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| FOUR TREASURES OF THE SKYBy Jenny Tinghui Zhang |
| 《天之四宝》(Four Treasures of the Sky) 作者：张廷慧(Jenny Tinghui Zhang) |
| One striking feature of “Four Treasures of the Sky,” Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s engrossing, eventful first novel, takes the form of an absence: Although much of this epic late-19th-century tale unfolds in the American West, there is not a memorable moment involving a horse. |
| 在张廷慧引人入胜、高潮迭起的首部小说《天之四宝》中，一个显著特征是缺少一样东西：这部19世纪末的史诗故事相当一部分发生在美国西部，但想不起来有哪个瞬间出现过马。 |
| The dearth of pounding hooves and accompanying dust clouds is telling; Zhang has trained her gaze on an area of American history that has gone largely unnoticed in westerns, even revisionist ones: the Chinese immigrants who built railroads and worked in mines — only to be met with racist persecution when they tried to assimilate into American life. |
| 缺少马蹄声和随之而来的漫天尘埃很说明问题；张廷慧将目光集中在美国历史上一个被所有西部片——甚至连粉饰历史的西部片都不例外——基本忽视的领域：那就是修建铁路和在矿山工作的中国移民，他们在努力融入美国生活之时却遭到了种族主义迫害。 |
| A series of cruel misadventures buffets Zhang’s protagonist, a Chinese teenager named Daiyu, from a comfortable, loving childhood into this unstable American milieu. Her troubles begin with her name; Daiyu’s eponym is Lin Daiyu, a tragic figure of legend who dies spitting blood after the family of her beloved tricks him into marrying someone else. Although Daiyu grapples with the legacy of her name throughout the novel, there is a more immediate cause of her ill fortune: the sudden flight of her parents, whose practice of sheltering members of a secret society opposed to the Qing court has landed them in danger. Twelve-year-old Daiyu is left with her grandmother, who, for the girl’s protection, disguises her as a boy and sends her to Zhifu, a city by the ocean. There Daiyu finds work sweeping the floors of a school run by a master calligrapher whose teachings form the spiritual and intellectual core of this novel. Calligraphy becomes a vocation for Daiyu. “Now, with a live, beating brush in hand,” Zhang writes, “I felt different pieces of my being sliding into place, as if I had just unlocked an extraordinary secret about myself.” |
| 张廷慧笔下的主人公是一位名叫黛玉的中国少女，她告别了舒适而充满爱的童年，来到这般不稳定的美国环境，经历了一系列残酷的不幸。她的麻烦始于名字；黛玉二字源于林黛玉，一个传奇性的悲剧人物，在所爱之人的家人骗他娶了别人后吐血而亡。虽然整部小说里黛玉都在与这个名字所承载的意义做斗争，但她的不幸还有一个更直接的原因：她的父母的突然出逃，是因为他们为一个反对清廷的秘密团体成员提供了庇护，导致他们身处险境。12岁的黛玉被留给了祖母照顾，而祖母为了保护她，将她扮成男孩，送到海边城市芝罘（音）。黛玉在那里的一所学堂做扫地工，学堂主人是一位书法家，他的教导构成了这部小说的精神和思想核心。书法让黛玉有了使命。“现在，手里拿着生动的毛笔，”张廷慧写道，“我感到身体的各部分逐渐归位，仿佛我刚刚解开了一个关于自己的非凡秘密。” |
| Daiyu’s studies are cut short when she is kidnapped by a friendly stranger at a fish market. Held captive for more than a year, she is forced to learn English; smuggled inside a bucket of coal on a cargo ship to San Francisco; and sold into prostitution at 14. All of this in the first 80 pages! |
| 因为被鱼市上一个友好的陌生人绑架，黛玉的学业中断了。她被囚禁了一年多，被迫学了英语；她被装入一桶煤里，偷运到开往旧金山的货轮上；然后在14岁那年被卖身为妓。所有这一切都发生在小说的前80页！ |
