Women in China have long been silenced or sidelined—if they weren’t smothered at birth. But now a booming economy has transformed their lives. Hilary Spurling sees the changes for herself ...
中国女性长久以来没有话语权，处于边缘化——如果她们出生时没被窒息而死。但现在，蓬勃发展的经济已改变了她们的生活。Hilary Spurling亲眼目睹了这一变化。
From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Summer 2011
来源于《智惠生活》杂志，2011年夏
\"Impossible is nothing,” said my Chinese host in March, when I told her the English proverb “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”. She had just passed me a plateful of what looked like tiny, shiny, caramel-and-white striped silk purses. They turned out to be sliced pig’s ear, one of many traditional delicacies at a banquet that included fried ants, sea slugs and geese feet.
三月份，当我告诉我的女房东“母猪的耳朵作不成丝钱包”（中文：狗嘴里吐不出象牙）这句英文谚语时，她告诉我：“没什么是不可能的。”她刚刚端给我一盘看起来小小的、亮闪闪的、焦糖和白色条纹相间像丝钱包的东西。这些原来是切好的猪耳朵，宴席中的传统美食之一，像油炸蚂蚁，海参和鹅掌一样普遍。
Of course almost nothing is impossible in a country where acrobats still juggle wooden chairs as if they were feathers or ping-pong balls—and where the gristle and cartilage of a pig’s ear turn up on your plate as an absurdly elegant appetiser.
当然，在一个杂技演员摆弄木椅就像羽毛或乒乓球一样的国家，一个猪耳朵软骨被当做开胃菜放在盘中端给你的国家，一切皆有可能。
What makes foreigners gasp and stretch their eyes in China now is the almost inconceivable speed and scale of the changes that, in the past ten years, have swept people off the land like a giant magnet. In 1990 three out of every four people still lived and worked, as they always had done, on farms. More than 40% have now moved to the cities. By 2015, according to an article I read in China Daily, based on a United Nations forecast, half the population will be urbanised.
目前中国最吸引外国人目光、让他们瞠目结舌的是，过去的10年中，中国难以置信的速度和规模发展变化，像一块巨大的磁铁，横扫这片土地的人们的生活。1990年，3/4的人们像以前一样，仍然在农场工作和生活。而现在40%的人搬去了城市。我在中国日报看到一篇文章，据联合国预测到2015年，有一半的人口将被城市化。
The creative energy released by this frenetic development is palpable almost as soon as you step off the plane. It comes like a buzz off the people, especially the young women. When I arrived in the university town of Nanjing on my first visit to China in 2007, I spent days on end watching and talking to students, marvelling above all at the confidence, competence and poise of the girls. I was working on a book about Pearl Buck, who grew up in the Chinese countryside before teaching on the Nanjing campus in the 1920s, so I knew a lot about the world of these girls’ grandmothers: a slow-moving world where traffic went by river steamer or canal boat, and the only wheeled vehicle most people ever saw was a wheelbarrow. Girls were shut up at home on reaching puberty with no further access to the outside world, and no voice in their own or their family’s affairs. In traditional households they were forbidden to speak even to their husbands, except behind closed doors in the bedroom at night.
