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Trip To Hanoi
"sensitive observer's response to a world totally foreign to the Western mind" -- from back cover blurb, Sontag's May, 1968 trip to Hanoi.
103 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published January 1, 1969
About the author
Susan Sontag
196 books5,861 followersSusan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933, grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from the College of the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard University and Saint Anne’s College, Oxford.
Her books include four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America; a collection of short stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea; and nine works of nonfiction, starting with Against Interpretation and including On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Where the Stress Falls, Regarding the Pain of Others, and At the Same Time. In 1982, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published A Susan Sontag Reader.
Ms. Sontag wrote and directed four feature-length films: Duet for Cannibals (1969) and Brother Carl (1971), both in Sweden; Promised Lands (1974), made in Israel during the war of October 1973; and Unguided Tour (1983), from her short story of the same name, made in Italy. Her play Alice in Bed has had productions in the United States, Mexico, Germany, and Holland. Another play, Lady from the Sea, has been produced in Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Korea.
Ms. Sontag also directed plays in the United States and Europe, including a staging of Beckett's Waiting for Godot in the summer of 1993 in besieged Sarajevo, where she spent much of the time between early 1993 and 1996 and was made an honorary citizen of the city.
A human rights activist for more than two decades, Ms. Sontag served from 1987 to 1989 as president of the American Center of PEN, the international writers’ organization dedicated to freedom of expression and the advancement of literature, from which platform she led a number of campaigns on behalf of persecuted and imprisoned writers.
Her stories and essays appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary publications all over the world, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Art in America, Antaeus, Parnassus, The Threepenny Review, The Nation, and Granta. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages.
Among Ms. Sontag's many honors are the 2003 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the 2003 Prince of Asturias Prize, the 2001 Jerusalem Prize, the National Book Award for In America (2000), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Photography (1978). In 1992 she received the Malaparte Prize in Italy, and in 1999 she was named a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government (she had been named an Officier in the same order in 1984). Between 1990 and 1995 she was a MacArthur Fellow.
Ms. Sontag died in New York City on December 28, 2004.
Her books include four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America; a collection of short stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea; and nine works of nonfiction, starting with Against Interpretation and including On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Where the Stress Falls, Regarding the Pain of Others, and At the Same Time. In 1982, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published A Susan Sontag Reader.
Ms. Sontag wrote and directed four feature-length films: Duet for Cannibals (1969) and Brother Carl (1971), both in Sweden; Promised Lands (1974), made in Israel during the war of October 1973; and Unguided Tour (1983), from her short story of the same name, made in Italy. Her play Alice in Bed has had productions in the United States, Mexico, Germany, and Holland. Another play, Lady from the Sea, has been produced in Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Korea.
Ms. Sontag also directed plays in the United States and Europe, including a staging of Beckett's Waiting for Godot in the summer of 1993 in besieged Sarajevo, where she spent much of the time between early 1993 and 1996 and was made an honorary citizen of the city.
A human rights activist for more than two decades, Ms. Sontag served from 1987 to 1989 as president of the American Center of PEN, the international writers’ organization dedicated to freedom of expression and the advancement of literature, from which platform she led a number of campaigns on behalf of persecuted and imprisoned writers.
Her stories and essays appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary publications all over the world, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Art in America, Antaeus, Parnassus, The Threepenny Review, The Nation, and Granta. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages.
Among Ms. Sontag's many honors are the 2003 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the 2003 Prince of Asturias Prize, the 2001 Jerusalem Prize, the National Book Award for In America (2000), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for On Photography (1978). In 1992 she received the Malaparte Prize in Italy, and in 1999 she was named a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government (she had been named an Officier in the same order in 1984). Between 1990 and 1995 she was a MacArthur Fellow.
Ms. Sontag died in New York City on December 28, 2004.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
November 27, 2021
She even taught me things I don't know about my country. The journey remains transformative to Susan even after it was long over. Reading her journey helps me a little bit on my own reflection of my Vietnamese origin, Western experience.
