by Sanmao
STORIES OF THE SAHARA
Foreword
By Sharlene Teo
The Sahara is the largest hot desert in the world and among the most sparsely populated, spanning 103,000 square miles of dunes and flatlands. How did a fiercely cosmopolitan Taiwanese woman end up living in one of the harshest territories on earth? What compelled her to move there? And once she got there, what happened?
Stories of the Sahara, the book that answers these questions, has captivated millions of readers to date. First published in Chinese in 1976 to rapturous success, Sanmao’s memoir and travelogue launched its author as a literary celebrity across Asia. Initially serialised in the Taiwanese United Daily News, the candid intimacy and liveliness of Sanmao’s writing cemented her status as an enduring cultural icon and figure of quixotic fascination. Coming to public attention during the prohibitive atmosphere of 1970s martial-law era Taiwan, Sanmao’s free-spirited itinerancy enthralled readers and demonstrated an exciting model of Asian femininity that centred personal agency, resourcefulness and reinvention.
Across the collection, Sanmao the chimerical protagonist-narrator presents herself as trendsetter and rule-breaker, cool girl and mystic, pensive romantic and comic heroine, globetrotter and housewife. She’s a singular polyglot who refuses to be confined to the limitations of a single category. She’s an unreliable but compelling narrator who embraces contradictions – evinced by her plain but assured prose style that shifts from farcical to sombre registers, scatological to highbrow, ludic to deadly serious, often within the same page. There is a wide thematic and emotional range to these pieces; from the high tension and suspenseful dread of ‘Night in the Wasteland’ and ‘Seed of Death’ to the ruminative melancholy of ‘Looking for Love’ and the absurdist comedy of ‘Nice Neighbours’ and ‘The Desert Bathing Spectacle.’
Reading Stories of the Sahara is a transporting and entertaining experience: the reader is brought up close to Sanmao’s individuality and independence. As its bestselling popularity attests, readers were drawn to Sanmao’s intrepid literary persona, her zest for life and insatiable taste for adventure. Although ubiquitous in the contemporary age of social media and commercialised feminism, Sanmao’s unabashed self-aggrandisement and position of gung-ho empowerment was ahead of its time. Her confidence veers on radical. Here is a woman without any medical training who has no compunction assuming the mantle of the local pharmacist or medicine woman. The roguish resourcefulness and wit of the Stories bear the thrill and jaunty energy of the picaresque, as does the memorable cast of characters – from the lovelorn grocer Salun to the enigmatic Sergeant Salva and the tragic Shahida.
‘Day after day, a black sheep like myself, who never even grew up in the desert, strives to dispel the misery of these long, leisurely years with artfulness and pleasure,’ Sanmao writes in ‘Hearth and Home’, one of the essays that instantiates Stories’ thematic preoccupations with identity, alienation, community and exile. There is a world weariness and sense of melancholy that undercuts and arguably contradicts Sanmao’s self-aggrandising and buoyant narrative tone. Her narrative persona is outgoing, neighbourly, empathetic and social. Yet she is plagued with abiding feelings of isolation. Beholding the wasteland, she states: ‘it was hard not to feel some measure of loneliness. But, by the same token, to know that I was wholly alone in this unimaginably vast land was totally liberating.’
Sanmao’s appealingly direct voice combines ‘artfulness and pleasure’ with an undeniable curiosity about the natural world and its inhabitants. Every story conveys this infectious capacity for wonder. She sees the humour and anecdotal potential of challenging conditions – describing life in the desert as ‘an unfailingly colourful experience’ – and finds the sublime in the quotidian: ‘scattered pieces of driftwood looked like modernist sculptures’. In this way, Stories’ vivid, searing evocations of desert places and spaces, both awe inspiring and hostile, transported readers who lacked the resources to travel. Her accounts of living alongside the Sahrawi, the indigenous people of the Western Sahara, are oftentimes playful and occasionally dangerous and heartbreaking. She describes cross-cultural encounters and the process of adapting to a new community with the empathy and respectful observance of a self-described ‘black sheep’ and lifelong outsider.
