San Mao, I Presume? Encounters with Incarnations of the Most Popular Spanish Writer in History

In 1967, a young woman from Taiwan went to Europe, learned Spanish, met a teenage Spaniard who fell for her, and, to make a long and apocryphal story short, years later claimed inspiration from a National Geographic article about the Sahara and decided that she wanted to live and travel in the desert. 

Subsequently, she moved to Spanish Sahara, an Arabic-speaking colony in West Africa.  She married the Spaniard there, obtained Spanish citizenship, lived her daily life in Spanish, and began writing lighthearted though sometimes gothic accounts in Mandarin about her experiences in the Sahara.  She sent these purportedly autobiographical stories to Taiwan, where they were published in periodicals starting in October 1974.  And then, more or less overnight, San Mao – an author guised in a persona and pseudonym at once – became extraordinarily famous.  A number of her narratives were collected into the 1976 anthology Stories of the Sahara, a volume that quickly became, perhaps, the most read, regaled and retold work of Taiwanese literature in history.  Its editions are literally innumerable, given that black market versions of it later circulated in China.  Put otherwise, San Mao is the most popular Spanish author of all time. 

She was not read in Spain, however, until forty years later.  That is because the twin Spanish and Catalan translations of Stories of the Sahara that appeared in Barcelona in 2016 were the first in any Western language of her landmark collection.  Few are the nations who have waited so long to read their most-read author.  This is particularly noteworthy because San Mao in her heyday was far more than an author:  she was a celebrity, a literary rock star, some combination of Audrey Hepburn, Lawrence of Arabia, Oprah, the Beatles, Annie Hall, Anthony Bourdain, Virginia Woolf, Robinson Crusoe, Dear Abby, Marco Polo, Martha Stewart, Livingstone and Stanley, and a long and storied tradition of Chinese travel writers.  In Spain, however, she was none of the above, for San Mao and Stories of the Sahara did not exist there until the Barcelona editions saw light. 

This talk will assess the posthumous Spanish author known as San Mao via close readings of selected stories and photographs in the 2016 volumes.  How might framing this Taiwanese author as Spanish rewrite the modern story not only of Spanish literature but of Spain itself?  How might Taiwan in turn be reframed and redefined along globalized lines of a new kind?  Encountering the incarnations of African adventurers in unexpected places entails the upturning of any number of presumptions.  Reappearances, that is to say, retain the potential for new formulations altogether.