Stories of the Sahara
Sanmao (translated by Mike Fu)
Bloomsbury Publishing: 2020
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When I learned recently about the vagabond Taiwanese writer Sanmao, she came as a curiosity more than a revelation. The lone Asian woman, travelling to far-flung places and defying well-trodden paths laid out for her, is nothing so unconventional today, but it must have been decades ago.

Not known to me, generations of Taiwanese and Chinese women had come of age with Sanmao as an inspiration. Many who are named Echo apparently trace its origins back to her, as it was the English name she sometimes used. The retrospectives I read depict her as a literary celebrity in her day, staring out from photographs with melancholic kohl-rimmed eyes, posed in long flowy dresses with an air of effortless glamour. Until her death in 1991—reportedly by suicide, about a decade after her Spanish husband José María Quero died in a diving accident—she travelled to more than fifty countries and published more than twenty books, and also wrote the screenplay for the acclaimed film Red Dust.

• Tags: Emily Ding, Issue 20, Sanmao, Taiwan