| Zhang’s descriptive prose is an arresting combination of earthy and lyric. “The tomatoes were sensitive and needy,” she writes of Daiyu’s childhood garden, “so we tended to them often, caressing their yellow-green skins that strained with mysterious energy.” The room of one of Daiyu’s fellow prostitutes “still smells like her, the whistle of citrus layering the air.” Before being sold to a madam who steps through a crowd of men “like wind cutting through hanging sheets,” Daiyu crouches among a collection of naked, frightened girls who remind her of visiting the fish market in Zhifu: “I and many others walked around each vendor, gazing hungrily at the fish, minds already racing forward to what it would taste like, how long it would take to scale, whether or not the meat was good, whether the eyeballs would pop in our mouths, how buttery the brain would taste, how soft the bones would be, soft enough to break between our teeth and leave in a wet pile on the table.” |
| 张廷慧娓娓道来的平淡叙事将朴实与抒情结合。“番茄娇气，需照料，”她这样描写黛玉童年时的菜园，“因此我们经常呵护它们，抚摸那因神秘能量而绷紧的黄绿色表皮。”黛玉的一位妓女同伴的房间里“仍然有她的气味，空气中弥漫着柑橘的呢喃”。她被卖给了一个“像风吹开悬挂的床单”一样从一群男人中走出的老鸨，在那之前，黛玉曾蹲在一群赤身裸体、惊恐万分的姑娘中间，她们让她想起了去芝罘鱼市的时候：“我和其他许多人绕着每个摊贩走来走去，眼巴巴看着那些鱼，脑子里已经在想象吃起来什么味道，去鳞需要多长时间，肉质好不好，鱼眼珠会不会在嘴里迸裂开来，鱼脑会有多滑腻，鱼骨会有多软，软到能在我们齿间碎掉，然后全都湿乎乎地堆在桌上。” |
| By conspiring with the mixed-race son of a wealthy white man — a boy with as little interest in taking Daiyu’s virginity as she has in yielding it — she manages to escape the brothel before she is violated. The two flee together to Boise, Idaho. Their success at eluding Daiyu’s predatory madam and the Hip Yee tong, the bloodthirsty gang that controls the brothel, is one of many junctures where Zhang’s novel seems to tilt toward a conventional redemption story. But on her first night in Boise, Daiyu is sexually assaulted. She abandons her companion and lives as a man for the rest of the novel, binding her breasts and going by the name of Jacob Li, even after she finds refuge working for a pair of successful Chinese shopkeepers in Pierce, Idaho. |
| 通过与一位富有白人男性的混血儿子合谋——这个男孩不愿夺取黛玉的贞操，正如黛玉也不愿交出她的贞操——她在被侵犯之前设法逃离了妓院。两人一起逃到了爱达荷州的博伊西市。他们成功躲过了黛玉那凶狠的老鸨和控制妓院的残忍黑帮协义堂的追捕，这是张廷慧这本小说看似倾向于传统救赎故事的众多情节之一。但在博伊西的第一个晚上，黛玉就遭到了性侵。她抛弃了伙伴，在小说接下来的时间里一直以男人的身份生活，裹起自己的胸部，化名雅各布·李，甚至在爱达荷皮尔斯市一对事业有成的店主那里得到工作庇护后也依然如此。 |
| “Four Treasures of the Sky” moves with nimble economy through Daiyu’s dislocations while poignantly rendering her struggle to maintain a coherent sense of self. At one point, she notes, “My hands are bigger now, can carry more than before. They have changed since the days of helping my mother or working in the garden or holding a calligraphy brush. These are still good hands, I remind myself. These are still my hands.” Her solitude is alleviated by the appearance of her namesake, Lin Daiyu, who arrives as an interlocutor and performs the functions of companion, protector and occasional heckler. While psychologically sound, these projections at times feel overworked; the original story of Lin Daiyu, told briefly in the novel’s early pages, lacks sufficient potency to bear so much narrative weight. |
| 《天之四宝》以灵活而简洁的笔触描写了黛玉的漂泊流离，同时也悲情描绘了她为守护完整的自我而经历的艰难困苦。她一度感叹道，“我的手现在更大了，能拿的东西比以前更多了。与帮母亲干活、在果园里劳作或者拿毛笔写字的日子相比，这手已经完全不一样了。我告诉自己，这仍是双好手。这还是我的手。”与她同名的林黛玉的出现缓解了她的孤独。林黛玉是与她倾谈的人，扮演了同伴、保护者和偶尔的质问者的角色。虽然在心理学上站得住脚，但这些投射有时会让人感觉过度；小说开头简单介绍了林黛玉的故事，但仍不足以承担如此多的叙事分量。 |
