Sanmao (writer)

Lore & Background

Sanmao was born Chen Mao-ping (陳懋平) in Chongqing to Chen Siqing, a lawyer, and Miao Jinlan. She had an older sister, Chen Tianxin. Her parents were devout Christians. Her family was from Zhejiang. After the Second Sino-Japanese War, the family moved to Nanjing. When she was six, her family moved to Taiwan due to the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in the Chinese Civil War. She disliked the restrictiveness of the Taiwanese school system. As a child, she developed an interest in literature and read a range of writers from all countries, including Lu Xun, Ba Jin, Bing Xin, Lao She, and Yu Dafu, and works such as The Count of Monte Cristo, Don Quixote, and Gone with the Wind. She read Dream of the Red Chamber as a Grade 5 student during class. When asked what she wanted to become when she grew up, she said that she wanted to marry a great artist, specifically Pablo Picasso. Due to her preoccupation with reading, Sanmao's grades suffered in middle school, particularly in mathematics. After an incident when a teacher drew black circles around her eyes and humiliated her in class, Sanmao dropped out. Her father home-schooled her in English and classical literature and hired tutors to teach her piano and painting. In 1962, at age 19, Sanmao published her first essay.

Reader's Guide

Sanmao studied philosophy at the Chinese Culture University in Taiwan, with the goal of '[finding] the solution to problems in life.' There, she dated a fellow student; however, becoming 'disillusioned with romance,' she moved to Madrid, Spain at age 20 and began studying at the Complutense University of Madrid. In Madrid, she met Spanish marine engineer José María Quero y Ruíz, whom she would later marry. Sanmao later moved to Germany, where she intensively studied German, sometimes up to 16 hours per day. Within nine months, she earned a qualification to teach German and began studying ceramics. At age 26, Sanmao returned to Taiwan. She was engaged to a teacher from Germany, but he died of a heart attack before they could marry. Sanmao returned to Madrid and began teaching English at a primary school, rekindled her relationship with Ruíz, and married him in 1973, in the then-Spanish-controlled Spanish Sahara. In 1976 she published the autobiographical The Stories of the Sahara, based on her experiences living in the Spanish Sahara with Jose. Part travelogue and part memoir, it established Sanmao as an autobiographical writer with a unique voice and perspective. Following the book's immense success in Taiwan, British Hong Kong, and China, her early writings were collected under the title Gone with the Rainy Season. She continued to write, and her experiences in the Spanish Sahara and the Canary Islands were published in several more books. On 30 September 1979, Jose drowned in a diving accident. In 1980 she returned to Taiwan, and in November 1981, she traveled to Central and South America on commission from Taiwanese publishers. These experiences were recorded in subsequent works. From 1981 to 1984, she taught and lectured at her alma mater, Chinese Culture University, in Taiwan. After this point, she decided to dedicate herself fully to writing. Sanmao's books deal mainly with her own experiences studying and living abroad. They were extremely well received not only in Taiwan, but also in Hong Kong and China, and they remain popular. From 1976 to her death in 1991, Sanmao published more than 20 books. She also translated the comic Mafalda from Spanish to Chinese. On 4 January 1991, at the age of 47, Sanmao committed suicide at Taipei Veterans General Hospital in Taipei by hanging herself with a pair of silk stockings. Some fans, notably Zhang Jinran, claimed her death was a murder. Her apparent suicide came as a shock to many readers and was accompanied by public expressions of grief throughout the Chinese-speaking world. There has been much speculation regarding the reason for her suicide: a cancer scare, disappointment over losing the Taiwan film Golden Horse Film Festival and Awards for her script to the film Red Dust, a loss which she took poorly, or depression over her husband's death 12 years earlier. She was buried at the Chin Pao San Cemetery.

Did You Know?

• Sanmao's pen name was taken from the main character of Zhang Leping's most famous work, Sanmao.
• She legally changed her name to Chen Ping because she avoided writing the complex character 'Mao' (懋) since childhood.
• She translated the Spanish-language comic strip Mafalda into Chinese.
• Her husband José María Quero y Ruiz drowned in a diving accident on 30 September 1979.

A Name in the Modern Canon

Sanmao occupies a place among the writers most frequently cited as having made significant contributions to modern Chinese women's writing. She is grouped alongside figures such as Lu Yin, Xie Wanying, Shi Pingmei, Ding Ling, Xiao Hong, and Eileen Chang—authors whose collective output reshaped what literature could mean when women stood as the subject of experience, thought, aesthetic judgment, and speech. After the May Fourth Movement, Chinese modern female literature was broadly understood as carrying a modern humanistic spirit, one that placed women at the center rather than at the margins of narrative. Sanmao's inclusion in this lineage signals that her work was recognized as part of this broader project of giving voice to women's perspectives, distinct from the male-authored traditions that had long dominated the literary field. Her name appears in the same breath as writers who employed vernacular genres, diary fiction, and redefinition as rhetorical strategies to challenge patriarchal assumptions, situating her within a tradition of literary activism and self-expression.

Inheriting a Contested Tradition

The literary world Sanmao entered was one where women's creative output had long been acknowledged yet systematically undervalued. For centuries, the dominant sentiment captured in the phrase 'for women, lack of literary talent is a virtue' treated the literary field as a male domain, even while both sexes were recognized as possessing cai—that quality of profound lyricism, deep intellect, and analytic skill. Yet women's works played an integral part throughout Chinese history. Poets like Li Qingzhao, Xue Tao, and Mao Xiuhui produced writing that addressed romance, marriage, gender roles, and the parallel hardships men and women faced in political and domestic life. Their recognition, however, was often blurred when male writers adopted female personas or attributed works to women, making authentic female voices harder to identify. Sanmao's place in the modern canon thus represents a continuation—and a reclamation—of a tradition that had always existed but was repeatedly obscured by the structures of a patriarchal literary establishment.

Writing in the Shadow of Revolution

The early twentieth century presented women writers with a complex landscape shaped by political upheaval and ideological transformation. The chaos following the Opium War of 1840, the imperialist invasions, and the 1911 Revolution created what felt like a state of emergency, compelling a generation to reckon with what it meant to become modern. Within this turbulence, the feminist movement gained momentum, and women writers increasingly engaged with feminist ideas, expressing perspectives rooted in their own experiences rather than those filtered through male authors. In the 1920s and 1930s, Freudian psychoanalysis found favor among Chinese feminists studying gender relationships, becoming a recurring topic in feminist literary work. Sanmao's emergence as a significant voice in this period places her within a community of writers who used literature as a site of protest against oppressive Confucian ideals while navigating the tension between challenging those ideals and maintaining social order. Her work was part of a broader literary discourse positively influenced by the social movements of the era.

The Struggle for an Authentic Voice

Even as political revolution promised liberation, the literary landscape continued to present challenges for women seeking to express a genuinely feminine perspective. When Mao Zedong came to power in 1949, the government abolished practices such as foot-binding, prostitution, and trafficking, and women were granted the right to own land, divorce, and join the military. Yet the 'iron girls' ideal of national development, while advancing formal equality, also forced women into a male-oriented stance on public and domestic policy. The resulting 'Mulanian' style of writing submerged true feminine identity, rendering the female perspective neglected in both political and aesthetic arenas. Sanmao's recognition as a significant contributor to modern women's writing suggests her work navigated or resisted this pressure, contributing to a literary tradition that insisted on women as subjects of their own experience and speech rather than as reflections of a masculine political narrative. Her name endures in the canon as part of that ongoing assertion.