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| As we celebrate our 125th anniversary, join us on a trip through the archives to see some of our spectacular reviews, interviews and essays. |
| 《纽约时报》书评栏目诞生125周年之际，我们精选了历年来的精彩评论、采访和文章，欢迎阅读。 |
| THE WOMAN WARRIOR by Maxine Hong Kingston | Review first published Nov. 7, 1976 |
| 《女勇士》(The Woman Warrior)，作者：汤婷婷(Maxine Hong Kingston) | 本评论首刊于1976年11月7日 |
| We know as little about the Chinese, now that we have taken up their revolution, as we ever knew — and probably even less about the Chinese in America. Whatever our pretensions, we are not friends but enthusiasts, and there is something glib and in the end patronizing about enthusiasts. Our curiosity is complacent and safe and rarely penetrating. As China watchers we are a little like grown-ups at a puppet show, and it is no wonder that the Chinese are so suspicious of us, so perverse with our visas, preferring the company of a dozen industrialists on a trade mission to the attendance of one armchair partisan. |
| 我们已经接受了中国革命的现实，但我们对中国人的了解还是一如既往地少——也许对身在美国的中国人就更少。不管怎么标榜，我们都不是他们的朋友，只是他们的爱好者，而爱好者身上总有一些花言巧语的东西，最后总会显出屈尊俯就的样子。我们的好奇心是自鸣得意的、是安全的，很少能够深入进去。作为中国的观察者，我们有点像看木偶戏的成年人，难怪中国人对我们如此怀疑，对我们的签证如此不近情理，宁要由十几个实业家组成的贸易代表团，也不要一个纸上谈兵的党棍。 |
| Chinese Americans must find it even more bizarre that we have dismissed the mystery of China for the mystique of the Chinese Revolution. Ten years ago they bewildered us and we ignored them. Now we peer at them in their American Chinatowns, desperate to discover if they belong to Peking or to Taiwan — as if the answer to that one question were all we needed to complete our understanding. Ten years ago they were the clichés of immigrant America. They were the Chinese waiter, the Chinese laundryman. Now they are part of our new rhetoric, and they are still anonymous. |
| 美籍华人一定觉得更奇怪的是，我们因为中国革命的神秘而无视中国的神秘。十年前他们让我们感到困惑，我们无视他们的存在。现在，我们在美国的唐人街里窥看他们，急切地想知道他们是属于北京还是台湾——好像只需这个答案就足以让我们获得完全的理解。十年前，他们代表美国移民的刻板印象。他们是中国服务员、中国洗衣工。现在，他们是我们新措辞的一部分，而他们仍然是无名无姓的。 |
| Maxine Ting Ting Hong Kingston is a young Chinese American writer, and “The Woman Warrior” is her first book. It is a brilliant memoir. It shocks us out of our facile rhetoric, past the clichés of our obtuseness, back to the mystery of a stubbornly, utterly foreign sensibility, and I cannot think of another book since André Malraux’s melancholy artifice, “La Tentation de l’Occident,” that even starts to do this. “The Woman Warrior” is about being Chinese, in the way the “Portrait of the Artist” is about being Irish. It is an investigation of soul, not landscape. Its sources are dream and memory, myth and desire. Its crises are the crises of a heart in exile from roots that bind and terrorize it. |
