San Mao: The Person Who Wrote Escape as Freedom

30-second overview: San Mao (1943–1991), born Chen Ping, was born in Chongqing and moved to Taiwan with her family in 1948. She dropped out of junior high after a math teacher publicly humiliated her, spent seven years in self-imposed isolation, then resumed writing under the guidance of painter Gu Fusheng. In 1962 she published her debut work in Modern Literature magazine.¹ In 1967 she went to study in Spain, where she met José María Quero y Ruíz, eight years her junior.² The two married in the Spanish Sahara in 1973; San Mao wrote about desert life, becoming a window to the distant world for Taiwanese readers under martial law.¹ In 1979, José drowned in a diving accident off the coast of La Palma in the Canary Islands.³ In 1990, her only screenplay, Red Dust, won eight Golden Horse Awards.⁴ On January 4, 1991, she died by suicide at Taipei Veterans General Hospital, aged forty-seven.¹ Her works have sold over 15 million copies; the first English translation was published by Bloomsbury in 2019 and was shortlisted for the National Translation Award.⁵⁶

A Stroke of Ink

Around 1955, in a classroom at Taipei First Girls' High School, a second-year junior high student received a zero on her math exam.

Before that, she had done something: she noticed the teacher always pulled quiz questions from the exercises at the back of the textbook, so she memorized all the answers—six consecutive perfect scores. The teacher suspected cheating and gave her a different test. The result was zero. Then the teacher picked up a calligraphy brush and, in front of the entire class, drew two large circles around her eyes—representing two zeroes.¹

The next day she collapsed in the classroom. After that, she stopped going to school. In 1956 she tried to return, but couldn't bring herself to walk into the classroom—she spent her days hiding in the library, and eventually formally withdrew.¹

For the next seven years, the place she went most often was Sanlihe Cemetery, sitting among the tombstones reading novels. She saw a psychologist, once a week, to no avail. She cut her wrists.¹

The person who brought her out was painter Gu Fusheng. San Mao proactively sought him out for painting lessons, leaving the house twice a week, her sole destination Gu Fusheng's studio at No. 2, Lane 2, Tai'an Street.⁷ Gu Fusheng taught her for ten months. But after just two months of instruction, he saw that her talent did not lie on the canvas: he handed her a few issues of Modern Literature magazine and recommended her to Bai Xianyong.⁷ In December 1962, nineteen-year-old Chen Ping published her debut short story, "Confusion," in issue 15 of Modern Literature.¹

Her original given name was actually Chen Maoping. The character "懋" in the family genealogy had too many strokes; every time she wrote her name as a child she skipped the middle character on her own initiative, and the family eventually relented and renamed her Chen Ping. Her English name Echo was also self-chosen.¹ Later she gave herself the pen name "San Mao" (三毛). One account says it came from reading Zhang Leping's comic The Adventures of Sanmao the Waif at age three; another says it was self-deprecating—"only worth three cents."¹ Both explanations point to the same thing: wandering.

A Window in the Desert

In 1964, without a high school diploma, San Mao gained special permission to audit courses in the philosophy department at Chinese Culture University, where she met a German teacher. After a year of dating, they got engaged. They went together to order wedding cards. That same evening, the German teacher died of a heart attack. San Mao took sleeping pills and was revived by her family. She later said: "Those name cards—I never dared go pick them up, even to this day."⁸

In 1967 she flew to Spain, enrolling at the Complutense University of Madrid. There she met José (José María Quero y Ruíz), an Andalusian youth. She was twenty-four; he was sixteen.² José proposed. She said to wait six years—until he finished his studies and military service. San Mao did not sit idle during those six years: she went to Germany for intensive German study, reading sixteen hours a day, and earned a teaching qualification in nine months.¹ She also studied ceramics. After circling back to Madrid, José was there waiting for her.

The six years were up. In 1973, the two married in El Aaiún, the capital of the Spanish Sahara. San Mao was thirty; José was twenty-two—his profession was diving engineer.¹ The wedding was minimalist: walking through the desert in casual clothes, going to the judge's office to register.²

After that, San Mao began writing about the desert for Taiwan. Invited by Ping Xintao, editor-in-chief of the United Daily News supplement, her first piece, "Chinese Restaurant," was published in October 1974. Using the name "San Mao," she sent the everyday life of the Sahara back to the island, one essay at a time.¹ In 1976, Stories of the Sahara was published by Crown Publishing, sparking a reading craze on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.⁹ In an era when citizens could not freely leave the country, her words were an entire generation of young Taiwanese's window to the distant world. Bai Xianyong later said that San Mao "created a legendary, magnificent romantic world… these extraordinary life experiences made her a youth icon on both sides of the strait."¹

What San Mao wrote was not exotic adventure. She wrote about daily life in the desert: how to improvise a Chinese meal with whatever ingredients were on hand, how to deal with Sahrawi neighbors who kept "borrowing" things that were never returned, how to maintain a semblance of home without running water or a proper supermarket. Her tone was always like talking to a friend—"let me tell you something fun"—even when the thing in question was actually dangerous or grueling. She made hard days sound interesting and made the faraway feel like next door. Readers were not reading travel essays; they were reading letters home from the Sahara.

