Sanmao in Spain: identity, alterity, and marginality of the self and the other in Diarios de las Canarias

This chapter analyzes texts written about Spain by bestselling Taiwanese author Sanmao, the pseudonym of Chen Maoping (1943–1991), who was and continues to be idolized throughout Asia for her 1970s accounts of travel through and life in Spanish territories (the colony of Spanish Sahara and the Canary Islands). Although generations of Asian readers associate Sanmao’s name with a love for Spain, the vast majority of her experiences with Spanish nationals took place outside of the Iberian Peninsula that the word “Spain” generally denotes. Given both her Asian ethnicity, a rarity in 1970s Spain, and the peripheral parts of Spain that she experienced and wrote about, Sanmao provides an interesting addition to the complex discursive terrain of ethnography, particularly within the field of Spanish cultural studies. The present study specifically examines what Sanmao’s Diarios de las Canarias reveals both about the Spanish archipelago in the years immediately following dictator Francisco Franco’s death, and about the author herself, a young, ethnically Chinese woman traveling the world and presenting it to largely sheltered Asian readers. Analyzing the dynamics of mutual and self-exoticization that color Sanmao’s narrations, this article argues that Diarios de las Canarias, and especially the story “Crónica de mis visitas a brujos”, reveals the complex and relational nature of identity at the individual (Sanmao herself), regional (the Canary Islands), and national (the Spanish nation) levels within a transnational, intercultural context shaped by lingering colonial structures and imperialist discourse.