| 汤婷婷是一位年轻的华裔美国作家，《女勇士》是她的第一本书。这是一本精彩的回忆录。它把我们从浮华的辞藻里震出来，超越我们愚昧的陈词滥调，回归一种顽固的、完全陌生的感官奥秘。我觉得，自从安德烈·马尔罗那本忧郁的巧妙之作《西方的诱惑》(La Tentation de l’Occident)以来，再也没有哪本书这样尝试了。《女勇士》是关于做一个中国人，就像《一个青年艺术家的画像》(Portrait of the Artist)是关于做一个爱尔兰人一样。这是对灵魂的探索，而不是风景。它的来源是梦与记忆，神话与欲望。它的危机，源自一颗从约束和恐吓它的根源逃离的心。 |
| It begins some 50 years before Maxine Kingston was born, some 30 years before the revolution, in the Hong family compound in a peasant village in Kwangtung Province. Another young woman (she is Maxine Kingston’s aunt, but she has no name, because the family has destroyed her name) is about to bear a child. Not her husband’s child — her husband is in America, working — but a child without a patronym, a child who represents not so much her own disgrace as some dark and profound disequilibrium that threatens everyone. The villagers, masked white, already mourning the calamity, march slowly on the compound, swinging lanterns. With knives and rocks they set to their grim work of destroying everything the family owns. Later that night, the young woman gives birth in the family’s ravaged pigsty, and then she drowns herself and her baby. The family finds the bodies, but there is no more mourning. The aunt with a name becomes “No Name Woman”; she becomes a story, one of the admonitory “talk-stories” that Kingston’s mother will tell years later to her California-born daughter. |
| 故事开始于汤婷婷出生前50年，也就是文化大革命前30年，在广东省一个农村的汤家大院里。另一个年轻的女人（她是汤婷婷的姑姑，但她没有名字，因为家族抹去了她的名字）即将生产。不是她丈夫的孩子——她丈夫在美国工作——而是一个没有父亲的孩子，这个孩子与其说代表她自己的耻辱，不如说代表着某种威胁着所有人的黑暗与深刻的不平衡。以白布蒙面的村民们已经在哀叹这场灾祸，他们缓缓走向大院，手里挥舞着灯笼。他们用刀和石头摧毁这个家所有的一切。当天深夜，这个年轻女人在家中被毁坏的猪圈里生下了孩子，然后她把自己和孩子都溺死了。家人找到了尸体，但没有任何哀悼。有名字的姑姑变成了“无名女人”；她变成了一个故事，一个警示性的“传说故事”，将在多年后由汤婷婷的母亲讲给在加州出生的女儿。 |
| The Chinese ideograph for the female “I,” Maxine Kingston says, means slave. Who was the slave woman? What was she? Chinese names are secret, powerful, substantial. Without a name, she has no explanation; without an explanation, no identity. “The Woman Warrior” is, in a way, about identifying her — this long-dead Chinese woman in whose ghost Maxine Kingston identified herself. |
| 汤婷婷说，在中文里，女性自称“我”时用“奴”这个字。这个奴是谁？她是什么？中国人的名字是秘密的、强大的、有内容的。没有名字，她就无法被解释；无法解释，就没有身份。在某种程度上，《女勇士》是关于她的身份——关于这个早已死去的中国女人，汤婷婷在她的鬼魂中找到了自己。 |
| “My aunt haunts me. … I do not think she always means me well. I am telling on her, and she was a spite suicide, drowning herself in the drinking water. The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute.” |
| “姑姑的亡灵纠缠着我……我想，她对我也并非总是怀有善意。我在暴露她的秘密，而她是含恨自杀，自沉于井中的。中国人总是惧怕淹死的人，哭哭啼啼的溺死鬼耷拉着湿淋淋的头发，皮肤泡得肿胀，一声不响地坐在水边，等着拉人下水，好做他的替身。” |
| Maxine accepts the substitution. Among the living, she will speak for No Name Woman. She sets out in her imagination for the China that “even now … wraps double binds around my feet,” and she arrives there more surely than a hundred real visitors. |
| 汤婷婷接受了这个替身的身份。在活着的人中，她会为那个无名女人说话。在她想象的中国之旅的开始，那里是个“至今……仍会缠着我的脚”的地方，但到达时，她比一百个真正去过那里的人还要确信。 |
