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. But being in Hanoi was far more mysterious, more puzzling intellectually, than I expected. I found that I couldn’t avoid worrying and wondering how well I understood the Vietnamese, and they me and my country.
