Hanoi: The Truth

Upon reading a “Trip to Hanoi”, I had to reread my Vietnamese history in order to get a sense of what was happening in Vietnam when Susan Sontag was visiting Hanoi. 1968 was the year of a turning point in Vietnam. It was during this time that the Tet Offensive shocked America and displayed the NVA tenacity and persistence in the Vietnam War. The context of Sontag’s trip is important because it represented a time where the tension in the US against the war was at its peak and liberal sympathizers, such as Sontag herself, were a large part of American society.

An interesting and honest observation that Sontag makes during her trip to Hanoi is that things were not a “ideal” as the sensationalized image of their trip created in the liberal atmosphere in the US. She likened her arrival to Hanoi as “meeting a favorite movie star, one who for years has played a role in one’s fantasy life, and finding the actual person so much smaller, less vivid, less erotically charged, and mainly different.” The expectations of heartfelt exchanges, sympathy, and compassion were all withered away by the language barrier and the disconnect that she felt with the North Vietnamese people. Although she believed her “sense of solidarity with the Vietnamese” was “genuine and felt”, she realized the truth of the matter is that it was “developed at a great distance from them”. In many ways the culture gap prevented Sontag from communicating the things she felt for the Vietnamese people, and she experienced the harsh contrast between presumptuous expectations and reality.