Remembering San Mao - The Bohemian Writer That Captured The Hearts of Millions of Chinese - What - S On Weibo

13/08/2020 Remembering San Mao - the Bohemian Writer That Captured the Hearts of Millions of Chinese | What's on Weibo
BACKGROUNDER
Remembering San Mao – the

Bohemian Writer That Captured the
Hearts of Millions of Chinese
27 years after her suicide, bohemian writer San Mao still strikes a chord with Chinese netizens.
Published 3 years ago January 5, 2018

By Manya Koetse
Renowned author and world traveler San Mao (三⽑) was one
of the first Chinese mass media celebrities. Exactly 27 years
after her passing, Weibo netizens collectively commemorate her
free spirit, inspirational life, and tragic death.
I n a time when Beijing’s first fast-food restaurants opened their doors, people were

hooked on Teresa Tang’s sweet voice, and television sets entered Chinese living rooms,
pirate editions of books by the wildly popular Chinese author San Mao first started spreading
all over mainland China.
Before this time in the late 1980s, the female author was already a celebrity in Taiwan and
Hong Kong since the 1970s; not just because of her many books, newspaper columns, song
lyrics, and public lectures, but also because of her free, cosmopolitan, and “legendary” life
that captured the imagination of many Chinese eager to look beyond their own borders.
Researcher Miriam Lang (2015) describes San Mao as “one of the first mass media
celebrities in the Chinese-speaking world” (440).
https://www.whatsonweibo.com/remembering-san-mao-beautiful-bohemian-writer-captured-hearts-millions-chinese/ 1/9
On January 4th 2018, the 20th-century writer became a trending topic on social media when
various media commemorated her. Chinese state media outlet People’s Dailydedicated a
post to the iconic author on Weibo, titled “Today, we cherish the memory of San Mao.”
People’s Daily writes:
“She was born in Chongqing, moved to Taiwan, studied in Spain, and settled in the
Sahara. All of her life she pursued freedom and touched the hearts of many with all of
her words. Her love-story with Jose stirred people’s emotions. Her mother said that
maybe her life was not perfect enough for her, but we now know that her life-long pursuit
of her dreams has already become romantic legend. Today, in 1991, writer San Mao
committed suicide.”
Besides that the post itself attracted thousands of comments and was shared nearly 3800
times, many other media outlets and netizens also posted their own commemorations to the
author on Weibo. One post by the Communist Youth Leaguereceived more than 100,000
comments on January 4th.
“She was the first author I really loved,” one person comments: “Whether she was in the
Sahara or Madrid, the way she describes her love has become like a little gemstone in my
own life.”

A Woman Writer Named Chen, Echo, and San Mao

San Mao is known as the wandering writer. Throughout her life, she moved from place to
place; a life pattern that already started forming in the early years of her childhood.
San Mao was born in Chongqing, China, in 1943. Her parents, mother Miao Jinlan and father
Chen Siqing, named their little girl Chen Mao Ping ( 陈懋平
). Chen, however, later preferred
to be called Chen Ping, and gave herself the English name of ‘Echo’ to honor her painting
teacher. Once she started writing, she used the pen name San Mao ( 三⽑
), which is how she
came to be remembered.
Chen Ping aka San Mao during her time in the Sahara.
San Mao’s early years took her from wartime Chongqing via Nanjing to Taiwan, where the 6-
year-old girl had trouble fitting in at school. She preferred reading books over doing
schoolwork, and while she read literary classics such as Don Quixote at an early age, she
failed in mathematics and received low grades.
After a teacher at her Taipei school embarrassed her in front of her classmates by drawing a
‘0’ grade on her face and making her parade around, she refused to continue her classes
there and was home-schooled by private tutors and her own father, who was a lawyer (Chen
2007).
San Mao as a young girl.
After studying Philosophy at the Chinese Culture University in Taiwan, the 20-year-old San
Mao set out to broaden her horizons and moved to Spain, where she enrolled at the
University of Madrid. It was the start of her bohemian lifestyle, that brought her from Spain to
Germany, from the Sahara Desert to the Canary Islands, and from Central and South
America back to Taiwan.
San Mao experienced many adventures but also had to face many difficult times. Her first
great love whom she was to be married to, a German teacher 19 years her senior, died of a
heart attack when San Mao was 26 old.
Chen Ping aka San Mao with her good friend Father Barry Martinson, a
Jesuit priest.
Ten years later, her Spanish husband Jose Maria Quero Y Ruiz, whom San Mao lovingly
called ‘He Xi’ (荷⻄ ) and with whom she had spent six years in the desert, tragically died
during a diving accident.
荷
San Mao and her Spanish husband ‘He Xi’ (
⻄ ).
Miriam Lang, in her study of San Mao (2015), describes her as “unusual for a woman of her
time and place”; she traveled far from home, married a non-Chinese man, and remained
childless. Nonetheless, Lang notes, San Mao was also traditional in that she represented
herself as a “happy housewife” while married, and expressed conservative feminine values
in her books (443).
San Mao and Jose.
Although San Mao published her first book at the of 19, she did not really gain fame until the
release of her first book The Stories of the Sahara ( 撒哈拉的故事
) in 1976. This work
revolves around San Mao’s personal experiences in the Sahara desert together with her
husband Jose (Ying 2010, 162).

