come to out house."  The reader feels the isolation of Hayslip immediately, and becomes fruserated with Hayslip as she tried to show the village that she didn't tell the prison anything.  In an attempt to win the acceptance of her village back, Hayslip planned to go work in the fields early in the morning.  But by going to the fields, she inadvertantly led the Republicans on a Viet Cong ambush, which was quickly broken up.  This severed all relationships with the Viet Cong.  She was taken to a trial that night and sentenced to death.  Two men took her to her future grave, but they raped her instead of killing her.  This killed her spirit however, and she now wished that the had been killed.  She had no side to fight for, and nothing to believe in.  The reader is taken along on this "roller coaster ride" of emotions with the little innocent girl experiences being arrested, tortured, honored, arrested again, saved, disgraces, sentenced to death, wishing she had actually been put to death, and the absence of the fight that once made the reader fall in love with this child's story.