Stories are seeds that get planted in my mind when I read them. Stories fade in time, but certain images take root.
I dream of a white, round adobe hut surrounded by night. I dream of camels crying with their lips pulled back and their huge ocher-colored teeth showing. I dream of a long train platform with the sound of a whistle trailing behind a departed train. I dream of a young woman with long black hair in a multi-color dress painting the letters on her husband’s grave. These and others have become part of my narrative and indeed I have set out to seek them.
The author Sanmao (1943-1991) left Taiwan and lived in the Western Sahara with her Spanish husband. She wrote short stories, all of them fictionalized autobiographies. Their ending was tragic: he drowned in a diving accident. She went back to Taiwan and later committed suicide by hanging herself.
I thought of Sanmao and her story, The Crying Camels, when tears rolled down the eyes of the camel who took me into the Sahara. But unlike her account of brutality, rape and murder, mine was just the sand and wind.