But how true was her Sahara, really? This question has never stopped since publication. San Mao insisted all her content was real experience. In 2019, translator Mike Fu of the English edition positioned her work as "semi-autobiographical," declining to vouch for the veracity of every detail.⁶ A University of Pittsburgh paper was titled directly "San Mao: Oasis or Mirage?" exploring the boundary between her documentary and fictional modes.¹⁰ Travel writer Ma Zhongxin published The Truth About San Mao in 1996, spending five years tracing San Mao's footsteps and interviewing friends and family, concluding that she "fabricated stories and invented a beautiful love."¹¹ But critics also questioned whether Ma Zhongxin started out with a bias.¹¹

The truth is probably more complex than either side claims: she was not fabricating, but neither was she writing reportage. She was using literature to reconstruct a world she needed.

This debate later gained another dimension. San Mao's writing took place at the tail end of Spanish colonialism. She was the foreign spouse on the colonizer's side; her neighbors were the colonized Sahrawi people. She wrote about these neighbors with goodwill and curiosity, but goodwill is not the same as equality. Translator Mike Fu acknowledged frankly in his preface that, viewed by contemporary standards, some passages "may carry a condescending tone toward Sahrawi neighbors."⁶ San Mao had no such self-awareness—almost no one in the 1970s did. But rereading her today, this dimension cannot be bypassed.

Her influence extended beyond Taiwan. In the 1980s, her works entered mainland China in the early reform and opening-up period. For readers who had just emerged from the Cultural Revolution, San Mao's Sahara was not a tourist destination but proof—proof that daily life could take a different shape, that a person could choose where to go. Her wandering writing became a unique cultural bond across the strait: a desert story written by a Taiwanese woman that gave mainland readers their first sense that "the outside world" was not just a slogan but a tangible warmth. In 2009, she ranked tenth in the literature category and thirty-fifth overall in an online poll for "The Most Influential Cultural Figures of Sixty Years of New China," and was simultaneously selected as one of "Sixty Women Who Influenced New China."¹ The National Museum of Taiwan Literature's assessment: San Mao "was perhaps Taiwan's best-selling and most influential literary figure."¹² By the time of her death, she had published fifteen works of literature, five translations, three audiobooks, and one screenplay—twenty-four titles totaling over 2.5 million characters, translated into fifteen languages.¹

But the "freedom" readers saw was not entirely the same as what she experienced. Critic Yang Zhao wrote: San Mao created a real dreamlike happiness for her readers, not only overcoming her own pain but also soothing the repression of all of Taiwan. Yet behind the words, the pessimistic, melancholic self was never liberated.¹

Nothing illustrates this gap better than "Olive Tree." San Mao wrote the original lyrics for composer Li Taixiang. The original verses spoke of: a little donkey, a Spanish girl's big eyes, wandering to distant places.¹³ Li Taixiang felt the original lyrics were difficult to set to music and set them aside. Folk singer Yang Zujun saw them and rewrote them into: little birds flying in the sky, clear streams in the mountains, vast grasslands.¹³ The version performed by Chyi Yu in 1979 was included on her debut album Olive Tree and was also the soundtrack to the film Joyful Face.¹³ Li Taixiang asked Chyi Yu to "sing very broadly, without any breathy tones"—he considered breathy tones to be decadent music. The song spread across the Chinese-speaking world. Taiwan's Government Information Office banned it from broadcast: the lyrics "don't ask me where I came from" and "distant places" were deemed potentially sensitive regarding cross-strait relations, and the romanticization of wandering was feared to encourage young people to run away from home.¹⁴ The ban only made the song more popular.

San Mao was always unhappy about the rewritten lyrics. She once said: "I can't sing this song. If wandering is only for the sake of seeing birds in the sky and great grasslands, then there's no need to wander at all."¹³

She wrote about a specific donkey and a real girl. Others turned it into abstract birds and grasslands. Even her own wandering was romanticized.

