30-second overview: San Mao (1943–1991), born Chen Ping in Chongqing, moved to Taiwan with her family in 1948. She dropped out of junior high after being humiliated in front of the class by her math teacher, and resumed writing after seven years of self-imposed isolation, guided by the painter Gu Fusheng. She published her first work in Modern Literature in 1962. In 1967, she went to Spain to study, where she met José, who was eight years her junior. In 1973, the two married in Spanish Sahara; San Mao wrote about desert life, becoming a window for Taiwanese people in the Martial Law era to imagine the distant world. In 1979, José died in a diving accident on La Palma Island in the Canary Islands. In 1990, her only screenwriting work, Red Dust, won eight Golden Horse Awards. On January 4, 1991, she hanged herself at Taipei Veterans General Hospital at the age of 47. Her works have sold over 15 million copies; her first English translation was published by Bloomsbury in 2019 and was shortlisted for the National Translation Award.
A Drop of Ink
Around 1955, in a classroom at Taipei First Girls' High School, a junior high school student scored zero on a math test.
Before that, she had done something: she noticed that the teacher always used exercises from the back of the textbook for quizzes, so she memorized all the answers, scoring full marks six times in a row. The teacher suspected cheating and gave a different test. She scored zero again. Then the teacher picked up a brush and drew two large circles representing zero around her eyes in front of the whole class.
The next day, she fainted in the classroom. After that, she stopped going to school. In 1956, she tried to return to school, but could not bring herself into the classroom: she ran to the library to hide every day, and finally officially withdrew.
For the next seven years, the place she visited most often was the Sanzhangli Cemetery. She sat among the tombstones reading novels. She saw a psychiatrist, once a week, but it did not help. She cut her wrists.
The person who helped her out was the painter Gu Fusheng. San Mao actively sought him as a mentor to learn painting, going out twice a week, with the only destination being Gu Fusheng's studio at No. 2, Lane 2, Tai'an Street. Gu Fusheng taught her for ten months. But after two months of teaching painting, he realized that her talent was not on the canvas: he handed her several copies of Modern Literature magazine and recommended her to Bai Xianyong. In December 1962, 19-year-old Chen Ping published a short story titled "Huo" (Temptation) in the 15th issue of Modern Literature.
Her original name was actually Chen Maoping. The character "Mao" in her genealogy had too many strokes; every time she wrote her name as a child, she skipped the middle character on her own accord. The family eventually went along with it, and she changed her name to Chen Ping. Her English name, Echo, was also self-chosen. Later, she gave herself the pen name "San Mao." One story says it was because she read Zhang Leping's comic Sanmao the Wanderer when she was three; another says it was self-deprecation, meaning "only worth thirty cents." Both stories point to the same thing: wandering.
A Window in the Desert
In 1964, San Mao, without a high school diploma, entered the Philosophy Department of Chinese Culture University as an auditor with special permission for exceptional ability. There, she met a German teacher. After dating for a year, they got engaged. They went together to order wedding business cards. That night, the German teacher died suddenly of a heart attack. San Mao took sleeping pills and was saved by her family. She later said, "I never dared to pick up those cards until today."
In 1967, she flew to Spain to study at Complutense University of Madrid. There, she met José (José María Quero y Ruíz), a youth from Andalusia. She was 24; he was 16. José proposed to her. She said wait six years: until he finished his studies and military service. During those six years, San Mao was not idle: she went to Germany to intensively study German, reading for 16 hours a day, and obtained teaching qualifications nine months later. She also studied ceramics. After a roundabout journey, she returned to Madrid, where José was waiting for her.
Six years had passed. In 1973, the two married in El Aaiún, the capital of Spanish Sahara. San Mao was 30, José was 22: his profession was a diving engineer. The wedding was minimalist: they walked through the desert in casual clothes to the judge's office to register.
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 essay, "Chinese Restaurant," was published in October 1974. She used the name "San Mao" to send daily life in the Sahara back to the island, piece by piece. In 1976, Stories of the Sahara was published by Crown Publications, sparking a reading craze across the straits. In an era when people could not freely leave the country, her words were the window through which a generation of young Taiwanese looked toward the distant world. Bai Xianyong later said that San Mao "created a gorgeous, romantic world full of legend... these life experiences that ordinary people could not achieve made her an idol for youth on both sides of the strait."
