Taiwanese writer and translator Sanmao (三毛, 1943-1991, actual name Chen Maoping 陳懋平, and sometimes known by her English name, Echo Chan) was a prolific writer, best known for her travel tales and reflections. She was also fluent and proficient in Spanish and German.
Her writing is pensive. She wore a carefree heart with a bohemian style, and melancholy and depression marked her life, which ended by suicide at age 47 in 1991. Last year, Google Doodle honored what would have been her 76th birthday.
Sanmao wrote many books about her life and her musings. Among those, she wrote an iconic book in Chinese about her experiences living in the Spanish Sahara, first published as essays, and then as a book in 1976, described as a travelogue and an autobiography titled, 'Stories of the Sahara' 《撒哈拉的故事》, 1976.
The first English translation penned by Mike Fu (also currently Assistant Dean for Global Initiatives at Parsons School of Design) has been published in January 2020. Although I've no intention of reading this English translation, I couldn't help checking out Xiao Yue Shan's long and thoughtful review titled, 'Coming Home to Everywhere: On Sanmao's Stories of the Sahara', published in Asymptote on 9 March 2020.
Diaries do not take particularly well to translation, as their languages, more faithful to mobility than to the stationary, are living. In Mike Fu’s rendition, however, the reluctance of the original language to relinquish its ownership is mediated by the mostly elegant simplicity of an English that does not try to capture the impossible quality of Sanmao’s voice, but commits to the more archaeological qualities of text. Sifting through the sentences, a form emerges, and though she is as unreliable to us as we suspect she is to herself, patterns of life are also unveiled. Inevitably, however, some of the humour of the original—contributed by the frequent hyperbolic and rhythmic, adjectival phrases of Chinese—dissipates, creating a mirage, dramatics and laughter dangling.
Since my teens, I've read Sanmao's writings many times over. To be honest, it was tough-going because I didn't understand her experiences or what she was trying to say. I didn't share any of her ideals and desires. Growing up differently didn't make me want to live her life. It was only much later in my twenties that when I read her books again, I begin to understand the layers beneath the desire to travel. And yes, I've also realized the differences in terms of stories collated in each edition/publication. I've loaned out all of my copies of her books that till now, I don't have one left! Arrrgh. I've got to rectify that soon.
I was most captivated by Sanmao's stories of the Sahara desert where she lived with her Spanish husband Jose Maria Quero y Ruiz (whom she married in 1973, and he passed away in a diving accident in 1979), and mingled closely with the indigenous people. Those were odd times since the Western Sahara still belonged to the Spanish Sahara from 1884 to 1975.
The most powerful story of the volume appears near the end, under the title “Crying Camels,” detailing the brutal consequences of the conflict between Spain and Morocco for control of the Western Sahara. It is also one omitted in certain Chinese-language editions. In a rare literary flourish, the story is told in traumatic flashback, culminating in a horrifying public rape and murder. In the Chinese version, Sanmao’s lines, which normally begin a new paragraph after nearly every sentence, suddenly crowd the eye in a jarringly aberrant block of text when describing her recollection of this depravity, almost as if she is trying to get the words out as quickly as possible, as if she cannot bear them. The sentences stutter. Though her I is still there, it is no longer commenting and curating, but desperate. Frantic.
In the past few decades, this book has been described as a a 'must-read' for thousands of young women yearning for independence from conservative social norms' back then. I read it as tales of adventure and exploring. Without social media and much Internet back then, the notion of traveling and being a nomad is romantic and exciting. I don't know if the world was a safer place back then. Now, it isn't exactly safe and traveling in a time of complicated politics and coronaviruses is a bad combination.
Asymptote reviewer and contributing editor Xiao Yue has obviously read many of Sanmao's works and pondered over the author's musings. In the review, she also wrote this of Sanmao,
The woman’s journey is often an anxiety of identity, a warring of body politics and self-consciousness of representation. Sanmao is aware of her bodily strangeness, but does not allow her recognized identity to take presence over her physicality. Rarely does she interrogate her alien status—peripateticism having long overwhelmed such didactics. She neither accuses her femininity or ethnicity, nor attempts to defuse it by way of social negotiation—these qualities are, to her, as transferrable and amenable as elastic-waist clothing. The sharp impressions of her locality give the sense of her life as experiment, thrill of discovery and novelty overwhelming self-categorization. Identity does not take precedence over physicality, and the ecstatic shattering of past lives leads to the manifestation of a different otherness, one that is not threatening, but simply separate. In watching, she never wonders what it is like to be watched in return. She refers to her desert home as a Chinese restaurant, exclaims to José that he is “Double-Oh-Seven and I’m the evil Oriental woman in the movie,” and thinks little else of it. It is, perhaps, a definition of freedom.
I have long read the other books, but I don't bother re-reading them since I'm not keen to read about the author's growing up years; although I admired how she has always lived on her own terms, never acquiescing. The other book that I'm fond of is, 'My Treasures'《我的寶貝》 1987. The book details 86 'treasures' that are precious to the author. It tells of their origin, acquisition and their significance. In an excellently written obituary to the author in The New York Times published on October 23, 2019, Mike Ives and Katherine Li highlighted,
One of her last books, “My Treasures,” is a collection of 86 short essays that celebrate clothing, jewelry, hand-decorated bowls and other objects that she had purchased during her travels.
In one essay, Sanmao pauses to analyze her own wardrobe, and lands on a metaphor.
“The jeans I was wearing were bought in Shilin, my boots were from Spain, my bag was from Costa Rica, and my jacket was from Paris,” she writes. “An international smorgasbord; and you could say they all united harmoniously and peacefully — and that’s exactly me.”
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