An Unhappy Ending

In the decade following her husband’s death, San Mao first set out on a 6-month journey to
America but then traveled less and finally settled in Taiwan in 1982, where she started
teaching literature and creative writing at the Chinese Culture University.
San Mao in the US.
Being a celebrity, her classes were always packed – students lined up to attend her lectures.
In 1989, she first visited mainland China again since her childhood, where she started
working on the screenplay of Red Dust, a love story set during the Sino-Japanese war.
Although the film eventually received much acclaim – even winning the prize for Best Film at
the Golden Horse Awards of 1990 – San Mao received criticism for creating a “too positive
picture” of the leading male character, who was perceived to be a traitor to the Chinese
nation (Lang 2015, 442).
Despite all of her activities in her later career, San Mao never parallelled the success she
had with her stories about the Sahara. In 1990, San claimed she had won a literary prize in
Spain for novella written in Spanish, but the work appeared to be non-existent (Lang
2015,442).
In early 1991, San Mao admitted herself to a hospital in Taiwan where she was tested for
cancer. The results turned out negative, but San reportedly asked the nurse for a sleeping
pill for the night and asked her not to wake her (Chen 2007).
San Mao ended her own life by hanging on January 4, 1991, at Rongmin General Hospital.
She was 47 years old.
Father Jerry Martinson, a Jesuit priest who knew San Mao for years as the brother of her
close friend Barry Martinson, told UCA News two weeks after her suicide that San Mao
“desired to escape from her fame’s pressure and emotional entanglements, and to reunite
with Jose (..). His death was a trauma in her life.”
He also said that Antoine Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince was San Mao’s favorite reading:
“At the end of the story, the Little Prince wanted to go back to his planet, reachable only
through short suffering.”
Throughout her life, San Mao visited over 54 countries and wrote a total of 26 complete
works (Chen 2007; Lang 2015, 442; Huang 2017). An English translation of her work Stories
of the Sahara (1976) is expected to be released by publishing house Bloomsbury in 2018.

Online “San Mao Fever”

The suicide of San Mao generated a new wave of “San Mao fever” in the 1990s. And now,
more than two decades after her death, the Chinese celebrity still has major appeal to social
media users, who post her quotes, photos, and audio segments.
“How I love San Mao,” one person writes: “Her every word is just immersed with her
wisdom.”
But not all commenters are equally positive. Some say that San Mao is representative of a
time when Chinese women “blindly followed” western values, adoring foreign men.
For the majority of commenters, however, San Mao is a name that brings out new inspiration
or old memories. “Whenever I think about her stories from the Sahara, it just moves me.”
One Weibo user honors San Mao by posting one of her quotes*:
“Often, I asked myself, what is distance? Then I heard my own answer, saying that
distance is what I desired most in life – that it is freedom.
A freedom far, far away, like the air.
At that moment, I realized that I had slowly released myself from all the things I didn’t
need that were binding me to my life. I then thought: I can go to the most remote corners
of the earth if that is where my heart wants to go.
It was in that moment, that my freedom had finally arrived.“
If you are interested in this story you might also be interested in reading the story of
Li Xianglan, the superstar who was caught between China and Japan during the
Second Sino-Japanese War.
The Stories of the Sahara (in Chinese) can be purchased from Amazon:

The story of the Sahara (Chinese Edition)
The complete works of San Mao can also be purchased in Chinese online:

The Complete Works of Sanmao (Chinese Edition)
iTunes also offers The Stories of the Sahara in Chinese:
By Manya Koetse
Sources & References
Chen, Shaoshua. 2007. “San Mao – Taiwan’s Wandering Writer.” Women of China,

November 30. http://www.womenofchina.cn/womenofchina/html1/people/writers/8/8989-
1.htm[4.1.18].
Huang, Echo. 2017. “The brave, tragic adventurer who inspired generations of Chinese girls
to adopt her nickname.” Quartz Magazine, April 24. https://qz.com/963273/the-world-
traveling-writer-san-mao-inspired-generations-of-girls-to-adopt-her-nickname-echo/ [4.1.18].
Lang, Miriam. 2015 (2003). In Lily Xiao Hong Lee and A.D. Stefanowska (eds), Biographical
Dictionary of Chinese women – The Twentieth-Century 1912-2000. London/New York:
Routledge.
Treichel, Tamara. 2013. “The Echo Effect.” Global Times, March

10. http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/767044.shtml [4.1.18].
UCA News. 1991. “PRIEST SAYS WRITER WHO COMMITTED SUICIDE WANTED TO
BECOME CATHOLIC NUN.” UCA News, February 21. https://www.ucanews.com/story-
archive/?post_name=/1991/02/19/priest-says-writer-who-committed-suicide-wanted-to-
become-catholic-nun&post_id=32086 [7.1.18].
Ying, Li-hua. 2010. Historical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Literature. Lanham: The

Scarecrow Press.
Images
http://www.baike.com/wiki/%E4%B8%89%E6%AF%9B%5B%E4%BD%9C%E5%AE%B6%5D
http://designblog.rietveldacademie.nl/?tag=mask
http://cq.people.com.cn/GB/365409/c24845560.html
http://www.360doc.com/content/14/0623/15/700274_389097947.shtml
https://www.lemiaunoir.com/san-mao-mujer-escritora/
http://www.sohu.com/a/142240780_767795
http://www.sohu.com/a/130964781_488738
https://elpais.com/elpais/2016/10/25/inenglish/1477405923_390849.html
常常，我跟⾃⼰说，到底远⽅是什么东⻄。
*“
然后我听⻅我⾃⼰回答，说远⽅是你这⼀⽣现在最渴望的东⻄，就是⾃由。
很远很远的，⼀种像空⽓⼀样的⾃由。
在那个时候开始，我发觉，我⼀点⼀点脱去了束缚我⽣命的⼀切不需要的东⻄。
在那个时候，海⻆天涯，只要我⼼⾥想到，我就可以去。
我的⾃由终于在这个时候来到了.”
Spotted a mistake or want to add something? Please let us know in comments below
or email us.
©2018 Whatsonweibo. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce our content without permission
– you can contact us at info@whatsonweibo.com.

Remembering San Mao - The Bohemian Writer That Captured The Hearts of Millions of Chinese - What - S On Weibo

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Remembering San Mao - The Bohemian Writer That Captured The Hearts of Millions of Chinese - What - S On Weibo

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

13/08/2020 Remembering San Mao - the Bohemian Writer That Captured the Hearts of Millions of Chinese | What's on Weibo

Remembering San Mao – the

Published 3 years ago January 5, 2018

I n a time when Beijing’s ﬁrst fast-food restaurants opened their doors, people were

San Mao as a young girl.

during a diving accident.

San Mao and Jose.

San Mao in the US.

The Stories of the Sahara (in Chinese) can be purchased from Amazon:

The complete works of San Mao can also be purchased in Chinese online:

iTunes also offers The Stories of the Sahara in Chinese:

Sources & References

Chen, Shaoshua. 2007. “San Mao – Taiwan’s Wandering Writer.” Women of China,

Treichel, Tamara. 2013. “The Echo Effect.” Global Times, March

Ying, Li-hua. 2010. Historical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Literature. Lanham: The

You might also like