这场狂热发展所释放出的创造力，刚下飞机就可明显感觉到。这创造力似乎来源于一大群人，尤其是年轻女性。2007年我第一次访问中国时，到达南京的大学城，用几天的时间观察学生、同他们交谈，这些女生们的自信、能力和姿态让我吃惊。我当时正在写一本关于赛珍珠的书，她从小在中国农村长大，上世纪20年代在南京的大学教书，所以我对这些女孩外婆那一辈的世界非常了解：那是一个行动缓慢的年代，交通主要靠江轮和运河船，大多数人唯一见过带轮子的交通工具是独轮手推车。到青春期，女孩们就被关在家中，不再与外界接触，在家庭事务中也没有话语权。在传统家庭里，她们被禁止说话，甚至只能在夜晚关上卧室门后，才能通自己的丈夫讲话。
I’ve been fascinated by China all my life. The only two books I remember from early childhood were both Chinese. One was a collection of watercolours by Yui Shufang, “Chinese Children at Play”. It showed small boys with shaven heads and girls with black pigtails playing games I’d never heard of, and wearing clothes unlike any I’d ever seen. They had patterned tops and brightly coloured trousers: the sort of clothes children wear worldwide today, but I was a wartime child, and in England in the 1940s we mostly wore grey flannel skirts or shorts and plain drab hand-knits. This was my first picture-book, and I was entranced by it. The second was a storybook read aloud to me by my mother before I could read myself. “The Chinese Children Next Door” was about a family of six little girls who wanted a baby brother so badly that in the end their wish came true. The seventh child was a boy, the answer to his parents’ prayer, the pet and plaything of his elder sisters.
我毕生都对中国着迷。我早期儿童时代唯一记得的两本书都是中国的。其中一本是于淑芳的《玩耍的中国孩子》。画中剃光头的男孩们和扎小辫的女孩们正在玩我从未听说过的游戏，他们穿的衣服我也从未见过。他们穿的上衣有图案，裤子颜色鲜亮，像现在世界各处孩子们穿的衣服一样。但我是生活在战争年代的孩子，在二十世纪四十年代的英国，我们大都穿灰色法兰绒短裙或短裤，还有朴素的土褐色手工针织衫。这是我第一本图画书，它让我深深着迷。第二本是故事书，我还不识字的时候，妈妈会大声的读给我听。《隔壁的孩子们》讲的是一个家庭，有6个女儿，他们非常想要一个男孩，最终他们的愿望实现了。第7个孩子果然是个男孩，父母的祈祷实现了，姐姐们准备的玩具也有了用处。
Both books bit deep and hard into my imagination. It was only years later, when I’d already started work on a Chinese book myself, that I came across the story that had meant so much to me as an episode in Pearl Buck’s memoirs, and realised that she was the author. “The Chinese Children Next Door” is a fictionalised version of the experience of her much older adoptive Chinese sister, a girl abandoned as a baby by her family and brought up as their own by Pearl’s parents. This sister was already a married woman with the first of six daughters by the time Pearl was born, and the two little girls grew up as best friends, witnessing the almost uncontrollable rage of the Chinese grandfather at a daughter-in-law who, year after year, produced only girls.
这两本书都给我留下了深刻的印象。几年后，当我自己开始写一本关于中国的书时，偶然在赛珍珠回忆录读到了这个对我意义非凡的故事，这才意识到，她就是故事的作者。《隔壁的中国孩子们》以比赛珍珠大许多、被收养的中国姐姐为原型创作。她的姐姐还是婴儿时就被父母抛弃，赛珍珠的父母把她当做自己的孩子抚养长大。赛珍珠出生时，她姐姐已经结婚并生有一个女儿，两个小女孩一起长大并成立最好的朋友，也目睹了她养女姐姐的公公看到一个又一个女孩出生后，难以抑制的愤怒。
I knew “The Chinese Children Next Door” by heart as a child, probably because it echoed the much sadder stories my mother told me about her own early years, when she too was the youngest of six unwanted girls. Her mother finally managed, at her seventh try, to produce the boy who was all she and her husband had ever wanted in the first place. “My life was ruined when I was two,” my mother said. As a child I must have recognised, at any rate subconsciously, the harsh unspoken truths lurking between the lines of a story that made my mother’s early unhappiness somehow easier to bear. When Jawaharlal Nehru read Buck’s captivating tale aloud to Mahatma Gandhi on his sick-bed, both men burst out laughing. Like Buck, they were only too familiar with the realities of a world where female infanticide, domestic slavery and sexual bondage were commonplace.
