[2] She fled to Da Nang where she worked as a maid, a black-market vendor, a waitress, a hospital worker and even a prostitute.

While working for a wealthy Vietnamese family with her mother in Saigon, Hayslip had a few sexual encounters with the landlord, Anh, and discovered she was pregnant.

[3][4] Hayslip's memoir was hailed as a previously neglected look at the war from the perspective of the Vietnamese peasants whose lives were upended.

A review by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David K. Shipler for The New York Times wrote "If Hollywood has the courage to turn this book into a movie, then we Americans might finally have a chance to come to terms with the tragedy in Vietnam.

Oliver Stone read her memoir when it was published in 1989 and felt that his look at the Vietnam War was incomplete without telling the story from the perspective of the Vietnamese.

The film version was also based in part on Hayslip's second book, Child of War, Woman of Peace, about her adaptation to life in the United States.