Sanmao was born Chen Maoping in China in 1943 and raised in Taiwan, and throughout her life she travelled to over fifty-five countries. She drew her pseudonym from the famous and beloved long-running Chinese comic strip character Sanmao, a wandering orphan so malnourished that he has only three hairs on his head. Explaining her rationale for adopting the moniker, Sanmao said ‘When I came across Sanmao, the orphan wandering in the streets, I realised there were a lot of poor children struggling to survive. When I began to write, I decided to faithfully record the lives of ordinary people whose voices go unheard. So I chose this name.’ There are three different identity modes to Sanmao: Chen Ping, her preferred personal name, Sanmao the literary personality, and Echo, the English name she gave herself in order to honour her art teacher.
Sanmao studied in Germany, the United States and Spain, where she met her future husband, José María Quero. Their progressive and bohemian partnership – founded on a shared adventurousness and José’s devotion to Sanmao’s uniquely independent spirit – forms the emotional underpinning of Stories of the Sahara. As detailed in ‘The Marriage Chronicles’, José’s wedding gift to Sanmao is ‘a camel skull, white bones neatly assembled, with a huge row of menacing teeth and two big black holes for eyes.’ To a delighted Sanmao, this unconventional and macabre artifact ‘was just the thing to capture my heart’ and ‘José was worthy of being called my soulmate.’ Their differences in nationality and personality are demonstrated to comedic effect across several stories, but so too is the mutual respect, humour and tenderness of their relationship.
Sanmao is refreshingly frank about her feelings for her husband: ‘I had never been passionately in love with him. At the same time I felt incredibly lucky and at ease.’ From near-death experiences to domestic episodes deploying ludic resourcefulness to handle the deprivations of desert life, Stories of the Sahara transplants the pragmatic challenges and compromises of marriage to an exotic setting. Their love story with all of its domestic foibles and cross-cultural misunderstandings is at once relatable, to deploy the millennial buzzword, and prescient of the increasing ubiquity of transnational relationships in an increasingly globalised world. Their romance is both glamorous and mundane, deeply romantic and humorously practical.
José and Sanmao moved to the Spanish Sahara after she read a feature about it in an issue of National Geographic and felt inexplicably and decisively drawn ‘toward that vast and unfamiliar land, as if echoing from a past life.’ The passages describing its breathtaking scale are written with a mixture of awe and morbidity: ‘the deathly still landscape was like a grim and ferocious giant lying on its side. We were driving along its quietly outspread body.’
Is the desert the panacea for ‘a lifetime’s homesickness’ or is it a metaphor for the restlessness and longing that is germane to Sanmao’s wandering spirit? The desert conveys infinity and mortal threat, boundlessness and the risk – and opportunity – of getting lost. It is a palimpsest of mirages and myths of rescue and no return. Eclipsing romantic love, Sanmao reflects upon how ‘deep in my heart, the Sahara desert had been my dream lover for so long … I’d expected a scorching sun, but instead found a swathe of poetic desolation.’
While Stories in the Sahara abounds with moments of companionship and cameraderie – between Sanmao and José, as well as with the Sahrawi community, these essays are deeply concerned with the isolating and poetically desolate compulsion of wanderlust. ‘I wanted a taste of many different lives, sop
histicated or simple … a life plain as porridge would never be an option for me,’ Sanmao opines. ‘In this life, I’d always felt I wasn’t a part of the world around me. I often needed to go off the tracks of a normal life and do things without explanation.’ Her quest for self-fulfilment and self-expression is incommensurate with a stable sense of belonging. To the lifelong traveller, the impulse to discover new experiences means that one place is never enough. As the wistful lyrics in her famous song ‘The Olive Tree’ go, ‘Do not ask me where I’m from/ My hometown is far away/ Why do I wander around/ Wandering afar, wandering’.
