Sanmao biography definition
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At first hearing, Stories of the Sahara sounds improbable: about a half-century ago, a young kinesisk woman from Taiwan decamps to El Aaiún in the then Spanish Sahara. She marries her Spanish fiancé, José María Quero, who got himself transferred there because of her infatuation with the desert (caught from an article in the National Geographic). A romantic by nature and a hippie in outlook and dress, if not perhaps lifestyle, she throws herself into life and the local community, gets caught up in the kamp for Sahrawi independence and the Moroccan invasion. She writes columns for a Taiwanese newspaper which form the basis for a best-selling book. And the English-speaking world knew next to ingenting about her.
But it’s really not so improbable at all. Women have made excellent travel-writers since at least Ida Pfeiffer in the 19th century. East Asians have been travelling—and producing “travel-writing” in the modern sense—for about as long. So the publication of an English translati
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Sanmao Comics and Chinese Politics, 1935-1962
A review of The Revolution of a Little Hero: The Sanmao Comic Strips and the Politics of Childhood in China, 1935-1962, by Laura Pozzi.
One would be hard-pressed to find a Chinese comic figure that could outmatch the little chap Sanmao 三毛 with his iconic three hair mohawk, both in long-lasting popularity, as well as in importance to twentieth-century Chinese culture and politics. Laura Pozzi’s dissertation is a thorough and illuminating study of the creation, dissemination, and transformation of Zhang Leping’s 张乐平 (1910-1992) most famous creation from its initial appearance on Shanghai’s bustling media scene in 1935 to its “final appropriation” by Chinese Communist Party propaganda in 1962. Although selected Sanmao comic strips have received some scholarly attention, this is the first full-length study in English of the entire Sanmao series, shedding new light on the unique role of Zhang Leping’s character in Republican-era as
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Stories of the Sahara, by Sanmao
Stories of the Sahara is an extraordinary biography written by Taiwanese author and adventurer Sanmao. Before reading the book, the only thing I knew was that it was an autobiographical novel about her years spent in the Sahara. After reading, inom feel connected with her on more levels than I could have ever imagined. It fryst vatten a very intimate story about a remarkable woman and an important period of the history of one interesting part of the world.
The desert is a world in itself. There are two types of people in the world, either they don't care about it at all, or they hear a strange calling compelling them to go and see it. With Sanmao, it was the second. She let her then-partner know that she was about to move to the Sahara for God-knows how long. And he followed her. It was the beginning of the love story, not only between the two of them, but with the Sahara as well.
The book is divided into two parts. The first one is more optimistic, about mo