Her difficulties to absorb, accept and trust her experience in the real North Vietnam came along with comparative trails of thoughts with US, with Cuban Communists, with her own version of a Vietnam as a spectator from a distance. She suspected that those Vietnamese acted, in their ingenuine way to seal layers of emotions during the first few days. But things started to slowly reconcile for Susan after the 5th day, to emphatize not patronize, and to see it as that it was.
Something Susan observed 50 years ago still remains true today: the direct, flat, naive languistic manner & the rhetoric grasp, the puritan sexless society, its lack of private, public boundary which leads to elevated collectivism (which even gives meaning and purpose, unlike being looked down upon)...
I am happy to stumble upon her, and this gem.
Try it here https://elib.thuviennguyenvanhuong.vn...
Her difficulties to absorb, accept and trust her experience in the real North Vietnam came along with comparative trails of thoughts with US, with Cuban Communists, with her own version of a Vietnam as a spectator from a distance. She suspected that those Vietnamese acted, in their ingenuine way to seal layers of emotions during the first few days. But things started to slowly reconcile for Susan after the 5th day, to emphatize not patronize, and to see it as that it was.
Something Susan observed 50 years ago still remains true today: the direct, flat, naive languistic manner & the rhetoric grasp, the puritan sexless society, its lack of private, public boundary which leads to elevated collectivism (which even gives meaning and purpose, unlike being looked down upon)...
I am happy to stumble upon her, and this gem.
Try it here https://elib.thuviennguyenvanhuong.vn...
January 1, 2019
Journal, July 2005
Susan Sontag spent two weeks in North Vietnam in 1968, and wrote 90 pages about her experiences. (Perhaps I will cull from those notebooks I kept in Gaza and the West Bank to feed my imagination as to what the truth is about Palestine. Would it be a long essay? Would it be something that I work into a novel, with all my students mixed up together? Will it be a series of short articles that I post at CTSA?) I wonder if Sontag didn’t just brainstorm a list of questions and then primed her pump thereby, so that her notes responded to her questions. Ah, to have her Surplus Attention Disorder, her “moral appetitiveness and lust for variety,” her “intense, uncomplicatedly attentive concentration.” I don’t think this is the same thing as Mindfulness, though.
Sontag is “a stubbornly unspecialized writer who has so far been largely unable to incorporate into either novels or essays my evolving radical political convictions and sense of moral dilemma at being a citizen of the American empire.” And she admits she is “one more volunteer in the armchair army of bourgeois intellectuals with radical sympathies in the head.” Still, she went where she was not supposed to go, even though it appears that she could not get out of her head for very long.
Alas, North Vietnam was not what she expected: “Made miserable and angry for four years by knowledge of the excruciating suffering of the Vietnamese people at the hands of my government, now that I was actually there and being plied with gifts and flowers and rhetoric and tea and seemingly exaggerated kindness, I didn’t feel any more than I already had ten thousand miles away.” Just a couple of years before in South Vietnam, the Order of Interbeing became a reality, as the young people tried to live according to precepts like this one: “Do not think that the knowledge that you presently possess is changeless, absolute truth. Avoid being narrow-minded and bound to present views. Learn and practice nonattachment from views in order to be open to receive others’ viewpoints. Truth is found in life and not merely in conceptual knowledge. Be ready to learn throughout your entire life and to observe reality in yourself and in the world at all times.”
An intellectual may be, as Camus said, someone whose mind watches itself, but if only Sontag could have relaxed more and learned how to breathe in the present moment. “The first experience of being there absurdly resembled 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.” When traveling to another land, there’s unending inner work to do, like letting go of expectations and illusions and delusions and projections.
She gets points for candor and points off for self-consciousness in the extreme: “My problem was that I (luckier than Godard) was now actually in Vietnam for a brief time, yet somehow was unable to make the full intellectual and emotional connections that my political and moral solidarity with Vietnam implied.”