| Maxine Kingston grew up in San Francisco, surly in a household ruled by inexplicable taboos and fetishes, furious in a family that could hang a picture of a group of Chinese villagers, who are fishing for treasure and throwing back the girls they catch. In her fantasies, she is a warrior, like Fa Mu Lan, the girl of her mother’s chants who fought gloriously in battle centuries ago and became a legend to the Chinese people. Fa Mu Lan was initiated into superhuman strength and courage among the dragons of the mind and the white tigers of the earth, her parents celebrated her with a son’s feast, carved their grievances on her back, and sent her fourth to avenge an emperor’s tyranny. She led an army of a million peasants and destroyed a dynasty. She became a legend of “perfect filiality,” and then she took off her armor to be a perfect, obedient wife in her husband’s house. |
| 汤婷婷在旧金山长大，在一个被莫名其妙的禁忌和恋物癖统治的家庭里，她的生活很阴郁。她很愤怒，因为家里会挂一张中国村民的照片，他们正在打捞被洪水冲走的财物，而把捞到的女婴扔回去。在她的幻想里，她是一名战士，就像花木兰一样。这是母亲给她讲过的故事，几百年前，花木兰在战场上英勇作战，成了中国人民的传奇。在心中的神龙与地上的白虎指引下，花木兰中获得了超人的力量和勇气，父母为她举办给男丁的盛宴，在她背上刺下他们的冤情，让她去向暴虐的皇帝复仇。她率领一支由百万农民组成的军队，摧毁了一个王朝。她成了“尽孝”的传奇，然后她脱下盔甲，在丈夫的家里做一个完美、顺从的妻子。 |
| Maxine’s parents, in fact, grieve unavenged. Her father leaves his village to earn money in America and never goes home again. Her mother, Brave Orchid, is alone when she loses her first born son and daughter. At the age of 38, she sails alone to Canton to become a doctor at the To Keung Midwifery school. She is a hard woman, and very skillful. She exorcises the hairy ghost that haunted her dormitory. She hides at night, for two years, studying her textbooks, so that no one would ever know how difficult she finds the work. By the time her husband sends for her, she has acquired a slave girl for $50 and has a thriving practice in the province. |
| 事实上，汤婷婷的父母悲痛难平。她的父亲离开村子到美国挣钱，从此再也没有回家。她的母亲，英兰，失去了长子和女儿之后孤身一人。38岁那年，她独自坐船到广东，在图强助产学校成为一名医生。她是个坚强的女人，而且技术高明。她赶走了在宿舍出没的可怕鬼魂。两年的时间里，她在晚上偷偷温习功课，这样别人就不知道她觉得这项工作有多难。当她的丈夫把她叫到美国的时候，她已经花了相当于50美元的钱买了一个丫头，在省内有了一个生意兴隆的诊所。 |
| At 45 in California, she bears another child, Maxine, her “Biggest Daughter,” but she never even once calls her “First Born Daughter.” Consolation is something she refuses. Brave Orchid has five more children in America, and no midwifery practice. She and her husband own a laundry, lose it, buy another and lose that, too, to an urban renewal project. The family that was land-poor in China is slum-poor, immigrant-poor in California. Brave Orchid is querulous and in her way indomitable, but she will not draw her grievances on her Biggest Daughter’s back and send her forth to conquer California. |
| 45岁时，她在加州生下了另一个孩子汤婷婷，她的“大女儿”，但她从来没有叫过她“长女”。她拒绝安慰。英兰在美国还有五个孩子，但没有助产诊所。她和丈夫曾经拥一家洗衣店，后来失去了它，他们又买下一家，后来它又被一个城市重建项目夺走了。这个在中国缺少土地的家庭，现在又成了加州贫民窟的穷人，成了贫穷的移民。英兰总是抱怨，以她的方式不屈不挠地抗争，但她不会把怨气撒在大女儿身上，再让她去征服加利福尼亚。 |
