Remembering Sanmao, the Taiwanese travel writer who lived in the desert
She was born some eighty years ago today.
Hello! I’m Emily, and this is a newsletter about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a rapidly changing world & our personal and collective place in it.
Friends & readers,
Have you heard of Sanmao, the Taiwanese travel writer who inspired generations of young women in the Chinese-speaking world? She was born some eighty years ago today, in 1943, and on this occasion, for your Sunday reading, I’m republishing here an essay I wrote for Mekong Review of her collection, Stories of the Sahara, which was translated into English for the first time in 2019 by Mike Fu—whom I also did a Q&A with (we had an interesting conversation about the line between fact/fiction and also his experience navigating thorny issues of identity). It’s also an opportune moment to remind ourselves of the forgotten war in Western Sahara that has persisted for over six decades, as new tensions surge.
I only really came to Sanmao when the Spanish translation of this book was published a few years ago. (I think my Taiwanese auntie might have mentioned her briefly before, but I may well be imagining this in hindsight.) So if you’ve grown up with her work, or if you’ve read the book and have any thoughts, I would be curious to hear it ❤️
When I learned recently about the vagabond Taiwanese writer Sanmao, she came as a curiosity more than a revelation. The lone Asian woman, travelling to far-flung places and defying well-trodden paths laid out for her, is nothing so unconventional today, but it must have been decades ago.
Not known to me, generations of Taiwanese and Chinese women had come of age with Sanmao as an inspiration. Many who are named Echo apparently trace their name’s origins back to her, as it was the English name she sometimes used. The retrospectives I read depict her as a literary celebrity in her day, staring out from photographs with melancholic kohl-rimmed eyes, posed in long flowy dresses with an air of effortless glamour. Until her death in 1991—reportedly by suicide, about a decade after her Spanish husband José María Quero died in a diving accident—she travelled to more than fifty countries and published more than twenty books, and also wrote the screenplay for the acclaimed film Red Dust.
I have long wrestled with my own proclivities for wandering, which has similarly taken me to remote, unfamiliar lands, and I was intrigued by Sanmao. We had been to different places, but I had also often travelled on my own and learned to speak and navigate part of the world in Spanish, and I wondered if her journeys would reveal anything to me about mine.
“I couldn’t understand the feeling of homesickness that I had, inexplicable and yet so decisive, towards that vast and unfamiliar land, as if echoing from a past life,” she writes in Stories of the Sahara, recently published in English for the first time. Due to some discrepancies in the historical detail, I realised the book to be a mix of memoir and fiction—though it’s not introduced as such and does not attempt to draw a line between them—about her time in the desert, published in Mandarin in 1976 and since translated into various languages, with more than fifteen million copies reportedly sold.
In fact, Sanmao is her narrative persona, derived from the protagonist in a well-known Chinese comic strip: a homeless boy who has only three hairs on his head—chosen, she said, to reflect how she wanted to record the lives of ordinary people whose voices often went unheard. Her real name was Chen Ping, and she was born in 1943 in Chongqing before fleeing with her family to Taiwan when Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China in 1949. She dropped out of school after troubles with a teacher, read philosophy at university, studied and worked in Spain, Germany, and the United States, learned many languages, travelled alone to various places, and suffered an early tragedy when her first fiancé died of a heart attack. By the time she arrived in the Sahara in 1974, lured by a National Geographic spread, it seemed she had already lived several lives.