| While living and working in Pierce, Daiyu encounters the novel’s romantic hero: Nelson Wong, the American-born son of a Chinese father, a gifted violinist and teacher. Here again, Zhang thwarts conventional expectation; the burgeoning love between Daiyu and Nelson is stifled by his belief that she is male. Zhang deftly evokes the personal cost of Daiyu’s disguise: “I learned to hide my natural reactions, my propensity to laugh at small things that enchanted me, to instead handle things with terseness and deliberation, not tenderness.” Unable to touch Nelson as she watches him sleep, Daiyu locates her longing in a memory: “Once, I wanted a fish from the fish market. I wanted it so badly that I could not see anything else, could only feel the satisfaction of it slipping down my throat. I craved nothing more than the fullness that would come, the heat from being fed.” |
| 在皮尔斯市工作和生活时，黛玉遇到了小说的浪漫主人公：华裔父亲的美国儿子尼尔森·黄，他是一位才华横溢的小提琴手和老师。在这里，张廷慧又一次反转了传统的期待；黛玉和尼尔森擦出的爱火被他以为黛玉是男性的想法扼杀了。张廷慧巧妙指出了黛玉女扮男装的个人代价：“我学会隐藏我的自然反应，我喜欢嘲笑那些让我着迷的小事，我做事利落而审慎，却没有温柔。”看着熟睡的尼尔森却无法触碰，黛玉将自己的渴望寄托于回忆：“有次我去鱼市想买条鱼。我实在太想要，以至于眼里别无它物，只有吞食的快感。我最渴求的是即将到来的满足，那种被喂饱的热量。” |
| Throughout the novel, Zhang adopts a stylistic tic of avoiding contractions. The inevitable formality of this device is offset by her exuberant prose, but it hampers her dialogue with a generic stiffness that undercuts the variety and individuality of speakers. This weakness becomes more pronounced in the novel’s second half, when Daiyu and her storekeeper allies — and eventually Nelson — clash with the ratcheting racism and mistrust of their white neighbors. The root causes of white enmity will be all too familiar to contemporary readers: economic competition, mistrust of cultural differences and the virulent wish for a scapegoat. “I am beginning to realize that in this place called Idaho, which they call the West, being Chinese can be something like a disease,” Daiyu narrates. “I am something they cannot fathom. I am something they fear. We all are.” America’s current rash of violent attacks against Asian Americans is a shameful reminder of how little distance we have traveled in more than a century. |
| 在整部小说里，张廷慧采用了避免缩略语的文体手法。这种文风必然呈现出的拘谨被她的华丽词章所抵消，但也因整体的僵硬而妨碍了对话，影响了人物多样性与个性的塑造。这一不足在小说后半段更加明显，黛玉和她的店主同盟——以及后来的尼尔森——与种族歧视和不信任与日俱增的白人邻居发生了冲突。当代读者对白人敌意的根源再熟悉不过：经济竞争、对文化差异的不信任以及寻找替罪羊的恶念。“我开始意识到，在这个叫爱达荷的地方，在这个他们口中的西部，身为中国人就像是一种疾病，”黛玉叙述道。“我是他们无法理解的东西。我是他们害怕的东西。我们都是。”美国近来接连发生针对亚裔的暴力袭击事件，是一种令人羞愧的提醒，即在一个多世纪的时间里，我们所取得的进步是多么微不足道。 |
| As tragedy ensues, Daiyu’s longing for home and her wish to belong are wrenching to read about. “There is a difference between being a newcomer to a city and being in a world that does not resemble you, that reminds you every moment of your strangeness,” she reflects. “This is what Idaho is to me. And so, when our Chinese customers come asking for millet and green onions, buying licorice and cinnamon, I watch them with tenderness, following their movements. I miss you, and I do not even know you, I want to say to the miner, the launderer, the servant.” |
| 悲剧接踵而至，黛玉的思乡之情和归属之愿令人揪心。“初来乍到一座城市，与生活在一个与你并无相同、且无时无刻不在提醒你自己的陌生的世界是有区别的，”她想。“这就是爱达荷之于我的意义。因此，当我们的中国顾客来买小米和大葱，买甘草和肉桂时，我会温柔地看着他们，目光追随着他们的一举一动。我想对矿工、洗衣工、仆人说，我想念你们，哪怕我并不认识你们。” |
| In an author’s note after the story is finished, Zhang explains that she based the Idaho portion of her novel on a historical atrocity. The resonance and immediacy of these barbarous 19th-century events are testament to Zhang’s storytelling powers, and should stand as a warning to all of us. |
| 在故事结束后的作者后记中，张廷慧解释说，小说中关于爱达荷州的段落是基于一场历史暴行。对这些19世纪野蛮事件的共鸣和实感证明了张廷慧的叙事力量，并应该成为对我们所有人的警示。 |
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