Stories of the Sahara

by Sanmao

‘Use the gas lamp!’ Yadasi said. There was a flicker of unease in his eyes. He kept shifting his gaze beyond the fire. We grew quiet for a while. The fire finally died down to a dark little pile. The gas lamp shone a pale white light on everyone’s face. We all moved in a little bit closer to each other.

  ‘Yadasi, are there really crystals here?’ Jerry tried his best to change the subject, his arms around Tania.

  ‘Last time I found a huge one. It was just on the ground here. Sanmao wanted to come because of it.’

  ‘You came last time just to find crystals?’ I couldn’t help but grow suspicious. It felt like a metal claw had seized me, almost choking me with terror. In a flash, I understood. I understood where we’d been sitting all night. It all became clear.

  Yadasi saw the look on my face. He knew that I knew. Averting his gaze, he said, ‘I came before because of something else.’

  ‘You. . .’

  Finally the thing I least wanted to confirm was confirmed. My nerves were shattered in an instant. I opened my mouth, looking at Manolín. I took a deep breath. We were the only two who had gone into the woods. I almost began screaming in fright. A look in Manolín’s eyes, so slight it was almost imperceptible, made me bite my lip. He also understood, then. He had known long before we had come to this cursed place.

  Miguel didn’t realise the huge shock that had come over me in just a few seconds. He unexpectedly started talking about it again. ‘One time, the ground didn’t crack, but a person died. Everyone thought it was strange. They still carried the body to burial. Afterwards, Demon Eyes, who hadn’t gone with them, started going crazy at home, eating dirt and rolling around. She insisted that the person wasn’t dead and the djinni wanted the people to take him out. Everyone ignored her. She caused a ruckus for a whole day and night, really going berserk. Finally they went and dug up the grave. Originally they’d buried the body with the mouth facing up. When they opened the grave, the mouth was facing down and the cloth around the body was ripped to shreds. The fabric around the head had been completely dry, but the corners of the mouth were wet and sticky when they dug it up. He’d been buried alive.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, do us a favour, stop talking!’ I shrieked. With this, the baby also started screaming, crying and kicking. A wind started blowing again. In the distance, there was a loud sigh in the night that slowly drifted towards us. The wind couldn’t disperse that deep and muffled tone. Lifting my head, I saw that the moon had started to come out. The forest behind us cast dark shadows, rustling its way over to us, bit by bit.

  ‘What are you yelling about, crazy?’ José cried. He stood up and began walking away.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To sleep. Are you all done—’

  ‘Come back, I’m begging you.’

  Surprisingly, José started laughing loudly from the darkness. Blending in with the other noise, everything felt even more off kilter. What sounded like ghostly laughter was coming from José.

  I crawled over to Yadasi and gave him a hard pinch on the shoulder. ‘You’re awful,’ I whispered. ‘Bringing us to this cursed place.’

  ‘Didn’t I grant your wish from earlier?’ He cast a sidelong glance at me.

  ‘Don’t say it out loud.’ I pinched him again. ‘Tania will go nuts if she finds out.’

  ‘What are you two talking about?’ Tania cried, her voice unsteady. ‘Is something wrong?’

  The sighing sound floated towards us again. Terrified, I lost my senses. I actually grabbed a sweet potato and hurled it in the direction of the woods. ‘Ghost – shut your mouth!’ I screamed. ‘We’re not afraid of you!’

  ‘Sanmao, you’re being paranoid,’ Miguel laughed content­edly, not knowing the whole story.

  ‘Go to sleep!’ Yadasi stood up and went over to his tent.

  ‘José!’ I called again. ‘José…’ The beam of a flashlight shone out from the little tent. ‘Shine a light for me,’ I cried. ‘I’m coming.’ I ran over there as fast as I could, dragging my sleeping bag. Once everyone had separated and entered their tents, I threw myself to José’s side and grabbed hold of him, trembling.

  ‘José, José, this whole time, we’ve been on the djinni’s land. You, me…’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘When did you know?’

  ‘The same time as you.’

  ‘I didn’t say anything. . . Ah – the djinni made you telepathic!’

  ‘Sanmao, there is no djinni.’

