A Documentary by Ana Pérez & Marta Arribas
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
A documentary by Ana Pérez & Marta Arribas SHORT SYNOPSIS In the 1970s, the Chinese traveler writer Sanmao lived an intense love story with the Spanish freediver José María Quero. They traveled to the Spanish Sahara where Sanmao chronicled her experiences in the book "Stories of the Sahara", which became a bestselling phenomenon in Taiwan and China. Sanmao emerged as an icon for modern women and was transformed into the protagonist of a legendary life filled with love, adventure, literature and tragedy. LONG SYNOPSIS SANMAO. THE DESERT BRIDE tells the love story between the Chinese travel writer Sanmao and the Spanish free diver José María Quero during the 1970s. A singular love story bridging East and West, packed with adventure, romanticism and prose, which was tragically disrupted when José María lost his life in an accident while spearfishing. Adding to this tragedy some years later, Sanmao took her own life in Taiwan, already a successful writer but unable to cope with the absence of her lover. Sanmao (born in 1943) was an imaginative child who was a precocious writer, very much obsessed with travelling. Being overly sensitive, she felt ill at ease at school and ended up being home-schooled by her parents in Taiwan, where they had emigrated from China. An avid reader of comic books, though her name was Chen Ping she decided to call herself Echo Chen. Later, she adopted the pseudonym “Sanmao” (meaning “three hairs”), as a homage to the main character of one of the most popular comic books from her childhood, an orphaned boy with three hairs. José María (born in 1951) was brought up in a large, rambunctious middle-class family in Madrid. He had always had a taste for adventure, and though raised inland far from the sea, he felt an overwhelming attraction towards diving. The two met towards the end of the 1960s in Madrid, where Sanmao had gone to study philosophy after travelling around Europe. They were from two radically different worlds but immediately felt they were meant for each other. They travelled to the Spanish Sahara, where José María found a job as a professional diver for a phosphate company in the port of Laayoune. Sanmao had dreamt of living in the desert since she was a small girl, and she fantasized about being the first woman to cross the desert. When she arrived she found herself immersed in a breathtaking yet hostile land, where peace and brutality, freedom and slavery stood hand in hand. She went on to chronicle her experiences in the book “Stories from the Sahara”, whose publication in 1979 in Taiwan and later in China, would catapult her to fame. They were personal accounts of her daily life, which included biographical elements of the couple, in which she related her interactions with the Saharawi locals, the struggles of the Green March and the hasty exit of the Spaniards. The young couple would move to the Canary Islands, where José María, known as He Xi in her stories, would drown in the waters of Barlovento beach at the age of 28. When they found his body, he was still holding on to the spear with a barracuda stuck to its end, one he had obsessively pursued until exhausting his strengths. Sanmao left Spain utterly devastated. It was 1980. She continued to travel and write about South America as her fame grew exponentially, but she never recovered from the death of her spouse. In 1991 she was found in a hospital in Taipei after hanging herself with her own stockings. José María’s death had exacerbated her already unstable personality. Sanmao’s suicide was surrounded by all kinds of uncertainties that lead to hundreds of theories not only about her death, but also about her lovers. Since then, having turned into an almost mythical figure, masses of Chinese-speaking readers have travelled to Spain in search of Sanmao’s trails. Some are surprised to discover that He Xi was not a mere invention of the author. At the cemetery of Santa Cruz on the island of Palma, Sanmao fans look for José María’s tomb, or more precisely the tomb of the “olive tree of my dreams” as she used to call him. “Olive Tree of My Dreams” is also the title of one of the most popular songs in China, with Sanmao’s lyrics that allude to José María. Sanmao played a big role in fashioning the image of Spain that has become fixed in the minds of Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong peoples. Sanmao narrated her life in the Spanish Sahara, but it was also through her stories that Chinese speakers were introduced to the Canary Islands, the Retiro Park and the Rastro Market in Madrid. She possessed a very special point of view, almost naïve, exalting the culture shocks with a keen sense of humor. Sanmao's work has been the reason why several generations of Chinese speakers have been attracted to all things Spanish. But in Spain this story that unites two countries so far apart in geography and customs is completely unknown. Though most of her books remain untranslated, "Stories of the Sahara" has already been published in the United Kingdom, Poland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Myanmar, China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan and the United States, and its rights were recently acquired by a Chinese production company to make a feature film. DIRECTORS’ NOTES When we first heard about Sanmao and José María Quero, we knew we were facing one of those singular stories that had inexplicably gone untold and needed to be urgently exposed. It was while chatting one afternoon with our friend Lorena Mena Quero, Jose María’s niece, that she nonchalantly asked: would you like to hear the story about my uncle and his wife, the Chinese writer Sanmao? She went on to relay a beautiful, true story full of passion, adventure and tragedy that immediately enticed us. We parted from Lorena with the conviction that we had an extraordinary movie in our hands, a story that strangely enough had never been told before. We began to make our acquaintance with the rest of the numerous members of the Quero family, who shared their memories of a brother that had passed away under such dramatic circumstances at the ripe age of 28. They also shared their memories of their “Chinese woman”, known to them as Echo, through photographs and letters in which the young woman recounted her life with José María in the desert, or otherwise included a recipe to some Asian delicacy. To them, Sanmao was a young, free spirited, nomadic Chinese woman with a touch of the melodramatic in her personality, which made her an oddity considering the very traditional society she came from. We tracked down the handful of stories that had been translated to Spanish in an old edition of the Reader’s Digest from the 1970’s, published only in South America. Her style immediately captivated us with its simplicity. It was a literary style somewhere between travelogue, memoir and historical account. Since Sanmao had never been published in Spain and was basically non-existent, we could have never imagined what we discovered once we looked to the Asian continent. It turned out that in Taiwan and in China, Sanmao was a massive literary figure and we immediately realized we were not just dealing with a quaint and tragic love story. From the moment she began to write about her adventures with José María (“Stories from the Sahara”), all the way to her mysterious suicide, Sanmao had become a mythical figure of enormous proportions. Slowly it dawned on us that we would be telling the story of one of biggest cultural icons for the Chinese-speaking population all across Far East Asia. She was completely unheard of in Spain, yet a mass phenomenon in the Chinese-speaking world. Our film had grown to reach a whole new dimension. In order to discern Sanmao’s heritage, we tracked down her brother Henry and her niece Tammy in Taiwan. They told us about their family’s origins and migrating to Taiwan, and spoke of Sanmao’s wild nature and her extraordinary sensitivity. They were very excited that we had gotten in touch with them, and our encounter even led the two families to get back in touch with each other after so many years apart. To us, Sanmao and José María were two odd characters in the desert who found themselves immersed in a society where slaves still existed, arranged marriages were mandatory and colonial wars waged. But it was there that they both learned to live with few material possessions, to value solidarity amongst the most needy, and to appreciate the aesthetics of the harshest landscapes. We realized that the Spanish Sahara and the process of decolonization were chapters in our history that had rarely been examined in any form or medium. We also recognized there were other historically notable events that had affected Sanmao, from the invasion of China by Japan (around the time Sanmao was born), to the arrival of Mao Zedong and the consequential departure of thousands of Chinese to the island of Taiwan, a country in historical limbo to which the author’s family emigrated. And of course, there’s the author’s vision of a Spain during the 1960s and 70s, where the mere presence of a Chinese woman added an element of the exotic in an otherwise homogeneous country. For all these reasons, we could not believe that her writings were completely unknown among us. Sanmao had placed Spain on the map, along with its history and its customs, for all the Chinese-speaking people around the world.