儿童时代我就深深记住了《隔壁的中国孩子们》，或许是因为，我母亲曾告诉我她早年更加悲惨的经历，她也是6个被人嫌弃的女儿中最小的一个，这个故事引起了我的共鸣。祖母第7次尝试，终于生了个男孩，一个她和祖父从最开始就渴望的孩子。“我只有2岁时，我的人生就被毁了。”我的母亲说。作为一个孩子，我必须承认，故事中字里行间严酷而不言而喻的事实，使母亲早些年不开心的经历，下意识的感觉不那么难以忍受了。当贾瓦哈拉尔·尼赫鲁给病床上的圣雄甘地大声朗读赛珍珠有趣的故事时，两个人都哈哈大笑了。像赛珍珠一样，他们对世界上的杀害女婴、国内奴役制度和性奴役现象再了解不过了。
Education and earning power have given the female descendants of that world independence in the past decade, and with it the self-reliance that comes from an unprecedented measure of control over their own lives. For the young women I met in Nanjing and Shanghai, even the draconian one-child policy of the last 30 years has an aspect of liberation. They looked blank when I asked about sex discrimination. “For some reason my parents wanted a boy as well as me,” one of them said, laughing. Her family had managed to get permission for a second child on the grounds that the first—my informant—had a fatal heart defect. Her mother was already pregnant again when a neighbour informed the family-planning office that the grounds for the permit were fake, so the baby had to be aborted.
过去的十年中，教育和赚钱的能力使那个世界的女性更加独立，她们自力更生，以前所未有的姿态掌控自己的生活。对于我在南京和上海见到的年轻女性而言，过去30年苛刻的独生子女政策，也有解放的一面。当我问到性别歧视时，她们一脸的然。“出于某些原因，除我之外，我的父母还要个男孩。”其中一位女士笑着说。她的家庭已获得生二胎的许可，理由是——第一个孩子——也就是她，有严重的心脏病。她母亲已经怀孕，这时她们的邻居向计划生育办公室她们生二胎的理由是假的，不得已孩子被流产了。
All of them assured me that nowadays no one was treated differently
but older people insisted that you have to pay attention to how people behave, not what they say. The arrival of a baby boy is greeted with celebration, the birth of a girl with condolence. Official statistics say that newborn boys outnumber girls by 118 to 100 in spite of the fact that, according to my friends, boys cost more. Parents have to start saving to buy a house or a flat for a son from the day of his birth, because no man has a hope of marrying unless he can provide a home for his bride—and girls can afford to be increasingly picky these days, in this as in much else.
所有的女孩都向我保证，现在没有人因性别而被区别对待。但年长的人说，你需要观察别人做什么，而不是他们说什么。男孩出生总是受到祝贺问候，而女孩出生会收到同情。官方数据显示，新生男孩数量超过女孩，比例达到118:100。但我的朋友说，事实上，男孩比女孩值钱。从儿子出生起，父母就开始为他攒钱买房，因为除非男孩可以为他的新娘提供房子，否则他是别指望可以结婚——现在的女孩对于房子和其他问题，变得日益挑剔。
All this turns the rural society of the last 2,000 years and more upside down. “Low culture, small knowledge,” another Chinese friend said scornfully, describing the villages in poor western parts of the country where girls are still expendable, and the one-child rule is so irregularly enforced that a large family of sons remains many mothers’ ambition. On my first visit, four years ago, I took a trip up the Yangzi, from Nanjing to the Lu mountains, in one of the big comfortable well-equipped coaches packed with Chinese tourists exploring their own country for the first time in history. It took eight hours, and I watched seven films screened one after another at the front of the bus: gangster movies, hoodlum fantasies, heroic or comedy thrillers, historical romances set in an imperial past where corrupt magistrates connived with rapacious landlords to oppress the locals. All of them blurred after a bit into a violent continuum of fist fights, knife fights, sword fights, sensational chases and gun battles punctuated by shots, grunts and thuds. Above and behind the male mayhem we heard the perpetual high screams or subdued moaning of women being beaten, tortured and raped.