  ‘Yes, there is… Those scary sighs…’

  ‘No, there isn’t. No. Say it. No. There. Isn’t.’

  ‘Yes. There. Is. You didn’t go into the woods, it doesn’t count. For me, yes, there is, there is. I went into the woods…’

  José sighed and put his arms around me. I fell silent. ‘Go to sleep!’ he whispered.

  ‘Listen…’ I whispered back. ‘Listen…’

  ‘Sleep!’ he said again.

  I lay there unmoving. Fatigue poured over me. I don’t know when but I fell into a deep slumber.

  When I woke up, José wasn’t by my side. His sleeping bag had been folded neatly and set by my feet. The sun had long since risen. It was still cold. The air was filled with the freshness of a morning mist. Everything came alive. Crimson rays of light cast a warm stain on the desert. There were small red berries growing on the wild brambles. A wild bird I didn’t recognise was flapping and flying low in the sky.

  I crawled out, all dishevelled, and looked over at the forest again. In the daylight, it looked like an inconspicuous clump of trees covered in sand and dust. It looked more drab than mysterious.

  ‘Ahem!’ I called out to José and Yadasi, who were digging out the sweet potatoes. Yadasi hesitantly looked over at me. ‘Don’t eat all the sweet potatoes,’ I said crisply. ‘Save one for Tania so we can convince her to come next time.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I don’t want any. I’ll drink tea.’

  Looking at Yadasi, I repaid him with a bright smile.

  Milestones in the Life of Sanmao

  Born Chen Ping on 26 March 1943 (the twenty-first day of the second lunar month) in Chongqing, Sichuan province. Ancestral home in Dinghai, Zhejiang province.

  Young Sanmao shows great passion for literature, reading Dream of the Red Chamber in the fifth grade. By middle school, she has read through many classic works from around the world.

  Takes a leave of absence in the second year of middle school. Receives careful guidance from her parents on classical poetry and prose and English, setting a sturdy foundation. Studies art under the tutelage of Gu Fusheng and Shao Youxuan.

  Receives special permission from Chang Chi-yun, founder of the Chinese Culture University, to attend classes in the philosophy department as a visiting student in 1964. Receives excellent marks in classes.

  Drops out of school again in 1967 and travels to Spain alone. Within three years, attends Universidad de Madrid and the Goethe Institute, then works at the law library at the University of Illinois. Very beneficial for her life experiences and linguistic training.

  Returns to Taiwan in 1970. Teaches in the German and philosophy departments at the Chinese Culture University at the invitation of Chang Chi-yun. Later, due to the sudden death of her fiancé, she leaves Taiwan again and returns to Spain, reuniting with José, who has held a torch for her for six years.

  In 1974, conducts civil marriage with José in the local court of the Spanish Sahara.

  Life in the desert stimulates her latent talent for writing. Encouraged by Ping Xintao, then editor-in-chief of the United Daily News, she writes a steady stream of works and begins to collect them for publication in book form. Stories of the Sahara, the first volume, is published in May 1976.

  On 30 September 1979, her husband José dies in a diving accident. With the support of her parents, Sanmao returns to Taiwan.

  In 1981, Sanmao decides to end her fourteen years of vagabonding and settle down in Taiwan.

  In November of the same year, United Daily
News sponsors her to travel through Latin America for half a year. She writes Over River and Mountain upon her return and travels around Taiwan on a book tour.

  Afterward, Sanmao teaches in the arts and literature work­shop at the Chinese Culture University. Her courses include ‘Writing the Novel’ and ‘Writing the Essay’. The students receive her with great pleasure.

  Due to health reasons, she leaves the faculty of the arts and literature workshop in 1984. Writing and giving talks becomes her main focus.

  Returns to her hometown in mainland China for the first time in April 1989. Discovers she has many readers on the mainland. Pays a special visit to the renowned Zhang Leping, creator of the cartoon character Sanmao, a long-held desire.

  Undertakes the writing of a screenplay in 1990. Completes her first Chinese screenplay and her last work, Red Dust.

  Dies on 4 January 1991, at the age of forty-seven.

  In July 2000, Sanmao’s possessions enter into the pre­paratory office of the National Centre for the Research and Preservation of Cultural Assets. Current address is National Taiwan Cultural Centre, 1 Zhongzheng Road, Zhongxi District, Tainan.

