Sanmao

Sanmao ( Chinese 三毛; born March 26, 1943 in Chongqing , Republic of China ; † January 4, 1991 in Taipei , Taiwan ) was a Taiwanese writer . She made a name for herself from 1976 with autobiographical works, but also became known in her native Taiwan through her long journeys and translations. By the time she died, she is said to have traveled to 59 countries. She studied philosophy and sometimes taught German. Born as Chen Mao-ping (陳 懋 平), she chose her stage namebased on the main character in the first book she got hold of, San Mao's Wanderings from comic artist Zhang Leping , whom she later met personally. In the English- speaking world she is also known as Echo or Echo Chan , the first name she gave herself in Latin letters, derived from the Greek nymph of the same name .

origin

Sanmao was born in Chongqing to the lawyer Chen Siqing and his wife Miao Jinlan. The family includes an older sister, Chen Tianxin. The parents were devout Christians. They were originally from Zhejiang . After the Second Sino-Japanese War , the family moved to Nanjing . When Sanmao was six years old, the family fled the communists to Taiwan . Nevertheless, the parents also criticized the lack of freedom in the Taiwanese school system of the time.

Already as a child, Sanmao was interested in classical and contemporary Chinese literature and an avid reader of authors such as Lu Xun , Ba Jin , Bing Xin , Lao She , and Yu Dafu . She was also fascinated by European and American classics, including The Count of Monte Christo , Don Quixote and Gone with the Wind . She was particularly influenced by one of the four outstanding Chinese classics, The Dream of the Red Chamber , an enormously extensive and demanding novel that she read as a 5th grade student. When asked what she wanted to be later, she replied that she was planning to marry a great artist like Pablo Picasso .

Because of her passion for literature, Sanmao had rather poor grades in other subjects, especially mathematics . After she was mistreated at the age of 12 by a teacher who painted black circles around her eyes and humiliated her in front of the entire class, she stopped attending school. Her father taught her English and classical literature at home. House tutors Shao Youxan and Gu Fusheng taught her to play the piano and paint.

Sanmao wrote her first essay at the age of 19 in 1962.

Life and Literary Career

Language lessons in Madrid and Berlin

At the Chinese Culture University in Taiwan studied Sanmao 1964 with special permission of the founder Chang Chi-yun philosophy to solve to be clear about the "meaning of life" and their personal problems. She fell in love with a fellow student, but found herself disappointed in the romance and moved to Madrid on her own in 1967 , where she learned Spanish. In 1969, Sanmao moved to Germany , where she took German lessons for up to 16 hours a day at the Berlin Goethe Institute . After only nine months she received her language diploma as a German teacher. She processed her experiences during that time in the short story Fallen City , which appeared in the 1982 newspaper Hai Xia . In it, she reported that there was enormous social pressure in order not to disappoint her parents, who financed her stay abroad, and found herself stressed by a German fellow student because he questioned her ability to spell German and even consumed audio books while sleeping To continue to learn “unconsciously”. She worked in the law library at the University of Illinois before returning to Taiwan at age 26. She got engaged to a German teacher there, but he died of a heart attack before they could get married. Sanmao returned to Madrid, where she taught English in a primary school.

Stories from the Sahara

In 1976 she published the autobiographical The Stories of the Sahara , previously only translated into English , the result of her life experiences at the side of her Spanish husband José María Quero, who came from Jaén and with whom she lived in the then capital of the Spanish Western Sahara, El Aaiún . She met José during her first stay in Madrid in 1967. He was only 16 years old at the time and worked in the kitchen at the Taiwanese embassy. After he had persistently asked for her hand for more than six years and after reading an article in National Geographic she said she wanted to travel to the Sahara and even felt "homesick" for this area she had never seen before, she followed him in the remote area. Because of her longing for the desert, José had looked for work in the loading station of the world's largest phosphate mine Bou Craa , around 100 km from El Aaiún. In 1973 she married him - the honeymoon took him through the desert to Algeria and Mauritania - and thereby obtained Spanish citizenship. She describes the exact, sometimes comical, circumstances of the wedding in detail in the Stories of the Sahara . Half travel diary, half literary memoirs, the short stories from the Sahara , which have not yet been published in German, impress with their incisive style, precise observation and their very personal attitude, which at times comes close to a confession . Sanmao's description of the local Sahrawi people and their lifestyle is partly controversial because of the tendency towards "racist" passages. Sometimes the book is reminiscent of a Robinsonade , as Sanmao describes in detail how she and José set up their own home in an unplastered, very modest concrete building. The purchase of building materials and the employment of craftsmen prove to be too expensive in the desert city. In order to get money, the two go fishing on the Atlantic coast and sell their goods with little business acumen.

The editor-in-chief of the Taiwanese United Daily News , Ping Xintao, encourages Sanmao to process her experiences in reports. The result of this was the book that in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China is still one of the widely read, extremely popular writings to this day. Sanmao's earlier lyrics were published in English under the title Gone With the Rainy Season . Her experiences in Western Sahara and the Canary Islands also play an important role in other books .

In the Canary Islands

At the end of the seventies, Sanmao lives with her husband in the city of Telde on Gran Canaria , sometimes also in Santa Cruz de La Palma on La Palma . On September 30, 1979, José died in the waters off Barlovento on La Palma in a diving accident. In the place a memorial commemorates the accident, which shows two bronze diving fins. His grave in the cemetery of the island's capital Santa Cruz is now a much-visited pilgrimage site for Asian tourists. Since December 2018 there is even a signposted Sanmao tour on La Palma , which leads from the capital Santa Cruz to the natural swimming pool of La Fajana in Barlovento.

