When I was 15, my dad and I took a trip to Los Angeles that changed my life. We didn't have a set agenda, and since we were staying down the road from the University of California, we took a campus tour.
23.01.2025 - 22:51 / cntraveler.com
When I found the writer Sanmao, I immediately wanted to layer my life over hers like a palimpsest.
It was a familiar feeling: I’d mimicked great Asian American women throughout my childhood as if I were a scarecrow—Sandra Oh, Margaret Cho, Amy Ta—maintaining only the illusion of likeness from a distance. But when I read Stories of the Sahara, the first of Sanmao’s books to be translated into English, I felt like I’d finally grazed the mark that indicated I was tall enough to ride—the one scratched at the height of a Taiwanese travel writer.
Sanmao is the pen name for the late Taiwanese memoirist Chen Ping. She was known for both her daring excursions to regions like the Sahara and the Kashmir Valley as well as her humorous yet tender writing style. After reading Stories of the Sahara cover to cover and back again as a college undergrad, I knew I’d found the heart of my senior thesis. Then an opportunity arose within my university’s English department to earn funding for a research trip outside the US. Having spent the last three years of school holed up in shoebox Manhattan dorm rooms writing about Western texts (dissecting Homeric valor, illustrating the failure of the marriage plot in Henry James and the like), I wanted to connect with a voice I didn’t need to stretch myself to meet—and find a reason to return to Taiwan, where my family is from. Studying Sanmao became a way to bring me back to the island for the first time in six years and for the first time as an adult.
Given the book’s name—Stories of the Sahara—my impulse to go to a tropical island on a different continent may not make immediate sense. Desert heat, unrelenting and seductive, pervades her writing. And while extreme conditions prevent Sanmao from embarking on her initial goal to become the first woman to traverse the desert, the obstacle encourages her to settle in the Western Saharan town of El Aaiún from 1974 to 1979. The book, a compilation of her weekly travel column in Taiwan’s United Daily News, jumps from episodes such as Sanmao running a de facto Chinese restaurant out of her kitchen, fossil-hunting in no man’s land, and delighting in her husband’s wedding present for her: a perfectly preserved camel skull. She showed me that a life of adventure wasn’t just for white men in khaki pith helmets.
But even as Sanmao weaves her readers through distant landscapes described as “a grim and ferocious giant lying on its side” and “an endless wasteland” stained blood red by the setting sun, her voice echoes from somewhere recognizable to me. It holds the same weight as those of the women I was raised by, whose tones possess a froggish rattle from the perpetually humidified climate that hangs in Taiwan’s south. I also realized that
When I was 15, my dad and I took a trip to Los Angeles that changed my life. We didn't have a set agenda, and since we were staying down the road from the University of California, we took a campus tour.
Feb 5, 2025 • 10 min read
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