  Sanmao Memorial Hall is established in Dinghai, Zhejiang in December 2000, planned by Fu Wenwei, faculty at Hangzhou University’s Tourism Institute, and his wife.

  In 2010, the new Collected Works of Sanmao is released by Crown Publishing.

  Translator’s Note

  The notion of a mother tongue or native language can be more complex than it seems. I was born in China and lived there until age four, speaking nothing but the twangy southwestern Mandarin of my rural surroundings in Hubei province. Then I had a brief stint in Denmark (where I was taught putonghua, or standard Mandarin) before immigrating to the United States with my parents at age five. English quickly superseded Chinese in my life out of practicality and necessity. Though I would continue to attend Chinese language school for a few hours every Saturday until age fifteen or so, my progress in literacy effectively ground to a halt due to structural limitations. Admittedly, by the time I was a teenager in suburban Ohio, I harboured an intense distaste for anything associated with China or Chinese culture. Like many first generation immigrants, I was compelled to reject my background, vying instead for conformity and the inoffensive monolingualism of Americanness.

  Eventually, I went to grad school with a vague idea to research and write about Chinese language cinema, build­ing upon my undergraduate studies in film and television production. It was around this time, in my early twenties, when I truly began to restore and reinvigorate my linguistic aptitude for Chinese. A few years later, I was gifted a copy of Stories of the Sahara. One of the first things that drew me to this book was Sanmao’s eminent readability, even for a Chinese-American like myself who grew up largely without deep knowledge of or access to Chinese literature.

  I recount all of this in order to give context to my own initial encounter with Sanmao, how enchanted I was by her voice, reaching across space and time to jolt my senses in New York City over forty years after she wrote the pieces collected in Stories of the Sahara. It’s hard to describe how moving it was to read an entire book in Chinese and feel such an intense emotional resonance with the writer’s sensitivities and observations, her humour and heartache. I knew from the outset that I wanted to translate this work into English. And, many years later, on the tail end of this circuitous journey, I’m incredibly honoured by the opportunity to have a hand in introducing this remarkable woman to English language readers around the world.

  STRUCTURE AND MECHANICS

  Vernacular Chinese can be deceptively simple to read, while still presenting many a forked road for the translator to consider. A single utterance of the exclamatory character yi, for example, can imply surprise, confusion or curiosity, depending on context. Subjects are often elided or ambiguous in casual prose. It is common to see complex thoughts conveyed through a multiplicity of clauses separated by commas alone, rather than the discrete sentences they naturally become when rendered in English. Dialogue tags, including relevant physical movements or expressions, are usually inserted only before or after a character speaks, rather than breaking up a long remark in the middle.

  In all such instances, I have chosen the most straightforward way to present what I have interpreted as Sanmao’s intention or narrative strategy while also conforming to the expectations and standards of English language prose.

  STYLE

  A hallmark of Sanmao’s writing style is her personal tone – almost confessional, some might call it – which situates the reader as a friend and confidante, bearing witness to her tales of adventure and intrigue. The vast majority of the stories in this book originally appeared in Taiwanese print publications such as the United Daily News, garnering immense popularity for their unvarnished style, warm-blooded ethos and fascinating sketches of the hinterlands and its denizens.

  Sanmao’s lively voice has aged well, but the rawness and off-the-cuff quality of her work are apparent in many repetitive phrases or constructions, as well as some abrupt or unclear narrative turns. My editors and I have chosen to judiciously trim down overuse of phrases like ‘suddenly’, for example, while preserving the original structure of her narrative flow as much as possible. Despite the profound empathy with which the writer viewed almost everyone in her life, there are quite a few instances where her judgments of others, especially the Sahrawi characters, may come off as insensitive at best, derogatory or racist at worst. Instead of expunging or explaining these moments away, we have chosen instead to preserve the integrity of the whole work, elements of discomfort and all.

  SPANISH AND ARABIC

  The vast majority of proper names and many phrases in the original are transliterated from Spanish or Hassaniya Arabic into Chinese. Some of these are easily identifiable or verifiable names with a standard (or precedent) of romanisation, such as José, El Aaiún, Fatima, Muhammad and so on. Others characters, mostly Sahrawi, have names that do not necessarily conform to a standard or recognisable romanisation. I have translated these with an eye toward consistency, based on variations that were suggested to me by my native Sahrawi colleagues.

  The usage of Arabic words like khaima (tent) or Salaam alaikum (good day) are accompanied by the explanations Sanmao inserted for the benefit of the Chinese reader. Meanwhile, there are some words or ideas that were not rendered in transliterated Spanish originally, but that I have opted to use in order to add flavour to the text: sopa de mariscos, the Hotel Nacional, cobarde, Dios mío, etc.

  CULTURAL AND LITERARY ALLUSIONS

  The touchstones of film and pop culture from the 1960s to 1970s are apparent in Sanmao’s writing, some of which have clearly lapsed into obscurity more than others. We have chosen not to footnote the allusions to books, movies or TV shows such as Born Free, Zorba the Greek, Mad Woman, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, etc.

  More tricky are the references to Chinese literature. Sanmao was a prolific reader and clearly well versed in the canonical literature of Chinese history. For excerpts of pre-modern Chinese poetry, we have used modern renditions by other translators of Chinese with proper attributions. For passing mentions of books, we have footnoted only when necessary in chapters with a density of references, such as ‘My Great Mother-in-Law’.

  Chinese language is rife with chengyu, four character idioms that condense a great deal of metaphorical, symbolic or even narrative signification into a pithy linguistic flourish. For the majority of these, I have opted for a conceptual translation into English, rendering them into phrases like ‘a hedge between keeps friendships green’ or ‘have my cake and eat it, too’. A more direct translation is employed when the Chinese expression lacks an English language equivalent, usually in instances where the phrase itself is couched in an explanation of a particular sentiment or can be easily understood based on context.

  Notes

  NICE NEIGHBOURS

  1Albert Schweitzer (14 January 1875 – 4 September 1965) was an Alsatian humanitarian
and philosopher who in 1913 founded a hospital in Lambaréné, Central Africa.

  A LADDER

  1Li Shangyin, ‘The Brocade Zither’, translated by Chloe Garcia Roberts.

  2Excerpt from ‘The Ugly Page/Picking Mulberries’ by Xin Qiji, translated by Andrew W. F. Wong.

  HEARTH AND HOME

  1From an untitled poem by Wang Wei.

  2From Ma Zhiyuan’s ‘Autumn Thoughts’, translated by Andrew W. F. Wong.

  MY GREAT MOTHER-IN-LAW

  1Told by an anonymous poet of the Han Dynasty (AD 196–219), Southeast Fly the Peacocks is the tragic love story of a young couple whose marriage was broken up by the man’s proprietorial mother. When the woman was forced to marry someone else, the lovers killed themselves in order to live together in the next world.

  2A pun on the poem ‘Pure Serene Music’ by Southern Tang poet Li Yu, who lived in the tenth century.

  3Excerpt from ‘Farewells on Grassland’ by renowned poet and government official Bai Juyi (Po Chü-i), translated by Hugh Grigg.

  4In the History of Song, Neo-Confucian scholar Yang Shi and a companion visit the Confucian philosopher Cheng Yi. They find Cheng Yi meditating, his eyes closed, and respectfully wait outside the door in the snow. When Cheng finally comes out of his meditation, a foot of snow has gathered about them.

  5A couplet from the poem ‘Climbing a Terrace’ by renowned Tang poet Du Fu.

  6The closure of Bai’s poem ‘Farewells on Grassland’.

  CRYING CAMELS

  1From Dream of the Red Chamber, volume 1, translated by David Hawkes.

  Translator’s Acknowledgements

  All told, this translation has been a labour of love, bridging several epochs in my own life and supported by the time, effort and kindness of countless friends and colleagues. I was first introduced to Sanmao back in 2011, thanks to the most propitious birthday gift of Stories of the Sahara from Jacob Dreyer. Gray Tan was a helpful interlocutor long before the book translation became a viable project. Eventually, both Gray and Jade Fu of the Grayhawk Agency were instrumental in connecting me with Bloomsbury.