所有这些使2000多年的农村社会发生翻天覆地的变化。另一位中国朋友轻蔑的用“文化低，知识少”描述中国贫穷的西部农村：女孩仍是可丢弃的，计划生育并不按规定执行，以至于家里有许多儿子仍然是很多母亲的梦想。四年前我第一次访问中国时，沿长江向上，从南京到庐山旅行。我坐在装备舒适的大巴里，周围都是第一次游览自己国家的中国游客。8个小时里，大巴前面的屏幕接连放了7部电影：警匪片、科幻片、英雄主义片、喜剧片、恐怖片，还有一部封建时代腐败官员同贪婪地主联合压榨当地人的历史爱情片。所有的电影在开场后很快变成暴力镜头，到处都是拳打脚踢、刀剑相向、狂乱的追逐和枪战，其间穿插着枪击、重击和吼叫声。在男性的暴力之后，我们听到了女性被殴打、折磨和强奸的高声尖叫和缓慢的呻吟。
Girls have not been routinely crippled by their mothers since the abolition of foot-binding almost a century ago, but in the villages many still die at birth by the traditional methods of stifling or strangulation. Their fate, and the mindset that makes it possible, were uncovered by Xinran in the 1990s when she was a young Chinese radio reporter based on the banks of the Yellow River, and she explored them for the first time in detail in her latest book, “Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother” (2010). Xinran’s initial contact with village life was a shock for which nothing in her urban background had prepared her, and one that reverberates through all her books. When she travelled the length and breadth of China in 2006, some of the interviews she conducted reduced even her Chinese cameraman to horrified incredulity.
自从一个世纪前取消裹足后，中国母亲已不再用这种方式让女孩们落下残疾了，但在农村，许多女婴在出生时就以传统的方式被窒息或扼死了。20世纪90年代，一位黄河沿岸的年轻中国广播女记者欣然，披露了当时女性的命运和思维方式，并在她的新书《一封匿名中国母亲的来信》中首次介绍了细节。欣然与农村妇女的首次接触，让城市背景、对农村毫无准备的她甚为震惊，并且这种震惊贯穿在了她所有的书里。当2006年她的足迹遍布中国大江南北时，她采访内容的困境甚至让她的摄影师惊恐怀疑。
Many of the stories people told Xinran were not essentially different from the accounts Pearl Buck had listened to as a young woman 70 or 80 years earlier. Born in 1892, Buck grew up hearing a distinctive noise: the low urgent monotone of Chinese women explaining their problems to her mother, who had been instructed, as a newly arrived and very young American missionary, to set up a women’s Bible class. Buck’s mother decided almost at once that Christian conversion was the last thing these people needed. From then on her Bible class functioned as an unofficial clinic, dispensing practical advice and a listening ear to women who had never been listened to by anyone before. When Pearl in turn inherited the class, its members talked to her as freely and frankly as they had done to her mother.
人们告诉欣然的故事与七、八十年前，赛珍珠年轻时所听到的大同小异。赛珍珠生于1892年，她成长的过程听到的都是一种独特的声音：中国妇女们用低沉而紧迫的单一语调，向赛珍珠于的母亲解释她们问题。作为刚到中国的年轻传教士，赛珍珠的母亲被指示建立一个女性圣经课堂。赛珍珠的母亲几乎立即决定，昄依基督教是这些人最不需要的。从那时起，她的圣经课堂也起到非官方诊所的作用，给人们切实可行的意见，并成为那些从未被聆听过的女性的倾听者。后来赛珍珠继承了课堂，学员们与她交流像同她母亲交流一样自由而坦率。
she steered clear of experts and officials,” says Leslie T. Chang, whose own graphic reporting of women’s lives in China today relies on precisely this lack of prejudice, along with intuitive sympathy and close attention. “Pearl Buck’s understanding of the country was built on years of patient observation, living in backwater cities and befriending students, housewives, servants and farmers.” Listening to ordinary people, and recording clearly and accurately what they say, form the basis of Chang’s “Factory Girls” (2008) as of all Xinran’s books.