| The old Chinese accommodate their ghosts or exorcise them. But Maxine Kingston grew up with too many ghosts to either accommodate or exorcise. The ghosts of her mother’s talk-stories, the ghosts of her warrior fantasies, the ghosts that milled around her and were the American ghosts — the teachers and the classmates, the milkman and the garbageman, the pharmacist from whom she has to beg candy to sweeten the curse of a bottle of medicine sent, by error, to her parents’ house. And she has too many grievances of her own. With 207 childhood grievances pounding in her head, she fights to find a voice for them. |
| 老一辈的中国人会祭祀或驱除鬼魂。但汤婷婷在成长过程中遇到了太多的鬼魂，既无法祭祀，也无法驱除。母亲讲的故事里的鬼魂、她化身战士的幻想里的鬼魂、在她周围游荡的美国鬼魂——老师和同学、送奶工和清洁工，还有那个药剂师，她不得不向他讨些糖果，好抵消错送父母家里的一瓶药所带来的诅咒。而且她自己也有太多的不满。她的脑海里浮现起207件童年的怨恨，她努力为这些怨恨找到一个说法。 |
| Brave Orchid has told her that her tongue was cut, at birth, to make her eloquent — a charming, sweet-voiced future wife. But the confusions of her childhood silence her instead. She flunked kindergarten. For three years, she cannot bring herself to talk at school. Her voice, when she does talk, is the “dried-duck voice” of her disguises. At home, she burrows under piles of laundry, hides herself in closets and secret corners of the cellar. At school, she torments another little Chinese girl — a girl who never talks at all. She pulls her hair, pinches her cheeks, she screams “Talk, talk!,” as if a single word from the bruised and sobbing child would free them both. In the end, she leaves, like any American daughter. She goes to Berkeley on a scholarship, marries an American, apparently — and settles in Hawaii. |
| 英兰告诉她，她在出生时被割断舌筋，为了让她什么音都发得出来——成为一个迷人的、声音甜美的未来妻子。但童年的困惑让她沉默了。她在幼儿园没有及格。三年的时间里，她在学校都没法讲话。当她说话时，声音是伪装出来的“干巴巴的声音”。在家里，她躲在成堆的衣服下面，躲在壁橱和地窖的秘密角落里。在学校，她折磨另一个中国小女孩——一个从不说话的女孩。她揪着那女孩的头发，拧着她的脸颊，大喊着“说话，说话！”，仿佛只要这个伤痕累累、泣不成声的孩子说一句话，她们俩就都能得到解脱。最后，她离开了，就像所有的美国女儿一样。她靠奖学金去了伯克利，显然嫁给了一个美国人，然后定居在夏威夷。 |
| In her own way she lays to rest the ghost of No Name Woman. “Now colors are gentler and fewer; smells are antiseptic. Now when I peek in the basement window where the villagers say they see a girl dancing like a bottle imp, I can no longer see a spirit in a skirt made of light, but a voiceless girl dancing when she thought no one was looking.” |
| 她以自己的方式让无名女人的灵魂安息。“如今，我看到的颜色更淡、色彩种类更少；空气闻起来像防腐剂的气味。村民们说他们看到地下室里有一个女孩在跳舞，如瓶中的精灵，如今我透过地下室的窗户窥视，却再也看不见以光束为裙的精灵，而是一个女孩在默默跳舞，以为没有人看她。” |
| Maxine has told her mother that she, also, talks-story. I wonder if Brave Orchid knows how well she does. Maxine Kingston writes with bitter and relentless love. Her voice, now, is as clear as the voice of Ts’ai Yen, who sang her sad, angry songs of China to the barbarians. It is as fierce as a warrior’s voice, and as eloquent as any artist’s. — Jane Kramer |
| 汤婷婷告诉妈妈，她也会讲故事。我想知道英兰知不知道她讲得有多好。汤婷婷用苦涩而无情的爱来写作。现在，她的声音如同向着野蛮人唱出悲愤中国歌曲的蔡文姬一样清晰。它像战士的声音一样凶猛，也像任何艺术家的声音一样雄辩。——简·克莱默 |
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