Almost in Paradise (Chapter 11)

Le Ly introduces a man named Red, who serves as one of many people who offer her false hope.  He forces her to change for him, but she refuses.  If someone really cared for her, then they would love her just the way she is.  She wanted someone who treated her right, who she loved, and who could get her out of Vietnam.  Unfortunately, all of these things would be very difficult for a girl with her reputation to find.

On her arranged tour through the city, Le Ly and her escorts pass a cemetery.  She uses a simile to describe the mass amount of tombstones she sees.  She says, "the headstones of cemetery for war victims flicker by like slats in a picket fence", but it's what she thinks later in that same moment that really sticks out to me. She imagines, "Perhaps one day in the far future, a child on her mother's arm will ask who these people were--why they died and why they are buried all together.  I find myself praying most fervently that the mother, having known war only from distant legends, will be unable to answer.  On that day, at last, the spirit of war will no longer hang over my village".  I believe this is how many people feel about the war we are engaged in now; they hope that one day in the future people won't know how bad things had become between differing people, countries, and cultures.  Unfortunately, wars and anguish seem to be the most memorable moments in the past.  
(image: war cemetery in Vietnam)

Her desire to be "home" again was so great that she considers breaking the rules that the government had placed in front of her when she had first arrived back in Vietnam.  Not even twenty years prior, her desire to leave was equally as strong.