Leslie T. Chang说：“她习惯性回避意识形态；避免偏袒任何一方；也避开专家和官员，”Leslie T. Chang以公正、直观同情和密切关注，在自己的图片中报道中国现代女性的生活，。“赛珍珠对中国的理解基于多年耐心的观察，她生活在闭塞的城市，与学生、家庭妇女、仆人和农民做朋友。”倾听普通人，准确而清晰的记录他们语言，形成了Chang的《女工》和欣然的创作基础。
Of course things have moved on since Buck’s day. Starvation is no longer endemic in the countryside. Girls are not commonly driven to suicide by implacable mothers-in-law, nor sold into slavery or exchanged for food in time of famine. Even the villages now have television and telephones. But rural society is still constricted by isolation and hardship, by lack of prospects and, for women, by dread of conceiving a baby girl.
当然，社会早已从赛珍珠时代向前发展。饥饿已不再是农村难以摆脱的问题。女孩们不再被难缠的婆婆逼得去自杀，更不会在饥荒时节被卖做奴隶或交换食物。农村甚至也有电视和电话了。但仍受制于隔绝和生活艰辛、缺乏前途，而女性，也仍害怕怀上女孩。
The realities of ordinary lives are no more up for discussion in China now than they were then. Buck’s account of a farming family in “The Good Earth” was widely attacked for its frankness when it came out in 1931. My biography of Buck has, I’m told, been severely cut in the Chinese edition: certainly it looks surprisingly slim. Chang’s book, published in the West in 2008, has yet to appear on the Chinese mainland. Xinran’s books have long been officially banned although, when the Guardian named her one of the world’s top 100 women on International Women’s Day in March, Beijing finally authorised the circulation of all but one of them in English translation.
与过去相比，现在普通人的生活现状不再被提出讨论。赛珍珠在其1931年的小说《大地》中对农村家庭的描写，因其坦率而广受攻击。据说，我写的赛珍珠传记的中文版被大幅删减，印刷品出奇的薄。 Leslie T. Chang的书于2008年在西方出版，但至今未出现在中国大陆。欣然的作品长久以来被官方禁止，今年3月的国际妇女节时，卫报将她列为“世界100位著名女性之一”，北京终于批准发行除其中一本外所有书籍的英文版。
Whether or not the women Xinran interviewed will ever read their own stories in print is another question. As a reporter in the 1990s she found people in the villages incurious, mute, reluctant to acknowledge the presence of a woman, let alone to answer her questions. Even in the towns she met with stubborn resistance. “The Chinese stood up against me,” she says. “They had never heard of the Cultural Revolution. They’d never heard of poverty in the countryside. Why was I trying to make them lose face?” I found the same attitude again and again in today’s students, who couldn’t see the point of deliberately stirring up their country’s history.
欣然采访过的女性们能否在印刷品中读到自己故事还未可知否。作为20世纪90年代的记者，她发现农村人对女性漠不关心、沉默，不愿承认女性的存在，更不用说回答她的问题。甚至在城镇，她也遇到了顽固的抵抗。“中国人纷纷反对我”她说。“他们从未听说过文化大革命。他们也从未听说过农村的贫穷状况。我为什么要使他们丢脸呢？”面对现在的学生，我一遍又一遍的遇到了这样的态度，他们不愿看到蓄意质疑他们国家的历史。
The past played no part in Chang’s conversations with the factory girls who had migrated from their villages to operate the assembly lines that produce the clothes we wear, the computer parts we need, the shoes, hats, handbags, games and gadgets that make the Western world go round. They work up to 13 hours a day, live in cold, dirty, overcrowded dormitories and eat poor food. They have no free time, health insurance, holidays or pension provision beyond the paltry state minimum. Three years ago their average wage was between 500 and 800 yuan—roughly ?50-80—a month. Today, a shortage of labour means that young women in their 20s, the elite of the migrant workforce, can earn three times as much, or more.
