Review | Fearless feminist travel writer Sanmao finally gets translation for Western audiences
- A role model far head of her time, the Beijing-born, Taiwan-raised writer became a beacon for Chinese women of a certain age
- Tempered by tragedy, her career ended in suicide following her Spanish husband’s drowning death
Stories of the Sahara
by Sanmao (translation by Mike Fu)
Bloomsbury
4/5 stars
Women have been chronicling their journeys at home and abroad since at least the 17th century, but travel writing remains a genre dominated by male voices. Only one woman, Alev Scott, was among the six nominees for Britain’s 2019 Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award – the sole English-language literary prize dedicated to travel writing.
The few women who have made their name as travel writers are almost all European or American. And in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they tended to be well-born English women such as Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark, who maintained stiff upper lips while exploring little-known regions of the Middle East. Before and after the second world war, the globetrotting American journalists Martha Gellhorn and Emily Hahn combined reporting with travelogues.
More recently, Dervla Murphy’s journeys through Asia and Africa, often by bicycle, and Jan Morris’ elegant and erudite portraits of cities such as Hong Kong and Sydney have jostled for shelf space with the current male giants of the genre, Colin Thubron, Paul Theroux and Jonathan Raban.
Less known still are the handful of female Chinese travel writers, despite the fact that the earliest of them – Wang Wei – was taking the road less travelled as far back as the late Ming dynasty (1368-1644).