D
on’t ask me where I’m
from,” opens the song
‘Olive Tree’, a folksy
Chinese language ballad
covered time and again
since the late 1970s. “My home is far
away...” The song is at once melancholic
and hopeful, a rumination on place and
belonging by a writer who professes to be
rootless and wandering. While extolling
the beauty of nature, the few verses
manage to convey the ethereal and the
illusory. The lyrics reveal a little of the
nature of the woman who penned them
over 40 years ago, known alternately as
Echo, Chen Ping and Sanmao. Impish
polyglot, literary idol, she provided a
symbol of generational yearnings, her
life defined by upheaval and romance in
equal measure.
By her untimely death in early 1991,
Sanmao was an accomplished writer,
translator and cultural icon in Greater
China, with nearly two dozen books
to her name. Her collections of stories
traced the arc of her unprecedented
trajectory, from childhood mischief
in Taipei to a maudlin coming of age
in western Europe, from the ache and
wonderment of life in western Africa to
the ineffable humanity she discovered in
the Canary Islands, across Latin America
and wherever she roamed.
Sanmao was born Chen Maoping in
the south-western Chinese municipality
of Chongqing (formerly Romanised as
Chungking), the second daughter of a
middle-class family. According to an
oft-retold anecdote, she dropped the
first character ‘mao’ in her given name
because the character’s complexity was
too difficult for her to write as a child.The precocious Chen Ping clashed
frequently with school authorities
and societal expectations during her
upbringing in Taiwan, to where the
family relocated in the late 1940s during
the Chinese Civil War. A bookworm at
heart, Chen began devouring all manner
of Chinese and western literature from
a young age. In the 1960s, she ventured
abroad – at a time when very few Chi-
nese women had the freedom or courage
to move about independently – making
her home in Madrid, West Berlin and
Chicago, and adopting the name Echo
among her western friends.
Several years later, Echo returned to
Taipei and became engaged to her lover,
a 40-something teacher from Germany.
Her fiancé’s sudden death from a heart
attack sent her into a period of despond-
ence that led to a suicide attempt. After
her recovery, she left Taiwan in haste
and headed to Africa, by way of Spain.
In 1974 Echo married an old friend
from Madrid, José María Quero, in the
town of El-Aaiún (sometimes spelled
Laâyoune), provincial capital of the
Spanish Sahara. Her sketches of life in
the colonial desert began to appear in
Ta iw a n’s United Daily News, garner-
ing a considerable popular readership.
Autobiographical in nature, these tales
introduced the author and protagonist
as a first-person narrator by yet another
name: Sanmao.
Sanmao rocketed to fame in 1976
with the release of the collected Stories
of the Sahara by Taiwanese publisher
Crown. Her candid tales of misad-
venture and poignant vignettes of the
human condition were widely acclaimed
in Taiwan, Hong Kong and, eventually,mainland China. In her narratives, her
husband José appears as both foil and
protector. Only a stoic and pragmatic
man like him could match the fiery, wily
Sanmao. He understands her intuitively,
and wants her to be herself to the utmost.
Through her portrayal of their part-
nership, Sanmao’s earnest, egalitarian
sensibilities and casual worldliness cast
her as a figure of devotion for millions of
youth, especially young women.
Following years in the western Saha-
ra, after Spain relinquished the territory
in 1975 José and Sanmao relocated to the
Canary Islands, where she continued to
write about her quotidian existence with
empathy and self-reflection. In 1979,
José died in a freak diving accident, aged
just 27. Sanmao returned to Taiwan,
but remained in the literary and cultural
spotlight. She produced many more
essays and travelogues, translated the
Argentine comic strip Mafalda into Chi-
nese and wrote dozens of songs as well as
a screenplay, filmed as Red Dust (1990).
She took her own life at the age of 47.
“Why do I wander, wander so far
away?” laments ‘Olive Tree’. The song
hauntingly encapsulates Sanmao’s bitter-
sweet devotion to a vagabond life. Dec-
ades later, her words continue to resonate
with wayward youth and middle-aged
nostalgics alike. This world, with all its
capacity for sorrow and joy, could never
be as peaceful as the eponymous olive
trees of her dreams. But in wandering,
one finds solace; in the simple truths of
nature, divine meaning.Mike Fu is a New York-based writer, editor and
translator into English of Sanmao’s Stories of the
Sahara (Bloomsbury, 2019)“