And how hard it may be to express solidarity by checking one’s intellectual presumption: “My first reaction to the didactically positive way the Vietnamese have of recounting their history is to find it simple-minded (‘Childish’) again.” I suppose they weren’t raised on the profound European and ironic sensibility of Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust, like she was. She admits as much here: “Despite my admiration for the Vietnamese and my shame over the deeds of my country, I still feel like someone from a ‘big’ culture visiting a ‘little’ culture. My consciousness, reared in that ‘big’ culture, is a creature with many organs, accustomed to being fed by a stream of cultural goods, and infected by irony.” How difficult it is to transform our “big culture” habit-energy!
“How odd to feel estranged from Vietnam here, when Vietnam has been present in my thoughts every day in America.” I am reminded that when Simone said to me on the phone when I was in Gaza, “it’s amazing what you all are doing,” she had an idea of Gaza, but I was living it, and the days and nights there were full of ordinary moments.
An elite education can evidently have its downside: “The moment one begins to be affected by the moral beauty of the Vietnamese, not to mention their physical grace, a derisive inner voice starts calling it phony sentimentality.” When as a sophisticated teen-ager she got to the “Sermon at the Stone” at the end of The Brothers Karamazov, did Sontag’s system react violently to all that “sentimental slop”?
Maybe the Vietnamese were like the Nicaraguans we met in 1984. They could make a distinction between the policies of our government and the American people: “it seems to me a defect that the North Vietnamese aren’t good enough haters. How else to explain the odd fact that they actually appear to be quite fond of America?” “Poets read us verses about ‘your Walt Whitman’ and ‘your Edgar Allen Poe.’” Did the Vietnamese contradict themselves, very well then, they contradicted themselves, they contained “both/and” multitudes.
As U.S. poet Gary Snyder observed, “Occidentals always run the risk of falling into simplistic dualism.” Especially the most sophisticated and incisive of them.
Susan Sontag spent two weeks in North Vietnam in 1968, and wrote 90 pages about her experiences. (Perhaps I will cull from those notebooks I kept in Gaza and the West Bank to feed my imagination as to what the truth is about Palestine. Would it be a long essay? Would it be something that I work into a novel, with all my students mixed up together? Will it be a series of short articles that I post at CTSA?) I wonder if Sontag didn’t just brainstorm a list of questions and then primed her pump thereby, so that her notes responded to her questions. Ah, to have her Surplus Attention Disorder, her “moral appetitiveness and lust for variety,” her “intense, uncomplicatedly attentive concentration.” I don’t think this is the same thing as Mindfulness, though.
Sontag is “a stubbornly unspecialized writer who has so far been largely unable to incorporate into either novels or essays my evolving radical political convictions and sense of moral dilemma at being a citizen of the American empire.” And she admits she is “one more volunteer in the armchair army of bourgeois intellectuals with radical sympathies in the head.” Still, she went where she was not supposed to go, even though it appears that she could not get out of her head for very long.
Alas, North Vietnam was not what she expected: “Made miserable and angry for four years by knowledge of the excruciating suffering of the Vietnamese people at the hands of my government, now that I was actually there and being plied with gifts and flowers and rhetoric and tea and seemingly exaggerated kindness, I didn’t feel any more than I already had ten thousand miles away.” Just a couple of years before in South Vietnam, the Order of Interbeing became a reality, as the young people tried to live according to precepts like this one: “Do not think that the knowledge that you presently possess is changeless, absolute truth. Avoid being narrow-minded and bound to present views. Learn and practice nonattachment from views in order to be open to receive others’ viewpoints. Truth is found in life and not merely in conceptual knowledge. Be ready to learn throughout your entire life and to observe reality in yourself and in the world at all times.”
An intellectual may be, as Camus said, someone whose mind watches itself, but if only Sontag could have relaxed more and learned how to breathe in the present moment. “The first experience of being there absurdly resembled 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.” When traveling to another land, there’s unending inner work to do, like letting go of expectations and illusions and delusions and projections.
