“I didn’t own a purse,” she wrote, “so I had nothing to hold.”

Her prose, which oscillates between memoir and fiction, has a laconic elegance that echoes the Beat poets. It can also be breezy, a remarkable quality at a time when her homeland, Taiwan, was under martial law in an era known as the “White Terror,” in which many opponents of the government were imprisoned or executed.

“She established a different and exotic place, a castle in the sand, for readers to enjoy,” said Carole Ho , a professor of literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong . “At a time when materialistic enjoyments were pretty limited in Taiwan, she yearned for something different, and showed younger girls that it’s O.K. to be unique.”

Sanmao, who wrote under a pen name and sometimes went by Echo Chan , was born Chen Ping on March 26, 1943, during World War II, into a well-educated Christian family in Chongqing, a city in southwest China. Her father, Chen Siqing, was a lawyer, and her mother, Miao Jinlan, was a homemaker.

After the war, the family moved east to Nanjing , and shortly before Communist revolutionary forces triumphed in 1949 , they fled to Taiwan.

Sanmao was a restless student who spent much of her time reading Chinese and Western literature, including “Gone With The Wind” and “The Count of Monte Cristo.”

One day in school, she wrote an essay about wanting to be a garbage collector so that she could roam the streets and find discarded treasures. When her teacher called the idea nonsense and made her start again, she doubled down — by writing that she wanted to be a Popsicle vendor.