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发表于 2013-2-6 21:04:44
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谢谢，现在可以贴原文了
Sea Turtles
The old street vendor began to cackle as she gazed upon my distress. This accomplished nothing besides making me a bit nauseous. The cracked, yellow enamel of her teeth reminded me of the texture of the pepper-specked, oil-soaked potato I had just bitten into.
She spoke to me in Chinese, “Your face is very red, xiaohuozi! Are you enjoying the food? More peppers?”
I made an attempt to smile politely. At least she called me, a 15 year-old, xiaohuozi, which means young man in Chinese. “Yes, it’s very good. Very hot. Please, no more pepper.”
Her laughter increased in volume. “Ha! Haha! I bet you hate it here, eh, city boy? I see, haigui, am I right? How do you like it here?”
I was in front of the entrance to Hutiaoxia (literally Leaping Tiger Canyon. The Chinese are fond of such flashy names), in Yunnan. I was about a day’s travel away from the village where I would begin my volunteer clinical work. On this trip, I had been fairly successful at keeping my “Made in the U.S.A.” label from showing too much. Unfortunately, the Chinese are specialists in foreign merchandise, and I had been identified. I suppose it didn’t help that when I reached into my pocket to find money to pay for the snack, my hand came out displaying George Washington’s serene expression.
Thankfully, Hutiaoxia is a fairly popular tourist attraction (yellow hair will not cause a flurry of excitement), and no one paid much attention to a senile old street vendor and her red-faced customer. Nevertheless, I failed to endure her jibes without feeling a familiar sense of alienation.
“Would you like another, haigui? Or perhaps you would like to try one of these? Hmm?” She flourished a bunch of small yellow fruits on a skewer. I feared for my digestive tract.
“No. Thanks.” I promptly hurried away.
“Come back soon, haigui! Ha!”
There is something that everyone should know about the Chinese: we can sniff out foreigners before they even open their mouth. Even among different Chinese ethnicities, there are distinguishing features invisible to others that we can establish before even starting a conversation. Understandably, pandemonium usually ensues when Chinese people see an actual foreigner. Our eyes widen, our pupils dilate into black discs of ecstasy, and we rush forward to sell you our wares.
“Oh, mister, come see here! You like jewelry? I have many things, unique, popular across China!”
Mister succumbs to such cajoling, and promptly buys all that he can.
“Thank you, I’ll take one of those, and one of those…. Oooh, what is that?”
Mister is now pointing at a small green stone that the seller has obviously been trying to grab his attention with.
“Ah, mister, you good eyes! This good quality real jade, stone of China, can take home and show off to friends! Not the fake jade those other people sell, see nice green color. Go well with your yellow hair!”
Mister is swayed easily and buys the “jade” happily.
“Thank you, xiexie!”
Such bounciness of character, and pidgin English, is only displayed to those light-skinned and dark-skinned foreigners, however. American-born Chinese receive an altogether different kind of treatment, one of snide alienation. I was lucky: I had no accent, typical hair color, as well as a fairly common skin color. I could pass for a native. Most of the time.
“Hey! You! Where are you from?”
I was busy haggling with a Chinese vendor in Beijing, some years ago, when he asked me this. I remained silent and asked for a better price.
“Don’t ignore the question! Want me to speak in English? Hey, what name? Hey!”
“I can speak Chinese, thanks.”
“So where are you from then, haigui?”
“It doesn’t matter. Now, are you going to sell for 30 yen, or will I have to leave?”
My trip to Yunnan marked a change from my usual trips to China. It started with the word haigui.
Foreign “Chinese” people, like my parents and I, are usually called haigui. Haigui literally means sea turtle. Sea turtles are always crossing the sea from one country to another. The Chinese follow this logic surprisingly well. My parents were actually in the clear: they had been through the Cultural Revolution and their first language was Mandarin Chinese. The same couldn’t be said for me: for my entire life, I had been haigui. When my parents and I went to China on our nearly yearly trip to visit my extended family, I would feel tension in the air. My aunts and uncles would tell my parents and me how lucky I was to be educated in America and gave me the largest bedroom in whosever apartment we were staying in. This method of welcome cut me off from the rest of my family: my cousins, one of them now attending the most prestigious university in China and the other a successful engineer, made no mention of their lives, nor did they ask about mine. I did not broach the subject.
6000 miles is a very long way for any animal, human or turtle or otherwise, to travel. Before my trip to Yunnan, I hadn’t gone back to China for two years. Although this may seem like an understandable span of time between “vacations”, it stretched intolerably long in my parents’ minds. A broadening expanse of time-consuming summer programs and the onset of high school washed away any hopes of trans-Pacific travel. At least, that’s the excuse I gave to my puzzled and essentially homesick parents. The truth was that I did not want to go back to China. I didn’t want to be treated as the odd one out, the displaced relative, the son of success, the weak link. I was a coward. I devoted myself to study and to hard work to the point of obsession. Exhausted, I went on binges of laziness and idleness, only to torture myself afterwards at the thought of wasted time. Periods of depression interspersed with hyperactivity confused and upset my parents.
Such symptoms of bipolarity may indicate mental weakness. Rest assured, I have no doubt that somewhere in my head there are firecrackers going off constantly to the roars of paper tigers. But a better explanation is that I wanted to win the acceptance of my family. If a novel were made out of the life stories of my various relatives, it would rival a work of Hemingway’s for somber tone and grueling terseness. My father came to America with a plane ticket and his mother’s blessings. Arriving with no cash and rudimentary English, he bound himself to his studies, devoting a decade of his life learning how to become an American doctor. He relearned the nearly endless lexicon of medical terms in English while courting my mother and taking additional college classes. His father, my paternal grandfather, labored for his entire life, and passed away due to diabetes and the closing of hospitals from the Cultural Revolution. My youngest uncle from my mother’s side was almost a genius. Rich off the stock trade, he spent all of his money buying gifts for his friends and caring for his wife and equally bright daughter. When his stocks crashed, he was left with nothing. His friends were silent, and his wife divorced him. He constantly argues and fights with my grandmother, who is going deaf and is losing her memory. His daughter, my first cousin, sacrificed her inherent talent for math, and stayed up late for the sum total of her high school years studying French, which her mother believes will help get her a job.
What can I say? I’m the next chapter in the story. |
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发表于 2012-12-28 15:19:58
发表于 2012-12-29 00:17:55