She gets points for candor and points off for self-consciousness in the extreme: “My problem was that I (luckier than Godard) was now actually in Vietnam for a brief time, yet somehow was unable to make the full intellectual and emotional connections that my political and moral solidarity with Vietnam implied.”
And how hard it may be to express solidarity by checking one’s intellectual presumption: “My first reaction to the didactically positive way the Vietnamese have of recounting their history is to find it simple-minded (‘Childish’) again.” I suppose they weren’t raised on the profound European and ironic sensibility of Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust, like she was. She admits as much here: “Despite my admiration for the Vietnamese and my shame over the deeds of my country, I still feel like someone from a ‘big’ culture visiting a ‘little’ culture. My consciousness, reared in that ‘big’ culture, is a creature with many organs, accustomed to being fed by a stream of cultural goods, and infected by irony.” How difficult it is to transform our “big culture” habit-energy!
“How odd to feel estranged from Vietnam here, when Vietnam has been present in my thoughts every day in America.” I am reminded that when Simone said to me on the phone when I was in Gaza, “it’s amazing what you all are doing,” she had an idea of Gaza, but I was living it, and the days and nights there were full of ordinary moments.
An elite education can evidently have its downside: “The moment one begins to be affected by the moral beauty of the Vietnamese, not to mention their physical grace, a derisive inner voice starts calling it phony sentimentality.” When as a sophisticated teen-ager she got to the “Sermon at the Stone” at the end of The Brothers Karamazov, did Sontag’s system react violently to all that “sentimental slop”?
Maybe the Vietnamese were like the Nicaraguans we met in 1984. They could make a distinction between the policies of our government and the American people: “it seems to me a defect that the North Vietnamese aren’t good enough haters. How else to explain the odd fact that they actually appear to be quite fond of America?” “Poets read us verses about ‘your Walt Whitman’ and ‘your Edgar Allen Poe.’” Did the Vietnamese contradict themselves, very well then, they contradicted themselves, they contained “both/and” multitudes.
As U.S. poet Gary Snyder observed, “Occidentals always run the risk of falling into simplistic dualism.” Especially the most sophisticated and incisive of them.
March 6, 2008
Brilliant. Moving, insightful, introspective and intelligently argued. A lovely piece of writing. Perhaps the only piece by Sontag that I've read that I've been genuinely impressed by and admire.
February 25, 2025
Sontag does this thing where she goes into a revolutionary society and then gets kind of obsessed with it like a weeb gets obsessed with Japan. Throughout the essay her own self-hatred comes through as infantilizing the Vietnamese people for their collectivism (which she praises anyways). She has some weird pseudo self awareness where she points out the downfalls of her views but then blames them all on american identity, which is exactly what her trip to vietnam should show her NOT to so. she realizes patriotism is essential to a revolution but isn't aware enough to put it into personal practice. her idea of the lack of distinction between public and private life in vietnam is what allows for less chauvinistic displays of patriotism and more simply conversation and that's what leads to successful revolution but she overcorrects - rather than being overly self analysitc and private she tries to be fully collective and public
November 24, 2024
Mình đọc bản dịch tiếng Việt bởi Phan Xích Linh vì chưa tìm được bản gốc tiếng Anh và đánh giá cao chất lượng dịch thuật của dịch giả.
Đây là tác phẩm thứ 2 từ Susan Sontag mà mình đọc và sau trải nghiệm này, mình càng yêu mến và nể phục trí tuệ, tài năng của bà hơn. Chỉ trong hơn 100 trang sách mà bà có thể mô tả cùng phân tích cực kỳ tinh tế sự khác nhau giữa góc nhìn văn hoá, chính trị, lối sống giữa Hoa Kỳ & Việt Nam qua chuyến thăm Hà Nội ngắn ngủi. Khả năng quan sát nhạy bén của Sontag còn chỉ ra rất nhiều điểm về bản chất của người Việt mà mình chưa bao giờ nhận ra, và bà có thể viết ra những suy nghĩ đấy đi kèm lập luận mạch lạc, rõ ràng với thái độ đầy tôn trọng và công bằng.
