NONFICTION - June 12, 1994

SEEING VIETNAM: Encounters on the Road and Heart by Susan Brownmiller (HarperCollins: $22; 228 pp.) What was Susan Brownmiller thinking about when she wrote this strange travelogue about Vietnam? It has the feel of a posh travel assignment run amok (in fact, Travel & Leisure sent Brownmiller to Vietnam in 1992). What’s the fanciest hotel in Hanoi? How do you teach your translator the English phrase “I am hot to trot”? Shopping, shopping, shopping, lamely justified as one way to understand the economy growing in Vietnam. “Slowly it dawned on us,” she writes, “that most of the Asian faces we were seeing in Hanoi’s upscale restaurants weren’t Vietnamese.” I believe she has spent decades thinking about Vietnam and what it means to be an American there, but why didn’t she write that book instead of this shopper’s guide to a broken country? At one point, some women in a park in Hanoi gather around Brownmiller asking, through a translator, how she likes Hanoi. “Tell them I like Hanoi very much. Hanoi is a beautiful city, with beautiful parks. Tell them. . . . Oh Jesus, God. Tell them I’m very sorry for what my country did to your country. And I burst into tears.” It must be said that, moving as this point may be, the rest of the book is so trite, so strained between travelogue and political conscience, that a reader cannot sympathize.