Return to Taiwan

A year after Jose's death, Sanmao returned to Taiwan again, from where she set off on a trip through Central and Latin America in November 1981 on behalf of the United Daily News . In the meantime, she wrote reports for Taiwanese newspapers and magazines, which were also published as books ( Over River and Mountain ). From 1981 to 1984 she taught at the Taipei University of Culture . For health reasons, she then limited herself to freelance writing and occasional seminars. She returned to her native city in mainland China for the first time in April 1989, and found out that she had many enthusiastic readers there. During this trip she also met the cartoonist Zhang Leping personally.

Between 1976 and her death in 1991, Sanmao published a total of 20 books, including the comic book translation Mafalda from Spanish into Chinese.

In East Asia, Sanmao is still regarded as a pioneering writer who is particularly valued by women, as she rebelled against traditional rules with her independent, cosmopolitan and independent lifestyle. In 2011, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of her death, San Mao's works were republished in a collection of eleven books, including the title The rainy season does not return about her childhood and youth in the first volume .

For the scientist Miriam Lang, Sanmao is the first “mass media celebrity phenomenon” in the Chinese-speaking world, not least because the author is also the heroine of her own stories. To distinguish Sanmao from the literary figure she created is an unusually complex challenge.

death

On January 4, 1991, at the age of only 47, Sanmao hanged himself with a pair of silk stockings while in a hospital in Taipei. Her numerous fans have since speculated about possible motives for suicide, including fear of being diagnosed with cancer, depression due to the untimely death of her husband José, or disappointment that her script for the film Red Dust (1990) won the Golden Horse Film Festival and Awards was not awarded. Since July 2000, her estate has been administered by the National Taiwan Cultural Center in Zhongxi. A memorial site designed by the architect Fu Wenwei was opened in Dinghai / Zhejiang in December 2000.

Quotes

“According to traditional Chinese upbringing, children should be accommodating. But Sanmao was different. Once a neighbor said something bad about our mother. Sanmao went to her and courageously argued with her about what had been said. She has had her own principles since childhood. ”- Chen Tianxin, Sanmao's elder sister

“Don't ask me where I'm from. My home is far away. I wander looking for the olive tree in my dreams. ”- from the poem The Olive Tree by Sanmao

“José had started calling me 'stranger' then. Not because Camus' novel had just become popular, but rather because 'stranger' seemed just the right name for me. In this life I had always had the impression that I was not part of the world around me. I have often felt the need to get off the beaten path of normal life and do things without further explanation. ”- Sanmao, Stories of the Sahara

Trivia

On March 26, 2019, Google honored Sanmao with a doodle for her 76th birthday.

literature

• Miriam Lang: San Mao Makes History , in: East Asian History , No. 19, June 2000, p. 145

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Echo Huang: The brave, tragic adventurer who inspired generations of Chinese girls to adopt her nickname , in: Quartz, April 25, 2017 [1] accessed on February 18, 2020
2. ↑ Wenju Shen: Sanmao, the Vagrant: Homeless Children of Yesterday and Today , in: Children's Literature In Education , September 2006, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 267-285 | [2]
3. ^ = San Mao — Taiwan's Wandering Writer, accessed March 28, 2016
4. ^ A Collection of San Mao . Retrieved April 21, 2016.
5. ↑ Mike Fu: Milestones in the life of Sanmao , in: Sanmao: Stories of the Sahara , London / New York 2019, p. 381 f.
6. ↑ memory of an olive tree - China.org.cn | website = www.china.org.cn accessed on April 21, 2016
7. ^ Ying Qian: Reception of Taiwan Literature in 1980s Mainland [3]. Retrieved February 20, 2020
8. ↑ Raquel Vidales: Sanmao: a Chinese woman's tragic love story in Spain , in: El Pais , October 26, 2016 [4] accessed on 20 February 2020
9. ↑ in detail Miriam Lang: San Mao Makes History , in: East Asian History , No. 19, June 2000, p. 145 [5]
10. ↑ Mike Fu: Milestones in the life of Sanmao , in: Sanmao: Stories of the Sahara , London / New York 2019, p. 381 f.
11. ↑ Raquel Vidales: Sanmao: a Chinese woman's tragic love story in Spain , in: El Pais , October 26, 2016 [6] accessed on February 20, 2020
12. ↑ [7] accessed on February 20, 2020
13. ↑ Spain archipelago opens route for Chinese travelers in memory of late writer , Xinhuanet, January 21, 2018 [8] accessed on February 20, 2020
14. ↑ Echo Huang: The brave, tragic adventurer who inspired generations of Chinese girls to adopt her nickname , in: Quartz, April 25, 2017 [9] accessed on February 18, 2020
15. ↑ XCRI online: San Mao: The handwriting of a globetrotter [10] accessed on February 18, 2020
16. ↑ Miriam Lang: San Mao Makes History , in: East Asian History , No. 19, June 2000, p. 145 [11]
17. ↑ Tamara Treichel: San Mao: The Echo Effect , in: People's Daily Online [12]
18. ↑ Mike Fu: Milestones in the life of Sanmao , in: Sanmao: Stories of the Sahara , London / New York 2019, p. 381 f.
19. ↑ XCRI online: San Mao: The handwriting of a globetrotter [13] accessed on February 18, 2020
20. ↑ XCRI online: San Mao: The Handwriting of a Globetrotter [14] accessed on February 18, 2020
21. ↑ Mike Fu: Milestones in the life of Sanmao , in: Sanmao: Stories of the Sahara , London / New York 2019, p. 171
22. ↑ Sanmao's 76th Birthday . In: Google . March 26, 2019.
23. ↑ Google Doodle honors 'Taiwan's wandering writer' San Mao . In: Taiwan News , March 26, 2019. Retrieved March 30, 2019.