This is a love story, and a literary love story at that. But, on the side of Jesuit priest Father Barry Martinson, at least, it is not a story of romance. Rather, he speaks of sacrificial love ‘which is something I really believe in.’ That, and the closest friendship he has ever known.
Image: Barry Martinson SJ and Sanmao (supplied).
It is beautiful this morning in the small township of Wufeng, 1000 metres above sea-level in the mountains of Taiwan. Mist rises out of the valley. The mountains are like those drawn by children – green, coming to a sharp point, corkscrewed with narrow roads and with clouds on the top.
Here, high above the densely settled plains, Father Barry has for 48 years served his congregation of members of the Atayal and Saisiyat Indigenous tribes. It has been a hermit-like existence, he says, which suits him.
But there was one woman who really came to know him. Her birth name was Chen Maoping. He calls her Echo Chan - the name she adopted to use in Latin script, the ‘echo’ a reference to the Greek nymph.
But millions of devoted Chinese fans know her by her pen name – Sanmao. She is one of the best known writers in the Chinese language, inspiration for a generation of young women who craved adventure and independence during China’s opening to the world.
She wrote to him once about their friendship: ‘The love between a man and a woman is too narrow. Such a deep love cannot be understood by the world. They are not high enough, they only care about gender differences, not knowing the soul sometimes has no gender at all. But it is a kind of love, like a part of me.’
Of all the movies they both loved, he had been surprised to find she had never seen his favorite: Casablanca. They watched it together. She loved it, but when it came to the climax, in which Rick, played by Humphrey Bogart, insists that his beloved Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) go with her husband rather than stay with him, she was ‘hysterical, and half crying. She was saying ‘No, no, no, you've got to go with him. This is not right. … They were made for each other’.’
Today, sitting in the bare kitchen of his simple home on top of the church, with mist rising out of the valley outside, Martinson says that next to his