When Heaven and Earth Changed Places

Ch. 7, A Different View
"With the sickening feeling that I was now a stranger in my own homeland, I crossed the last few yards to my house with a lump in my throat and a growing sense of dread. Houses could be rebuilt and damaged dikes repaired-but the loss of our temples and shrines meant the death of our culture itself. It meant generations of children would grow uo without fathers to teach them about their ancestors or the ritutals of worship. Families would lose records of their lineage and with them the umbilicals to the very root of our society-not just old buildings and books, but people who once lived and loved them" (195).

This photo is excatly what I was thinking reading this quote. This used to be a shrine and the woman looks as if she has lost everything. I jsut learned in the few seconds to read the quote above that she bascially has. Le Ly said earlier in the novel that fathers stay back to protect the shrines, so if the shrine is destroyed then what happend to the father? It is hard as Americans to comprehend the statement, "...the loss of our temples and shrines meant death of our culture itself," because we do not practice this. We write it down in books or document with pictures. Whereas Le Ly's culture is to build up this shrine over the many years their ancestors have lived and learn from it. As American soliders, I don't think we knew that it meant to destroy one. The next generations could no longer know what their family was about or their heritage. This SETTING is hard for Le Ly to take in. When Le Ly finds her badly beaten father, it is almost as if he is the shrine in shambles. He also knows the information the shrine holds and he himself has their culture in his hands. Le Ly's father goes on to tell her that she cannot blame anyone. All she needs to worry about is the battle she was born to fight which is to raise her son the best she can.