A trip down memory lane with Hanoi Jane
The Metropole hotel opens up its air-raid shelter where the Hollywood actress once took refuge
Go down an unassuming stairway between the pool and outdoor bar at the luxurious Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi hotel and you find yourself in an old air-raid shelter.
The basement shelter was rediscovered during renovations two years ago and is now open to visitors. They come because this place was made famous when Jane Fonda and other Westerners took refuge here during the Vietnam War.
Tran Minh Quoc, former Vietnamese ambassador to Italy, remembers hunkering in the shelter with Fonda when he served as her interpreter during her June 1972 visit to Hanoi.
Quoc, 65, says Fonda showed no signs of fear, grabbing her camera and heading above ground as soon as the sirens stopped. But he also recalls her emotional side, especially when she burst into tears at seeing schoolchildren wearing straw hoods for protection during bombings.
Fonda gained global fame as a smart and sexy big-screen presence in the 1960s. But around 1970 she became an increasingly active opponent of creeping US involvement in Vietnam.
After criticising the administration of then president Richard Nixon for escalating the air campaign against North Vietnam, she received an invitation to visit Hanoi in May 1972. It came from the Vietnamese Committee for Solidarity with the American People, a group that invited several hundred US activists to visit during the war.
Few North Vietnamese at the time had seen a Jane Fonda movie. Yet Chu Chi Thanh, a former cameraman for the state broadcaster, remembers being impressed by the sight of her in a traditional Vietnamese ao ba ba outfit.
Fonda was very approachable, Thanh says, recalling it made him realise that while the US military was their enemy, the American people were friends. It reassured him that his country was not in fact isolated.
Fonda was followed by cameras everywhere she went in war-torn Hanoi, including a visit to Bach Mai Hospital. She also spoke to US soldiers in South Vietnam about the destruction she had seen.
These actions on what was then considered enemy territory caused a major stir back home, where she was pilloried as “Hanoi Jane” in the right-wing and establishment media.
According to Norm Smith, who was stationed in South Vietnam as a civilian employee of the US military during the war, Fonda deserves to be branded a traitor because her visit bolstered North Vietnam’s position as they sought to negotiate an end to the war with the Paris Peace Accords.
Although Fonda was undeterred by the criticism, she said, “I will go to my grave regretting the photograph of me in an anti-aircraft carrier [sic].” She was referring to the iconic picture of her sitting at the controls of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun that made it look like she was taking aim at her own country.
When she and Quoc met again in the United States in 2002, she asked if she had been set up. He answered no, but later admitted Fonda’s visit had been incredibly valuable to North Vietnam. When the two met in 2002, Fonda told Quoc she wanted to someday return to Vietnam. Eleven years on, however, she has not been back.
