Taiwanese feminist author Sanmao

[Randy W]

from Goldthread on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/342615829579497/posts/1085732611934478/

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To celebrate International Women's Day, we're resharing this piece about Sanmao, who dazzled Chinese readers with accounts of her adventures at a time when most of them could only dream of traveling.

Famed Taiwanese feminist author Sanmao finally gets an English translation

Megan Cattel
JAN 16, 2020

Sanmao inspired generations of Chinese women with her insatiable wanderlust and can-do spirit.
 

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“She captured the public imagination in greater China at a time when very few women could not only travel the world, but live abroad by themselves.” Fu says. “She was a pioneer in that sense, but also a deeply romantic person, a wandering soul, somebody who molded her entire reality into what she believed it should or could be.”

Sanmao was born in Chongqing as Chen Maoping in 1943. Her family moved to Taiwan in 1948 during the Chinese Civil War.

A voracious reader as a kid, she struggled against the rigidity of the education system and was homeschooled from middle to high school. At the age of 20, she studied at the University of Madrid, marking the beginning of her time far from home. She developed a penchant for learning languages, and became fluent in Spanish and German.

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After settling in the capital city of El Aaiún during the waning days of Spanish colonial rule in the Sahara, Sanmao began to chronicle her life in the desert. Her stories were serialized in a Taiwanese newspaper in 1974.