The Chinese Wife of a Spanish Husband: Sociocultural Interaction on the Principle of "Friend or foe" in a Collection of Sahara Stories by Taiwanese Writer San Mao (1943-1991)

San Mao (1943-1991) was one of the most popular writers of the Chinese-speaking world in the 1970s and 1980s. Her most popular works, The Stories of the Sahara and The Weeping Camel, describe her life in the Spanish Sahara (now Western Sahara) and in the Canary Islands with her Spanish husband in the early 1970s. These stories portray San Mao as an independent, resourceful wanderer, capable of being wherever she is, feel at home, and who sought to find a common language with outcast members of society. San Mao, as a spokeswoman for Chinese culture, which carried goodwill throughout the world, was able to find her readers in Taiwan in the 1970s. Its fame spread to mainland China in the 1980s, when economic liberalization led to an increase in the number of publications, giving readers of the continent access to literary works that were not widely available for decades. These waves of enthusiasm before the works of San Mao were called “San Mao fever” or “San Mao phenomenon”. This topic is relevant and needs to be studied, due to the fact that the works of the writer and her biography were practically not translated into Russian and were not published. Russian-language sources have very little information about the life and work of San Mao, with the exception of a few articles on the Internet. The purpose of the work is to review the events in the life of the writer who influenced her work, including those related to her husband San Mao, José Maria Kero and Ruiz. To determine the key factors in the life and work of this writer, we will use the artistic method and the biographical method. First, consider the biography of San Mao.