Chang与工厂女工的谈话并未涉及多少过去的历史。她们从农村来的流水线旁，生产出我们穿的衣服、我们需要的电脑部件、鞋子、帽子、手提包、以及使西方世界得以运转的游戏和小器具。她们每天工作13小时以上，住在寒冷、肮脏又过于拥挤的宿舍，吃的是简单的食物。她们没有自由时间，没有医疗保险、节假日或超过国家规定的最低养老金以外的福利。三年前，她们的月平均工资是500——800元，大约50-80英镑。现在的用工荒说明，20多岁的年轻女性，也就是农民工中的精英，可以挣到以前三倍或三倍以上的收入。
They return to their villages at New Year bearing gifts: anoraks, trainers, sweets and toys for the children, pretty jackets for their mothers. They also inject unprecedented sums of money into the rural economy. Young unmarried women now subsidise their parents, pay for the education of younger brothers and sisters, distribute handouts to elderly relatives, and command growing respect from the village as well as from their families. Some go back home to settle, bringing capital and know-how. A friend told me about her female cousin who returned to farm the land in the village where their grandparents lived in a mud house with paper windows. People like this are beginning to put up glass-and-stone two-storey houses in the country, conspicuous proof of an alien world of development and enterprise. Factory girls may look victimised to outsiders, who take them to be helpless, ill-paid and insecure, easy prey to sexual and financial exploitation, stuck on the lowest and most vulnerable level of society. “But that’s not how they see themselves,” says Chang. In their own eyes they are proud, resourceful, energetic risk-takers at the cutting edge of a social revolution.
她们带着礼物回家过新年：防风衣，运动鞋，给小孩的糖果和玩具，还有给她们妈妈的漂亮夹克。她们还给农村经济注入了前所未有的资金。年轻的未婚女性现在资助她们的父母，负担弟妹们的学费，救济年长的亲戚，也赢得了村里和家里的尊重。有的人带着资金和技术回家定居了。一位朋友告诉我她表姐回老家种地了，村里的爷爷奶奶还住在有纸窗户的泥巴屋子里。她们在农村盖起了玻璃窗户的二层小楼，这是外面世界事业和发展的显著证明。女工们可能被外界看做受害者，她们孤立无援、收入微薄、缺乏保障，易受性别和经济剥削，一直处于社会的最底层、最弱势的群体。“但她们并不是这样看待自己的，”Chang说。在她们眼中，她们自豪、机智、精力充沛，是社会革命最前沿的的冒险者。
I overlapped with Xinran and Chang on the eastern book-festival circuit in March, spending nearly a week with Xinran in Dubai, following Chang into Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai. Listening to them talk about their books, and talking myself about mine, I realised for the first time how directly our subjects interlinked, and how, underlying the relentless change in China, there is much continuity. The first stories Buck wrote were about change, modernity, the seismic shifts already beginning to crack the country apart in the opening decades of the 20th century. She saw water come from the tap for the first time in 1900, and watched the first train come roaring out of a tunnel in the hill outside her home town of Zhenjiang four years later. Her parents had known the place as a sleepy market town before it became a foreign treaty port, a rich and expansive trading centre strategically positioned where the Yangzi meets the Grand Canal, in those days China’s main north-south traffic artery. The region still produces fish, rice, silk and tea, but, with the coming of roads, Zhenjiang dropped back into the sticks.
