Sanmao was a Taiwanese writer who read one article about the Sahara and moved there, marrying a Spanish diver named José and settling in El Aaiún in the Spanish Sahara in the 1970s. These are her dispatches: Building furniture out of coffin wood, running an unlicensed clinic for her neighbors out of a first aid kit, a hair-raising drive into the desert to find fossils, a wedding, the slave trade still operating next door, and the Polisario uprising arriving at her doorstep. She’s funny, nosy, and completely without the tone of a foreign correspondent. She was a superstar across the Chinese-speaking world and only reached English in 2019.
Stories of the Sahara