The Person She Couldn't Keep

In 1975, Spain withdrew from the Sahara. San Mao and José moved to the Canary Islands, first living at Calle Lope de Vega 3 in the Telde district of Gran Canaria, and later also living on La Palma.³

In September 1979, San Mao's parents flew from Taiwan to Europe to visit their daughter and son-in-law. After six years of marriage, this was the first time they met José. San Mao accompanied her parents on a trip to London. At the airport farewell, José made a promise to his mother-in-law: "Next year I'll come visit Taiwan."³

There was no next year.

On September 30, José drowned while underwater fishing off the Barlovento coast of La Palma. He was twenty-seven.³ His body was recovered the next day. That day was the Mid-Autumn Festival.³

After seeing her parents off at the London airport, San Mao returned to her hotel. At one o'clock in the morning, someone knocked on the door. Upon hearing the news, she flew back to La Palma and personally dug José's grave in the mud.¹⁵ Her older sister Chen Tianxin later recalled: "If our parents hadn't been there, she would have followed José. It must have been God who made Mom and Dad go at that exact moment."¹⁵

That fall, her parents brought her back to Taiwan.

After José's death, she wrote the essay collection Dreams of the Flowers Falling, documenting the period after her loss.¹ After that she did not stop. In 1981, commissioned by a publisher, she traveled to Central and South America and wrote Ten Thousand Rivers and a Thousand Mountains upon her return. She taught at Chinese Culture University from the same year until 1984.¹ She also translated the Argentine comic Mafalda directly from Spanish into Chinese.¹ In her lifetime she traveled through fifty-four countries.¹

But no matter how far she went, the San Mao readers remembered was always the one in the Sahara—long hair, long skirt, large earrings, with the silent José beside her. The San Mao who returned to Taiwan was not as romantic. She kept setting out—Central and South America, mainland China, Xinjiang—as if stopping would mean being caught by something. One of her closest friends, Ni Kuang, later reflected: "San Mao always had suicidal tendencies. She was a dramatically intense, deeply tragic figure who left the world because she lost the power to love and be loved."¹

In April 1989, San Mao set foot on mainland Chinese soil for the first time. She went first to Zhoushan, Zhejiang—the Chen family's ancestral home—searching for ancestors she had never met. Then she went to Shanghai to visit eighty-year-old cartoonist Zhang Leping, and her first words upon meeting him were to ask him to be her "father." Zhang Leping later told people he never expected he would "draw" a real daughter into existence.¹ The copy of The Adventures of Sanmao the Waif she read at age Chongqing had ultimately connected her with its creator—a drawn wandering orphan who had prophesied a real wanderer. This bond continued until her death.

In August 1990, she flew to Ürümqi to visit seventy-seven-year-old "King of Western Songs" Wang Luobin, staying at his home for nearly a month. A thirty-year age gap lay between them. Wang Luobin always maintained his distance. When San Mao left, she cried and embraced him.¹⁶ Wang Luobin later heard of her death on the radio and wrote the last love song of his life, "Waiting—A Love Song for the Dead."¹⁶

One hundred and twenty-one days after leaving Xinjiang, she was dead.

The Last Twenty-Five Days

In 1990, director Yim Ho approached San Mao to co-write a film screenplay. The two used roughly forty intensive evening sessions to complete Red Dust.¹⁷ This was San Mao's only film screenplay: set in Japanese-occupied China in the 1940s, an allegory for the entanglement of Eileen Chang and Hu Lancheng, starring Brigitte Lin, Chin Han, and Maggie Cheung, with music by Lo Ta-yu.⁴ The film premiered in Hong Kong in November and opened in Taiwan on December 8.

On December 10, the 27th Golden Horse Awards ceremony was held at the National Theater in Taipei. Red Dust won eight awards: Best Feature Film, Best Director, Best Actress (Brigitte Lin), Best Supporting Actress (Maggie Cheung), Cinematography, Art Direction, Costume Design, and Original Film Score.⁴ Brigitte Lin later said: "Without San Mao, I would not have won this award."¹⁸ The two were kindred spirits. When drinking together, they made a pact: whoever died first had to find a way to come back and tell the other what death felt like.

San Mao was the sole screenwriter of that film. But Best Original Screenplay was nominated and did not win.⁴

Twenty-five days later.

On January 2, 1991, San Mao was admitted to Taipei Veterans General Hospital for surgery to treat endometrial hyperplasia. The surgery was successful, with no cancer found; the hospital scheduled her discharge for January 5.¹⁹ The day before admission, she solemnly gave her mother a jade carving and a birthday card.¹⁹ The night before, she told the nurses: "Don't come disturb me in the middle of the night."