Tragedy has a tendency to eclipse the light of a life’s work, romanticising everything, lending every line an air of pathos and bittersweet resonance. José died in a diving accident in 1979, and a few years after, in 1981, Sanmao settled down in Taiwan where she taught and published more than twenty works including the acclaimed Chinese screenplay Red Dust, before committing suicide in 1991. Walt Whitman famously said that we contain multitudes. As the following essays demonstrate, Sanmao possessed a deep understanding of the engagement of the self with the granular and cosmic; in her world, connection and isolation, joy and pain, as well as splendour and melancholy existed side by side. ‘Whether in a few short days or over the long span of a life, everything disappears in due time: tears, laughter, love, hate, the ups and downs of dreams and reality. On the sand, pure white like snow, there was no trace of the dead. Not even the nocturnal wind could carry aloft their sighs.’
Sharlene Teo, May 2019
Contents
A Knife on a Desert Night
A Desert Diner
The Marriage Chronicles
Apothecary
Child Bride
Night in the Wasteland
The Desert Bathing Spectacle
Looking for Love
Nice Neighbours
Dilettante Fishermen
Seed of Death
A Ladder
Hearth and Home
My Great Mother-in-Law
Stealing Souls
Sergeant Salva
Hitchhikers
The Mute Slave
Crying Camels
Lonesome Land
Milestones in the Life of Sanmao
Translator’s Note
Notes
Translator’s Acknowledgements
Note on the Author
Note on the Translator
A Knife on a Desert Night
When I first arrived in the desert, I desperately wanted to be the first female explorer to cross the Sahara. The thought of it used to keep me up all night back in Europe. My previous experiences travelling through various countries wouldn’t be of much use since there was no civilisation to speak of in the desert. After thinking it over for nearly half a year, I decided to go anyway and scope it out once I got there. Of course, I couldn’t very well go without any plan whatsoever. It wouldn’t do to simply strap a large canteen to my back and parachute out of a plane. So I began in Spanish territory, in the capital of the Sahara Desert: El Aaiún. I found it hard to believe that this was a capital city. It was clearly just a small settlement in the middle of the great desert, with a handful of streets, a few banks and a couple of shops. The desolate scenery and atmosphere reminded me of the towns in Western films. The usual flourishes of a capital city were nowhere to be seen.
The home I rented was outside of town. It was a shabby little place, but the monthly rent was even higher than what was standard in Europe. There was no furniture. I spread straw mats on the ground as the locals did. I bought a mattress to sleep on in the other room. And with that I was all settled for a while. I did have water. There was an oil drum on the roof. Every morning around six or so, the city government would deliver salty water collected from deep wells in the desert. I don’t know why it was so salty. You used it to wash your face and bathe. As for drinking water, you had to buy it by the bottle.
Life here was unbearably lonely for me at the start. I didn’t know how to speak Arabic and my neighbours all happened to be indigenous people of the Sahara – Africans. Very few of the women knew Spanish, though the children could speak it haltingly. There was a street right in front of my house, and beyond that was the endless desert, smooth and soft, full of serene mystery, stretching out all the way to the edge of the sky. It was a yellowish orange colour. I thought the surface of the moon probably looked pretty similar to this place. I loved how the desert was stained red at sunset. Every day as the sun went down, I’d sit on the roof until the sky was totally dark and feel an immense loneliness, out of nowhere, deep in my heart.
I initially planned to rest for a while and then travel through the desert. Unfortunately I didn’t know many people, so I had nothing to do except go and hang out at the police station in town every day. (OK, I’ll admit, I had no choice. The police station had confiscated my passport. They were always trying to deport me.) I paid a visit early on to the deputy director, a Spaniard.
‘Señor, I would like to go to the desert, but I don’t know how to get there. Can you help me?’
‘Desert? Aren’t you in the desert right now? Why don’t you lift your head up and look out of the window?’ He spoke without raising his head himself.