Ước chi hai bà Susan Sontag và Xuân Phượng từng có cơ hội gặp nhau và cùng trao đổi về cuộc đời thế sự - mình cá là cuộc trò chuyện sẽ cực kỳ hưng phấn và sâu sắc.
Đây là tác phẩm thứ 2 từ Susan Sontag mà mình đọc và sau trải nghiệm này, mình càng yêu mến và nể phục trí tuệ, tài năng của bà hơn. Chỉ trong hơn 100 trang sách mà bà có thể mô tả cùng phân tích cực kỳ tinh tế sự khác nhau giữa góc nhìn văn hoá, chính trị, lối sống giữa Hoa Kỳ & Việt Nam qua chuyến thăm Hà Nội ngắn ngủi. Khả năng quan sát nhạy bén của Sontag còn chỉ ra rất nhiều điểm về bản chất của người Việt mà mình chưa bao giờ nhận ra, và bà có thể viết ra những suy nghĩ đấy đi kèm lập luận mạch lạc, rõ ràng với thái độ đầy tôn trọng và công bằng.
Ước chi hai bà Susan Sontag và Xuân Phượng từng có cơ hội gặp nhau và cùng trao đổi về cuộc đời thế sự - mình cá là cuộc trò chuyện sẽ cực kỳ hưng phấn và sâu sắc.
December 29, 2025
Brutally self-aware and brilliant reflections of her two-week visit as a guest of North Vietnam in 1968. Surprisingly also helped me understand and face my own emotions and feelings towards interacting with the “third-world” as both an Asian diaspora and an American. Although…I’m gonna have to reconcile the tension with the former identity on my own.
1000% this read enhanced my experience of Hanoi. I thought my trip>Susan Sontag’s (kinda obvious why) but it’s not a competition. Hanoi is a special place and it has the ability to make almost any visitor feel special enough to write an account as thoroughly honest and introspective as this one. I think Susan Sontag deserves a lot of credit for this impression.
1000% this read enhanced my experience of Hanoi. I thought my trip>Susan Sontag’s (kinda obvious why) but it’s not a competition. Hanoi is a special place and it has the ability to make almost any visitor feel special enough to write an account as thoroughly honest and introspective as this one. I think Susan Sontag deserves a lot of credit for this impression.
December 15, 2023
to me this is a staggering work and a glorious insight into her mind - thinking + observation/evaluation processes, modes of ethical self-checking, and more. i'm surprised to see that it is not considered a classic and being treated as such
August 26, 2024
“Il fenomeno dell'angoscia esistenziale, dell'alienazione, non esiste assolutamente tra i vietnamiti, probabilmente anche perché non hanno il nostro tipo di "ego" e la nostra dotazione di fluttuanti rimorsi.”
January 3, 2024
This is what Didion's South and West should have been, but unfortunately wasn't.
March 18, 2024
Lukewarm arrogance
October 21, 2024
I cried for what I was made of. For i was made of Vietnamese materials.
I am Vietnamese.
I am Vietnamese.
June 9, 2025
someone commented 'lukewarm arrogance,' likewise
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September 4, 2025buồn cười nhất là nội dung sai chính tả
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September 16, 2025Luin tän suomeksi mutta suomipainosta ei oo täällä... Laittakaa se tänne....
January 2, 2026
Prescient for today’s world.
January 25, 2026
i prefer kundera
July 26, 2016
I love the candor and honesty that Sontag has shown in this work, which keeps reminding me of my own trip to Hanoi last year. The frustration and disorientation upon her arrive, the speculation on the politeness and admiration when encountering Vietnamese seem so familiar to me. I love Sontag's genuine attitudes towards her own experience and her rather detached tone and insightful yet empathetic thoughts.
March 30, 2016
Love you, Sontag...
January 27, 2013
is there somewhere where she revisits this subject, years later...?
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews