I knew almost nothing about Central and South America before.
It is just a small and not so impressive plate on the world map. Poor, remote, mysterious, unimagined.
It was after reading "Walking over Ten Thousand Miles of Water," in Sanmao's words, discovered a most beautiful and pure Central and South America: Mexico, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina .......
In November 1981, two years after José left, Sanmao began her trip to Central and South America.
She returned to Taiwan in 1982, followed by the publication of Walking Through Ten Thousand Mountains. It was her first travelogue.
This rereading, word for word, was captivated by the richness of her inner expression. At the same time, in the words of this travelogue, read another side of San Mao.
In Honduras, she specialized in picking remote villages and towns to walk one by one.
Very poor places, small mud rooms, uniformly only a hammock. The window is an empty frame, with no boards or glass to keep out the wind.
Women, a bunch of children, men in their prime, sat staring blankly at the door watching the cars go by.
Honduras is indeed picturesque. Pine forests, rivers, big mountains, deep blue skies, herds of green grass cattle and sheep ...... It was just that her heart, always forgetting the faces and eyes of the poor inhabitants along the way, could not be released in their kind, shy and helpless smiles.
Even Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, is lonely and sad. Although there are very beautiful big buses running all over the streets there, and they have a fairy tale name - cygnets.
But when she saw that there were several Chinese restaurants and grocery stores in the city, and that her compatriots were pervasive in finding a life around the world, living even in places as poor and claustrophobic as Honduras, there was always a pang of indescribable gloom in her heart.
"O this mournful country, how is it that, having entered thee but ten days or so, thy sorrows have heavily infected me?"
This woman of kind and compassionate nature has traveled from the Sahara Desert to the Canary Islands, and from the Canary Islands to Central and South America, where kindness and compassion are her passport to life. Compassion because the heart truly knows it.
Everywhere she goes, she loves the world and the common lowly suffering people who have nothing to do with her.
With empathy, she let go of herself, stepped into the other person's shoes, saw their world, experienced their? s feelings, understood their behavior, to understand their sorrow and suffering.
In Costa Rica, she was invited to be a guest at her best friend's sister's farm.
She said that those compatriots from China who have become farmers here are charming in their speech, profoundly relevant in their rhetoric, idealistic and ambitious, and full of love and hope for their own piece of land.
"Who likes to be a traveler who drifts forever? If one day you hold your own soil in your hand, see the green grass growing slowly in the breeze under the clear sky, and count the year's harvest, that down-to-earth feeling, for me, is the best answer for the rest of my life."
In fact, most people envy and understand the Sanmao, is nothing more than a bone full of romantic fantasy, and a righteous, determined to walk the wandering soul. And I thought it was not quite true.
Whether in the workplace or sword fighting, most women hope that the present world is stable and quiet. Her wandering and drifting is the result of a rich soul's tenacity to fight against bone-crushing loneliness.
People, Hershey is still there, sweetness is still there, the sun is still there, the desert is still there, she can be stretched to live a poetic life courage is still there, manpower is better than the fate of the persistence is also still there.
Joseph's natural freedom and liberty had a deep impact on Sanmao's attitude toward life.
The wild horse in her heart is no longer caught by the circle, because there is the support of love, can go forward without hesitation, no matter how bad the result, at least there is still his embrace for her to cover the bottom, his trust and support is her spiritual station.
Looking at Sanmao's emotional experience, it has not been smooth. Abandoned by her first love, the first man she wanted to marry turned out to have a wife, her German fiancé died in her arms, and her beloved husband left her after just six years of marriage .... In fact, she also wanted to stop, and he did a down-to-earth husband and wife, get a heart, white head not to leave, the hand of the stick, with the old.
But she has always been lonely.
In Ecuador, Sanmao lived with local Indians for more than half a month.
She went to great lengths to find a piece of the Silver Lake of her dreams, refusing the help of her friends and traveling alone.
The woman who was afraid of owing a debt of gratitude was so used to walking alone that she felt very uneasy when she was coldly pampered and loved by someone. She says that owing favors but not being able to redeem them will become a burden. This burden will be more difficult to bear than staying in a cheap hotel for a few days without a shower.
The debt of favors is a bitter debt. You must have a generous heart to bear and bloom. Unpayable human debt is a shackle, for the windy Sanmao, it will naturally bind the freedom.
She ended up living alone in the humble and shabby home of a lakeside Indian, with a mat and an oil lamp, sleeping in a pile of dried corn leaves, and getting along with the family and even the Indians in the village.
She took freedom and interpreted it so completely. Since due to her, is the civilization of the spirit.
Traveling in Central and South America, many times, she focused on looking at people, thinking that the Indians are the most beautiful race of people in the world. Their almost Asian-Mongolian faces familiarized and obsessed her.
Sometimes she would go to a market for a whole day and not buy anything. The beauty of that lies in the fascination of the bazaar itself, not in having to buy something.
In Gusco, Peru, on a rainy night, Mitsuru went to see a night play.
A poor musician, clinging to his dream, tries to play the "gino" (a seven-hole reed flute unique to the Indians) for people to hear. But no one wants to hear him play the flute solo. So he started a folk music and dance troupe. But the dance troupe was on the verge of closing down due to financial constraints.
In the rainy Gusco Square, the musician sells tickets for his troupe to one tourist after another, and in the end, only one person, Sanmao, buys three tickets.
Sanmao, who has always been interested in the indigenous cultures and local life of the places she travels, was y moved by the musician's courage and paranoid obsession to follow his dream.
On that rainy night, she and her assistant were the only two audience members on stage. Although there were only two audiences, the performers didn't dare to slack off at all, and dedicated their one performance to the program in its entirety. The performers and the audience, sympathizing with each other, understood each other.
After the performance, the musicians played a solo of a piece they had composed on the reed flute for Mitsuru to thank her for her knowledge.
"The Indian, broad and short in body, walked slowly onto the stage, looking peaceful. The lights shone on him alone, and his hands, slowly raised, closed his eyes and transformed himself into a flute, into a tune, into the original world. Within that, a mysterious musical soul, low and slow, flowed out wildly.
......
He gave this sentiment to a stranger in the square who was willing to buy a ticket to come and listen. Play and play and play, and the whole body of that miserable, downtrodden Indian played with splendor, and at that moment he was, on the stage, a true monarch."
Tears overflowed as I read this.
This is a "Bo Ya play, Ziqi listen, Zi heart with me" high mountains and flowing water meet, right? The moment we meet, it's better than the rest of the world.
A poor musician who is not appreciated by anyone, an immortal phoenix, and a stranger who is willing to listen and deliver his heart and soul to the cause.
In Bolivia, the beautiful country that Sanmao called the lily of the highlands.
She goes to a witch's market.
"On those countless walks, my Wiccan sisters sold me every representation of money, happiness, love, health, and peace.
They were in business, and I bought all the wishes of a person's life, and by comparison, I should be the one to make the profit. For me, who has a very deep faith, witchcraft is not really something to ask for, it's just that the mood of the game, the joy of the folk, is all fulfilled in this little stall."
She is not the unearthly goddess people think she is. She wanted nothing more than plain love, sturdy health, and everlasting peace. And these are but the truest wishes of a little girl next door in the world.
Only the miracle of her wanderings seems to have given her a gorgeous package.
Relative to today's "global village" like world, at that time, people's world is not broad enough, people's eyes, is still enclosed in the basic needs of food, clothing and warmth.
Many people only see the gorgeous and exquisite shell of Sanmao's packaging, but they do not really understand her heart. Her words, has been her experience, molded into a distant fairy tale. The beauty and pathos of the fairy tale are floating in the air, unable to land.
As she returned to Suzhou later, when people introduced her, she said: "This is from Taiwan, the famous writer Sanmao".
She knows that all her fame in mainland China is not a down-to-earth person, but just "the famous Sanmao", and she can't help but feel a sense of sadness in her heart.
San Mao can not be herself. The only thing she can be is a woman.
While she had said in her early years in White Hands Make a Family that "how others analyze me has nothing to do with me", her ego at that time was the pride of her prime. But in the six years since Jose's death, she has devoted herself to her readers and viewers, and being "everyone's Sammo" has become her whole life.
We all had the illusion that Sanmao, even if she died, would surely die under a clean and majestic blue sky and in a charming and strange journey.
"If the landscape of the earth can sensitize the mind of a, then I am the one who got, just the scenery along the way, is a soul washing, if a person, can die under such a clean and majestic blue sky, is also a kind of happiness!
In the extreme of beauty, I do not have another thought, just want to die on this, will be this moment into eternity."
So she said in Bolivia.
But she put a stop to our imagination.
That year, in a Mexican temple museum, among the various gods, Mitsuru heard the name "Suicide God" for the first time:
"When I first heard the tour guide pointing a stick at a mural, counting the gods one by one, in which he slipped a small name -- Suicide God -- it was still a shock. -- the god of suicide -- it still came as a shock. I trotted along with the guide and kept asking him what exactly was the position of the suicide god in ancient times, did he give people a license to commit suicide? Or did he accept people who committed suicide? Or tell people to go to suicide?
.......
Then for the second time I slowly went to see the museum again on my own, specializing in the god of suicide, and found that he himself in the picture is hanging from a tree."
I sucked in a breath of cold air when I saw this!
In her own words, she was merely curious. No religion in the world allows people to commit suicide, and only in Mexico did she find such a small god that was not even mentioned in the books, and she felt at the time that it was the Mexican religion that gave mankind the greatest respect and freedom of will.
But I believe it was her destiny.
Underneath, she had it all planned out for her. As the tour guide said, of the many gods in the Mexican museum, the one she cared about the most turned out to be an unassuming suicide god who didn't even have a name.
Ten years later, she really chose to end the red dust in this way. Not on a wandering journey, not under a tree like the Suicide God, but alone in the cold restroom of a hospital ward.
This way, is the reverence for the god of suicide? Or is love so deep and heavy as life that it can only be measured in death?
A spasm of heartache. She had always had suicidal thoughts, and in the end, had only obeyed herself.
After Sanmao's death, her father, Chen Siqing, said in a media interview, "It's hard for me to describe my daughter, I guess she always felt lonely."
Her confidant Sui Ho-Ping also said that any criticism, speculation, and caring blessings still could not diminish her sharpness, and, of course, still could not protect the loneliness of her heart, which belongs to the literati for all eternity.
The mountains, the water, the wind, the sand. After walking so many different paths, seen so many stunning scenery, dealt with so many complicated people, and also appreciate the world of human feelings, she finally can not promise herself a complete.
Perhaps this is her fulfillment?
Love sometimes,
No love sometimes,
Flowers bloom sometimes,
Flowers fall also sometimes.
There is a time for everything. The meaning of life, perhaps she has interpreted with ease, complete.
She was tired and just wanted to lie down and rest. If you don't fall out of shape, you won't have any hang-ups.