3月份，我在东方图书巡展上偶遇欣然，与她在迪拜呆了一周，然后跟Chang一起去了香港、北京和上海。听她们谈论她们的书籍，我也谈论我的书籍。我第一次意识到，我们关注的主题如此相近，意识到中国潜在的无情变革下，有许多的连续性。赛珍珠的第一本故事集就是关于变革、现代性，以及21世纪初就把中国分裂开的地震式变化。1900年，她第一次看到水从水龙头里流出来。四年后在浙江老家，她第一次看到火车从山的隧道中呼啸而来。她父母眼中沉睡的市场小镇后来变成了对外通商口岸，成为一个富饶、广阔的贸易中心，处于长江与大运河交汇的战略位置。那个时候大运河是中国南北交通的大动脉。这个地方仍然产鱼、米、丝绸和茶，但随着道路的出现，浙江沦落成为偏僻的乡村了。
This year, some of its inhabitants told me with satisfaction, it finally tore down the last of its old houses. It has become a featureless provincial town, full of the kind of suburban shop fronts and drab apartment blocks familiar worldwide now that we all wear the same Chinese-made t-shirts, jeans and trainers, drive the same brands of car, and organise our lives in the same way by mobile phone. As I walked along the broad new embankment at twilight, I watched an aeroplane hanging against the pale sky. I did not realise, until I found it still there on my way back half an hour later, that it was a stationary paper kite—the contemporary equivalent of the flying pagodas I loved as a child in “Chinese Children at Play”.
今年，当地的居民满意的告诉我，最后的几所老房子终于被拆掉了。这里已变成一个毫无特色的城镇，到处都是城市化的商业街，单调的住宅楼，世界各处都已习惯穿同样中国制造的体恤衫、牛仔裤和跑步鞋，开同一牌子的车，用手机按照同样的方式安排我们的生活。傍晚我沿着宽阔的新河堤散步时，我看到苍白的天空中有一架飞机。直到半小时后我返回时才意识到，那是一个静止的纸风筝——我小时候在《玩耍的中国孩子》中最喜欢的飞行宝塔的现代版本。
I visited the school where Buck taught in 1915-16, now the Pearl S. Buck Middle School. Her students, all boys, were eager and hungry, starved of information even more than food. Today the school is mixed, but the intake still comes from poor families who could not otherwise afford education. One boy wanted to be a writer. One girl was so tense her lips moved all through my talk as she rehearsed, repeatedly, the question she planned to ask me in English. Another boy, falling over his words in a rush to get them out, explained that he had never spoken to a foreigner before, and it made him so nervous that he hoped I wouldn’t be angry. These teenagers, like all the students I met, wanted to know what Buck had done for their country, how I rated her books, and what I thought of her translations from the Chinese.
我参观了赛珍珠年执教的学校，现成为赛珍珠中学。她当年的学生全是男孩，对知识的渴求甚至超过食物。现在这所学校男女生混合，招收的仍然是来自贫困家庭、无力承担教育费用的学生。有一个男孩想成为作家。一个女孩很紧张，我说话时她的嘴唇一直在动，重复的念叨她想用英语问我的问题。另一个男孩急于说话，反而磕磕巴巴，他说他从未与外国人说过话，所以才如此紧张，希望我别生气。这些青少年们，与我见过的所有学生一样，都想知道赛珍珠对中国做了什么，想知道我怎样评价她的书籍，我怎样看待她英译本的书。
&Buck’s books were banned under Mao, and she herself was classified a Public Enemy, guilty of peddling cultural imperialist lies. On my first visit to Zhenjiang four years ago, research in any normal sense seemed impossible. “It’s been too long, and no people want to talk about Pearl Buck,” I was told firmly. The house she lived in as a child had been destroyed, her mother’s grave was now buried under a housing development. Even the names of the people she knew locally had been removed from the Chinese edition of her memoirs.
