From mid-July to mid-August 1979, with the compass of an investigative journalist in the new Vietnam, following the American flight after the fall of Saigon in 1975, Gabriel García Márquez traveled the country from north to south, from east to west, to assess the objectivity of the reunification phenomenon in 1976 and one of its consequences: the exodus of the boat people. However, after seeing the consequences of the American delirium in Saigon, it seemed secondary to the heartbreaking situation that year that the unified country was facing.
43 years after his visit, 40 years after his Nobel Prize for Literature and 55 years after the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, he is remembered from Hanoi, where there are no longer any journalists who knew him, except for Pham Dinh Loi, from the Vietnam News Agency, assigned to the Spanish section, who shortly after was one of three translators in a team with Nguyen Trung Duc of One Hundred Years of Solitude, in Vietnamese Tram Nam Co Don .
He tells us that during his work, García Márquez visited many places and spoke with many people in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, and Vung Tau, as well as in the surrounding areas. He was received by Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, and visited the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and the Vietnam Writers Association. He was also interviewed for the Van Nghe (Literature and Art) newspaper.