San Mao did not write about exotic adventures. She wrote about the daily necessities of life in the desert: how to make a table of Chinese food with only the ingredients at hand, how to deal with Sahrawi neighbors who constantly "borrowed" things, how to maintain the appearance of a home without running water or a decent supermarket. Her tone was always as if she were talking to a friend: "Let me tell you something interesting"—even if that thing was actually dangerous or hard. She wrote interestingly about hard days, and made the distant world feel like the next door. Readers were not reading travel essays; they were reading family letters sent back to Taiwan from the Sahara.
But how real was her Sahara? This question has never stopped since publication. San Mao insisted that all content was based on real experiences. In 2019, the English translator Mike Fu positioned her work as "semi-autobiographical," not guaranteeing the truth of all details. The University of Pittsburgh has a paper titled San Mao: Oasis or Mirage?, exploring the boundary between her realism and fiction. Travel writer Ma Zhongxin published The Truth of San Mao in 1996, spending five years tracking San Mao's footsteps and visiting relatives and friends, concluding that she "fabricated stories and fictionalized a beautiful love." But critics also questioned that Ma Zhongxin came with bias from the beginning.
The truth may be more complex than either side says: she was not fabricating, but she was not writing journalism either. She was using literature to rebuild a world she needed.
This debate later gained another dimension. San Mao's writing occurred at the end of Spanish colonial rule. She was a foreign spouse on the side of the colonizers; her neighbors were the colonized Sahrawi people. She wrote about these neighbors with kindness and curiosity, but kindness does not equal equality. English translator Mike Fu admitted in the preface that, by contemporary standards, some passages "may carry a condescending tone toward Sahrawi neighbors." San Mao did not have this awareness; almost no one did in the 1970s. But reading her today, this dimension cannot be bypassed.
Her influence extended beyond Taiwan. In the 1980s, her works entered mainland China in the early stages of reform and opening up. For readers who had just emerged from the Cultural Revolution, San Mao's Sahara was not a tourist attraction, but evidence: proving that daily life could grow into another shape, that a person could choose where they wanted to go. Her wandering writing became a unique cultural bond between the two sides of the strait: a desert story written by a Taiwanese woman made mainland readers feel for the first time that the "outside world" was not just a slogan, but a touchable warmth. In 2009, she ranked 10th in literature and 35th in total popularity in the "Top 100 Most Influential Cultural Figures in New China's First Sixty Years" online poll, and was simultaneously selected as one of the "60 Women Who Influenced New China." The National Taiwan Literature Museum's evaluation is: San Mao "is perhaps the most best-selling and influential literary figure in Taiwan." By the time she passed away, she had published 15 literary works, 5 translations, 3 audiobooks, and 1 script: a total of 24 books, with over 2.5 million words, translated into 15 languages.
But the "freedom" readers saw was not exactly the same as what she experienced. Critic Yang Zhao wrote: San Mao created a real, dreamlike happiness for readers, overcoming not only personal pain but also soothing the entire Taiwan's repression. Yet behind the words, the pessimistic and melancholic self was not liberated.
The best illustration of this gap is The Olive Tree. San Mao wrote lyrics for composer Li Taixiang; the original lyrics were: for the little donkey, for the big eyes of the Spanish girl, wandering far away. Li Taixiang felt the original lyrics were hard to set to music and put them aside. Folk singer Yang Zujun saw them and rewrote them: birds flying in the sky, streams in the mountains, wide grasslands. The version sung by Qi Yu in 1979 was included in the first album The Olive Tree, and was also the original song for the film Happy Smile. Li Taixiang required Qi Yu to "sing broadly, without falsetto"—he thought falsetto was decadent music. This song spread throughout the Chinese-speaking world. The Taiwan Radio and Television Bureau banned the song: the lyrics "do not ask me where I come from" and "distant places" were considered potentially triggering for cross-strait sensitivities, and the romanticized wandering was feared to encourage teenagers to run away from home. The ban only made the song more popular.
San Mao was always dissatisfied with the changed lyrics. She said, "I will not sing this song. If wandering is only to see birds flying in the sky and the wide grassland, then there is no need to wander at all."