On the morning of January 4, a cleaning staff member found her in the bathroom, hanging by a stocking from the IV stand hook.¹⁹

She was forty-seven.

The police concluded "suicide due to illness and world-weariness." Her mother, Mu Jinlan, disagreed, believing it was an accident caused by unconsciousness from sleeping pills. Attending physician Zhao Guanzhong also disagreed: endometrial hyperplasia was a minor surgery; he speculated it was an emotional issue.¹⁹ Thirty-five years later, these accounts have no consensus. She is buried at Jinbao Mountain Cemetery in Taipei.¹

The literary world's positioning of her has also never reached consensus. San Mao herself was well aware—she once told Jia Pingwa: "My books are written for ordinary people… they don't belong on your bookshelf, unless it's friendship, not literature."²⁰ Scholars have observed that she "is far more popular than Eileen Chang" and also "lacks a canonization master like C. T. Hsia" to secure her a place in literary history.²⁰ But the world beyond the canon is larger—her books have sold over 15 million copies.⁵ In 2019, The New York Times commemorated her in its "Overlooked" series, calling her "a wandering writer who found her voice in the desert."⁵ That same year, the first English translation, Stories of the Sahara, was published by Bloomsbury. Translator Mike Fu traveled to Spain specifically to visit José's niece and tour San Mao's former home in the Canary Islands.⁶ The book was shortlisted for the National Translation Award.⁶ On March 26, 2019, her seventy-sixth birthday, Google launched a commemorative Doodle in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.²¹ In 2020, Spain produced a documentary, Sanmao: La novia del desierto (San Mao: The Bride of the Desert).²² In 2022, Spain published her biography, Un viaje al corazón de Sanmao (A Journey into the Heart of San Mao). In 2025, the Oxford academic journal Adaptation published a paper analyzing San Mao's function as "cultural diplomacy" in Spanish-language biographical adaptations. A Taiwanese writer, more than thirty years after her death, is still being discussed and reinterpreted on another continent.

She and Sima Zhongyuan were well-known literary friends who made a "life-and-death pact": whoever died first had to come back to tell the other about the world after death. On January 4, 2024, Sima Zhongyuan passed away—the same month and day as San Mao's death, exactly thirty-three years apart, as if he had finally kept that appointment.²³

In the more than thirty years since San Mao's death, her works have never gone out of print, with new editions printed every year. On mainland Chinese social media platforms, quote accounts named after San Mao still have over one million followers—despite the fact she never lived in the age of social media. Her name has become a cultural symbol representing not just literature but an entire set of values about freedom, wandering, and sincerity.

In 1992, the year after San Mao's death, Taiwan established the San Mao Literary Award.²¹ Her English name Echo also became a name for a generation of Chinese women: mothers who grew up reading San Mao's essays named their daughters after it.²¹

Young people in Taiwan today may not have read San Mao's books, but the tradition she opened has not disappeared. Before her, Taiwanese people didn't think "writing about your own life" counted as literature. San Mao proved that ordinary people's daily experiences—groceries, foreign predicaments, loss and loneliness—if written honestly and specifically enough, are literature. This road later extended to blogs and social media. Every Taiwanese person writing a diary abroad stands before the window she opened in 1974 when she first sent a manuscript back from the Sahara.

She Became a Path

Today, there are two San Mao–themed tourist routes in the Canary Islands.

The one in the Telde district of Gran Canaria passes the former home where she and José lived at Calle Lope de Vega 3, an olive tree installation, and a book-shaped bench sculpture. The La Palma route, opened in 2018, passes José's grave in Barlovento.²⁴

There is a visitor's register in front of José's grave. Open it, and over sixty percent of the entries are in simplified Chinese, ten percent in traditional Chinese, and twenty percent in Spanish.²⁴ The majority of visitors are women in their twenties.

A person who spent her life escaping ultimately became someone else's route. She taught an entire generation to imagine the distant world. And the distant world, in the end, erected signposts for her.

Further Reading

• Bai Xianyong: The person who brought San Mao's debut work into Modern Literature
• Brigitte Lin: Red Dust gave her the crown—and cost her a friend
• Taiwanese Folk Music Movement: The soil from which "Olive Tree" grew
• Taiwanese Prose: The literary territory San Mao occupied
• Xi Murong: A contemporary female writer who also wrote the foreign into Taiwanese hearts

References