The ‘Echo’ of the Sahara: Sanmao in Spanish bio-adaptations

Since the 1970s, popular writer Sanmao (三毛; ‘Echo’ Chen Ping, 1943–91) has captivated generations of readers in Taiwan and mainland China with autobiographical accounts of her life across the Spanish-speaking world; however, it is only in the past decade that her works have been translated into European languages. This article shows how two contemporary biographical adaptations have contributed to the transcultural reception of Sanmao's life. I offer a comparative analysis of the Spanish documentary Sanmao: La novia del desierto (Sanmao: The Desert Bride, 2020) and biography Un viaje al corazón de Sanmao (A Journey to Sanmao’s Heart, 2022), both by Marta Arribas Veloso and Ana Pérez de la Fuente. The documentary remixes preexisting footage from Sinophone cinema/cartoons, voice recordings, writings from Sanmao’s lifetime, and interviews with her family and friends to weave a collage of her multifaceted life. While the film emphasizes Sanmao’s romantic story, the book draws a more comprehensive picture of the Spanish Sahara’s colonial history, thereby reconfiguring the desert romance into a historical biography. Alongside the translations of her works and the development of the ‘Ruta Sanmao’ tourist initiative in Spain’s Canary Islands, these bio-adaptations have enriched transnational understanding of this Sinophone celebrity's cultural legacy. I further explain Sanmao's afterlife with the sound phenomenon of an ‘echo’: a sustained resonation through time, a back-and-forth conversation across space, and a form of Sinophone-Hispanic cultural diplomacy strengthened through her popular literature and these contemporary bio-adaptations.