She wrote about a specific donkey and a real girl. Others turned it into an abstract bird and grassland. Even her own wandering was romanticized.
The Person Who Could Not Be Kept
In 1975, Spain withdrew from the Sahara; San Mao and José moved to the Canary Islands, first living at No. 3 Calle Lope de Vega in the Telde district of Gran Canaria Island, and later also living on La Palma Island.
In September 1979, San Mao's parents flew from Taiwan to Europe to visit their daughter and son-in-law. Married for six years, this was the first time they had met José. San Mao accompanied her parents on a trip to London. At the airport when seeing them off, José and his mother-in-law made an agreement: "Next year, we will come to Taiwan to play."
There was no next year.
On September 30, José drowned while underwater fishing off the coast of Barlovento on La Palma Island. He was 27. His body was fished up the next day. That day was the Mid-Autumn Festival.
After seeing her parents off at London Airport, San Mao returned to the hotel. At 1:00 AM, someone knocked on the door. After learning the news, she flew back to La Palma and personally dug José's grave in the mud. Her sister, Chen Tianxin, later recalled: "If it were not for her parents being there, she would have followed José. It must have been God who made her parents suddenly go at that time."
That autumn, her parents brought her back to Taiwan.
After José left, she wrote the essay collection Dreams of Flowers Falling, recording the days after loss. After that, she did not stop. In 1981, commissioned by a publisher, she traveled to Central and South America, and wrote All Rivers and Mountains upon her return. From the same year, she taught at Chinese Culture University until 1984. She also directly translated the Argentine comic Mafalda from Spanish into Chinese. She traveled through 54 countries in her life.
But no matter how far she went, the San Mao readers remembered was always the one in the Sahara—long hair, long skirt, big earrings, with silent José standing beside her. The San Mao after returning to Taiwan was not so romantic. She kept setting out—Central and South America, mainland China, Xinjiang—as if she would be caught up by something if she stopped. One of her closest friends, Ni Kuang, later reflected: "San Mao always had suicidal tendencies. She was a character with strong drama and heavy tragedy, leaving the world because she lost the power to love and be loved."
In April 1989, San Mao stepped onto mainland Chinese soil for the first time. She first went to Zhoushan, Zhejiang—the Chen family's hometown—to look for ancestors she had never met. She then visited 80-year-old cartoonist Zhang Leping in Shanghai; the first thing she said upon meeting him was to claim him as her "father." Zhang Leping later told people that he did not expect to "draw" a real daughter. San Mao's Sanmao the Wanderer, which she read in Chongqing when she was three, finally connected her to the author—a drawn wandering orphan who prophesied a real wanderer. This friendship continued until her death.
In August 1990, she flew to Urumqi to visit the 77-year-old "King of Western Songs," Wang Luobin, staying at his home for nearly a month. There was a 30-year age gap between them. Wang Luobin always kept his distance. When San Mao left, she cried and hugged him. Wang Luobin later heard the news of her death from the radio and wrote his last love song, Waiting—A Love Song to the Dead.
121 days after leaving Xinjiang, she died.
The Last 25 Days
In 1990, director Yim Ho asked San Mao to co-write a film script. The two used about 40 nights of intensive dialogue to complete Red Dust. This was San Mao's only film screenwriting work: set in 1940s China under Japanese occupation, it implicitly alluded to the entanglement between Eileen Chang and Hu Lancheng, starring Brigitte Lin,秦汉 (Qin Han), and Maggie Cheung, with music by Lo Ta-yu. The film premiered in Hong Kong in November and was released 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 major awards: Best Feature Film, Best Director, Best Leading Actress (Brigitte Lin), Best Supporting Actress (Maggie Cheung), Cinematography, Art Direction, Costume Design, and Film Music. Brigitte Lin later said, "Without San Mao, I would not have won this award." The two were confidantes. When they drank, they made an agreement: the one who leaves first must try to come back to tell the other about the feeling after death.
San Mao was the only screenwriter for that film. But the nomination for Best Original Screenplay was there, but she did not win.
25 days later.
On January 2, 1991, San Mao was admitted to Taipei Veterans General Hospital to undergo surgery for endometrial hyperplasia. The surgery was successful, there was no cancer, and the hospital arranged for her discharge on January 5. The day before admission, she solemnly gave her mother a jade carving and a birthday card. The night before, she instructed the nurses: do not disturb her in the middle of the night.
Early in the morning of January 4, cleaning staff found her hanging from the hook of an IV stand with a stocking in the bathroom of her ward.
She was 47.
The police conclusion was "world-weariness due to illness." Her mother, Miu Jinlan, did not agree, believing it was an accident where she lost consciousness in a daze from sleeping pills. The attending physician, Zhao Guanzhong, also disagreed: endometrial hyperplasia was only a minor surgery; he speculated it was an emotional issue. 35 years have passed, and there is no consensus on these claims. She was buried in the Jinbaoshan Cemetery in Taipei.
The literary world's positioning of her has never had a consensus. San Mao knew it well—she told Jia Pingwa: "My books are written for ordinary people... they do not belong on your bookshelf, unless it is friendship, not literature." Scholars observed that she was "far more popular than Eileen Chang," and also "lacked a canonizing master like Xia Zhiqing" to fight for her a place in literary history. But the world outside the canon is larger—her books sold over 15 million copies. In 2019, The New York Times mourned her in its "Overlooked" series, calling her "a wandering writer who found her voice in the desert." In the same year, the first English translation Stories of the Sahara was published by Bloomsbury. Translator Mike Fu went to Spain specifically to visit José's niece and visit San Mao's former home in the Canary Islands. This book was shortlisted for the National Translation Award. On March 26, 2019, her 76th death anniversary, Google launched a commemorative Doodle in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. In 2020, Spain filmed a documentary Sanmao: La novia del desierto (San Mao: The Bride of the Desert). In 2022, Spain published another biography of hers, Un viaje al corazón de Sanmao (A Journey to San Mao's Heart). In 2025, the Oxford University academic journal Adaptation published a paper analyzing San Mao's function as "cultural diplomacy" in Spanish biographical adaptations. A Taiwanese writer, more than 30 years after her death, is still being discussed and reinterpreted on another continent.
She and Sima Zhongyuan were well-known literary friends; the two had made a "life-and-death pact": the one who leaves first must 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 33 years apart—as if finally fulfilling that pact.
More than 30 years after San Mao's death, her works have never gone out of print, and new editions are still printed every year. On social media platforms in mainland China, accounts with San Mao's name as their slogan still have over a million followers—although she never lived in the age of social media. Her name has become a cultural symbol, representing not just literature, but a whole set of values about freedom, wandering, and sincerity.
In 1992, the year after San Mao's death, Taiwan established the San Mao Literature Award. Her English name, Echo, also became the name for a generation of Chinese women: mothers who grew up reading San Mao's essays gave this name to their daughters.
Today's young Taiwanese may not have read San Mao's books, but the tradition she opened has not disappeared. Before her, Taiwanese people felt that "writing about one's own life" was not literature. San Mao proved that ordinary people's daily experiences—daily necessities, foreign dilemmas, loss and loneliness—when written honestly and specifically enough, are literature. This path later extended to blogs and social media. Every Taiwanese writing a diary in a foreign land stands in front of the window she opened when she first sent manuscripts back from the Sahara in 1974.
She Became a Path
Today, there are two tourism routes in the Canary Islands named after San Mao.
The one on Gran Canaria Island in the Telde district passes by the former home at No. 3 Calle Lope de Vega, where she and José lived, an olive tree installation, and a book-shaped bench sculpture. The route on La Palma Island was launched in 2018, passing by José's grave in Barlovento.
In front of José's grave is a visitor book. Flipping through it, over 60% is Simplified Chinese, 10% is Traditional Chinese, and 20% is Spanish. Most who come are young women in their twenties.
A person who spent her life escaping finally became someone else's path. She taught an entire generation to imagine the distant world. And the distant world, in the end, set up a signpost for her.
Further Reading
- Bai Xianyong: The person who pushed San Mao's debut work onto Modern Literature
- Brigitte Lin: Red Dust made her a queen, and also made her lose a friend
- Taiwan Folk Song Movement: The soil in which The Olive Tree was born
- Taiwanese Essays: The literary genre territory occupied by San Mao
- Xi Murong: Another female writer of the same era who wrote the foreign land into the hearts of Taiwanese people