Susie’s Hanoi Diary

One may choose to believe Sontag when she states that she did not intend to write about her trip to Hanoi; one may also choose to believe that a group of heroic Americans was responsible for causing Flight 93 to crash into an open field in Pennsylvania, rather than the White House. If one is to believe Sontag’s claims that she did not decide to write about her trip until after its conclusion, then he must accept that the journal she kept, for purely personal purposes in the midst of a visit in which each day’s schedule was highly structured and free time was purportedly spent wandering the city streets, contained off-the-cuff, extemporaneous prose of the following sort: “Thus, the gluttonous habits of my consciousness prevent me from being at home with what I most admire, and—for all my raging against America—firmly unite me to what I condemn. ‘American friend’ indeed!”

Alternatively, one may view the journal excerpts included in “Trip to Hanoi” as having been written with an audience in mind, and having been presented as excerpts from a ‘journal’ for rhetorical purposes. Taken in this light, the journal section plays a key role in Sontag’s argument: the concession. In her journal entries, Sontag’s initial reception of Hanoi is colored by a moral ambivalence deeply rooted in her own western way of thinking. She is frustrated by her inability to understand the North Vietnamese people she encounters; despite her best intentions to remain receptive and open-minded, she cannot help but feel suspicious that their overly simplistic moral outlook and the redundant, terse manner in which they express themselves are concealing something- or even worse, that the Vietnamese, with whom she has sympathized so fervently from afar, are an intrinsically simple, childlike people. In her journal entries, Sontag concedes that she had her own doubts about these Hanoi folks at first; that even she is not so enlightened as to have been able to transcend the entirety of that crude American mindset which her generation has been unfortunate enough to inherit.

The reader is intrigued by the brutal self-honesty found in the journal section, as seen in such statements as, “it seems to me that while my consciousness does include theirs, or could, theirs could never include mine…I have more on my mind than they do.” A white, liberal, academia-dwelling activist admitting to herself that a part of her feels inherently superior, on a broad intellectual level, to the people of a foreign culture she is freshly encountering? Sacrebleu! The reader, continuing through the journal section and making it well into the main body, in which Sontag reflects upon her trip, finds that Sontag’s initial ambivalence gives way to a…well, rather than compose my own cutting, critical manner of characterization here, I think I’ll let a few highlights from the latter portion of Susan’s narrative speak for themselves: “the North Vietnamese is an extraordinary human being…Vietnamese are ‘whole’ human beings, not ‘split’ as we are…while the Vietnamese are stripped down, they are hardly simple in any sense that grants us the right to patronize them…they don’t experience as we do the isolation of a ‘private self’…one can’t exaggerate the fervor of their patriotic passion and their intense attachment to particular places.”

Ultimately, I find Sontag’s characterization of Hanoi and the North Vietnamese people (see above) to be preposterous on a general psychological level, and every bit as propagandist as the “rhetoric of patriotism in the United States [which] has been in the hands of reactionaries and yahoos,” which she so sharply decries. However, I must admit that I find her rhetoric to be effective, on the whole. By devoting considerable detail to portraying herself, in her journal entries, as being beset by a traveler’s crises of identity and a disorienting ambivalence during her first days in Hanoi, she concedes just enough to make the reader wonder if he is reading a work which might actually contain an interesting perspective- and not just a politicized caricature. If only Susie could have mustered the restraint to make her on-the-ground diary’s prose a bit more believable, and to lay it on just a smidgen thinner in her final estimation of the North Vietnamese people, ‘Trip to Hanoi’ might have really left me thinking.