‘No, I want to make a trip like this.’ I waved my hand over the map that hung on the wall and pointed to the Red Sea.
He looked me up and down for almost two minutes. ‘Señorita,’ he said. ‘Do you know what you’re saying? This is not possible. Please get on the next plane back to Madrid. We don’t want any trouble.’
I became agitated. ‘I won’t cause any trouble for you. I have enough to cover living expenses for three months. I’ll show you. The money’s right here.’ I grabbed a handful of dirty bank notes from my pocket and shook them at him.
‘Fine. None of my business. I’ll give you residency for three months. After that, you must leave no matter what. Where are you currently living? I need to register you.’
‘I live outside of town in a house with no doorplate. How to explain… I’ll draw a picture for you.’
And thus I settled down in the great Sahara Desert.
I don’t want to complain repeatedly about my loneliness, but I almost couldn’t get over how tough it was during that initial period and thought often about heading back to Europe. Amid that endless stretch of sand, it was so hot during the day that water could scald your hands, while night was so cold that you had to wear a heavy coat. Many times I asked myself why I insisted on staying here. Why had I wanted to come to this long-forgotten corner of the world all by myself? As there were no answers to these questions, I continued to settle in, one day at a time.
The second person I met was the retired commander of the desert corps, a Spaniard who had been living in the desert for most of his life and had no desire to repatriate. I asked for his advice on travelling into the desert.
‘Señorita, this is impossible. Consider your circumstances.’
I stayed quiet, but I must have obviously looked dejected. ‘Come and look at this military map,’ he said, calling me over to the wall. ‘This is Africa. This is the Sahara Desert. The dotted lines are roads. The rest, you can see for yourself.’
I already knew. I’d looked thousands of times at many different maps. On the retired commander’s map, apart from a few dotted lines in the Spanish Sahara, there were only the borders between countries. The rest was completely blank.
‘What are these roads of which you speak?’ I asked.
‘The roads here are the tyre tracks of people who’ve travelled before. When the weather’s nice, you can see them. Once the sandstorms get intense, they disappear.’
I thanked him and left, my heart heavy. I knew I was overestimating my abilities. But I couldn’t just let it go. I’m a stubborn person, through and through. To keep from getting discouraged, I went to find some locals to ask their advice. The Sahrawi people are natives of this huge desert; they’d surely have their own ideas.
There was a
public square outside of town, crowded with camels and Jeeps, goods and goats. I waited for an old Muslim man to finish praying, then asked him how I could cross the Sahara. This old man spoke Spanish. As soon as he opened his mouth, a crowd of young people gathered around him.
‘You want to go to the Red Sea?’ he asked. ‘I have never been in my whole life. Nowadays you can fly to Europe, change planes and get to the Red Sea safe and sound. No need to cross the desert.’
‘Yes, but I want to get there by going through the desert. Please advise.’ I spoke very loudly, worried he hadn’t under- stood.
‘You must go? Alright then! Listen carefully. Rent two Jeeps so you have an extra in case one breaks down. You will need a guide. Once you are fully prepared, you may as well try!’
This was the first time someone had told me I could give it a shot. ‘How much does it cost to rent a Jeep per day?’ I pressed. ‘How much for the guide?’
‘Three thousand pesetas per day for the Jeep, another three thousand for the guide. Then there is food and gas.’ Great. I added it up and figured basic expenses would be 180,000 pesetas for a month.
No, that wasn’t right. I needed to rent two cars, so the total would be 270,000 pesetas. This didn’t include equipment, gas, food or water. I’d need at least 400,000 pesetas per month or it wouldn’t work.
I fingered the few large bills in my pocket, feeling discouraged. ‘It’s too expensive,’ I said grudgingly. ‘I can’t afford to go. Thank you.’
As I was about to leave, the old man said, ‘There is also a way to do it without spending much money.’
Hearing this, I sat back down again. ‘What do you mean?’