Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao (Bloomsbury Publishing)
Every once in a while, but not often enough, a book makes me want to meet the writer, sit and chat, become best friends. Failing that, I read whatever I can find about that author, trying to fit the jigsaw puzzle pieces of her life together to make a whole person from those fragments of information.
This is what happened when I finished the last page of Sanmao’s Stories of the Sahara. The kohl-encircled piercing stare gleaming from the determined face of a slender woman dressed in black, standing within a blurred desert street scene, gives little away. Nor did I learn much about her background in her vivid essays where she figures prominently but usually as an observer.
How did this young woman from Taiwan end up married to a Spaniard, living in the Sahara? Sanmao doesn’t say. She begins her book with “I desperately wanted to be the first female explorer to cross the Sahara,” but gives no clue as to how this ambition came into being. other than blaming the National Geographic. She doesn’t even say if her ambition was realized. Instead she gives vivid glimpses of life in a desert outpost, living among Sahwari villagers, with a Spanish military camp some distance away. Her husband Jose persuades her to marry him, but she does so only after exploring for three months, “running around the tents of the native nomads with my backpack and camera.” She mentions that she knew Jose in Madrid, but how they met is never divulged. The only reason why Sanmao writes about their wedding, I suspect, is because it’s great comic fodder, as is her description of setting up a household, repurposing an old tire and boards from crates that once held coffins.
Her satirical humor is turned only upon herself and, peripherally, upon Jose. During her year in the Sahara, she is acutely aware of how her neighbors live, and she reports on this with deep respect, even when she finds the events horrifying.
Her story of the ten-year-old bride who lives next door and has become her friend, the slave who can neither hear nor speak but communicates through pantomime and gifts, the Spanish soldier who is haunted by both his slaughtered battalion and the hate he has for the tribesmen who killed them, the rebel and his lover who were destroyed by politics--all are described with compassion, along with cool, dispassionate details. Even when she tells about the night Jose was caught in a quagmire and the men whom she flags down for assistance decide to rape her instead, Sanmao is almost matter of fact in her narrative, as though this had happened to someone else. She sees no villains, simply people who exist in a different, inexplicable, and fascinating way of being, within their own world.
She is clearly in love with the desert, which she reveals in brief snapshots. Its yellow dust filling the sky during sandstorms, its pale orange light at sunrise, even its “heat that made you wish for death,” its nights of “frozen black,” all are unveiled in swift descriptions that she sweeps tnto the fabric of her stories, making the Sahara as irresistible as the tales themselves.
Who was this woman? Born in China in 1943, raised in Taiwan, a traveler who went to 55 countries in 14 years, who studied in Madrid, Berlin, and Illinois during the 60s --she was a child whose ambition was to marry Picasso, a young woman who left home in her early twenties and returned as a celebrity (and a Spanish citizen) when she was 38, a writer who sold 15 million copies of her 15 books and gave five hundred talks to audiences numbering in the thousands in Taipei, before she hung herself with a pair of silk stockings at the age of 47.
Jose died in a diving accident when the two of them lived in the Canary Islands. Sanmao took too many pills on purpose soon after she was widowed and years later still referred to him in the present tense, while admitting “I had never been passionately in love with him. At the same time I felt incredibly lucky and at ease.” Passionate or not, how could she resist a man who gave her a camel skull, complete with teeth, as a wedding gift? Passionate pales next to the love and understanding that comes with a present like that. Living without the man who had loved her from the time he was sixteen, who told the woman eight years older than he that he would marry her when he grew up, must have stripped much of the color from Sanmao’s life. She continued to write but “her later pieces are all veiled in melancholy.”
“Solipsistic,” a Chinese-American writer said of Sanmao in the New Yorker, “...myopic, not truly curious.” If this is true, it was certainly lost in translation. Sanmao’s life was her art, and her beam of curiosity was laser sharp, at least as it’s conveyed by Mike Fu’s English interpretation from the original Chinese. We should be all be as myopic as this woman of many names--Sanmao. Echo Ping Chen, Chen Maoping--who lived a life of stories and offered them up with relish and charm.~Janet Brown