赛珍珠的书在毛主席时代被列为禁书，她本人也被列为公敌，罪行是兜售帝国主义文化言。四年前我第一次到镇江的时候，任何普通意义上的研究都是不可能的。“时间太久了，没人想谈论赛珍珠，”有人明确的高诉我。她小时候住的房子已被毁坏，她母亲的墓地被埋在一座住宅下。就连她认识的当地人的名字，也被从她回忆录的中文版中删掉了。
Her slow rehabilitation speeded up just over a year ago when she was ranked, with government approval, one of the Top International Friends of China. Now there is a museum in her name, as well as the school whose pupils are learning to re-evaluate her. These children are more fortunate than their parents and grandparents. Many, perhaps most, will go on to university. I’m told that even people earning the basic subsistence wage of three yuan a day reckon to spend one on food, one on rent and a third on education. Schooling is tough and ferociously competitive for pupils. They start at six years old (preparations for entry can begin as young as three) and are weeded out from then on by cut-throat examinations. The young women I talked to all agreed that it was virtually impossible to find a Chinese school where children felt relaxed and happy. Many of them knew of young families who had left the country altogether to settle abroad rather than put an only child through the rigours of their own system.
仅在一年前，经中国政府批准，将赛珍珠列为中国国际友人之首，她的名誉快速恢复了。现在这里有一座以她的名字命名的博物馆，一所以她名字命名的学校，那里的学生正学习重新评价她。这些孩子比他们的父母、祖父母更幸运。许多孩子，或许大多数，都会上大学。有人告诉我，甚至那些每天赚取维持最低生活3元的人，也会用1元买食物，1元付房租，1元用在教育上。小学教育及艰苦又竞争激烈。他们六岁起开始上学（学前教育最早可3岁开始），从那时起就要经受严酷的考试淘汰。同我谈话的所有年轻女性都认为，要找到一所孩子们感到即轻松又愉快的中国学校是不可能的。许多年轻的家庭移居海外，不愿让他们唯一的孩子经历自己国家严酷的体制教育。
But it is obvious to even the most cursory observer that education drives China. The university boom started as a means of extricating the country from economic recession. Wherever I went I talked to students in packed classrooms holding 250 or more. The huge new campuses on the outskirts of big cities were powerhouses, put up initially with strictly limited staff and resources to produce the new educated generation that has mobilised change. In the prosperous east, 50% of the school-leavers are now university-educated, and it is more like 70% in a city such as Nanjing.
即使最马虎的观察者也会发现，教育推动了中国的发展。大学的繁荣开始成为中国摆脱经济困境的手段。无论我去哪里，都是在容纳250人或更多的教室里与学生交谈。大城市郊区庞大的新校园就像发电站，培养能够发动变革的有文化的新一代人，校园建设初期配备的人员和资源严格有限。在繁荣的东部地区，50%的毕业生都受过大学教育，在南京这样的城市达到70%以上。
This is a world without maps. There were no street plans or road maps under Chairman Mao, so even professionals don’t know how to read them. When the car in front skids to a halt without warning, it is generally because the driver is ringing a friend to ask how to get somewhere. On my first visit to the little country town where Buck set “The Good Earth”, still a backwater in the poorest part of Anhui, the massive mud ramparts, the mud houses and the muddy main street had all gone, leaving almost nothing she would have recognised except the street markets. When I spotted one of these down a side turning, the driver slammed on his brakes in the middle of a newly built four-lane highway, and simply abandoned his car while we got out to investigate. The side-street was lined, as it had been in Buck’s day, with stalls selling fruit, vegetables, mounds of different coloured grains, beans and pulses, caged and loose chickens, crates of white pigeons, great baskets of red and black crayfish, and live fish in plastic bowls of water: shrimp, crab, frogs, eels, lithe dark trout, silvery flatfish, white water-worms. Tailors and shoeshine boys worked from the gutter, and the air was filled with the smell of roast sesame seed from freshly baked buns, pancakes and waffles.
这是一个没有地图的世界。毛主席时代没有道路的规划和地图，所以即使是专业人士也无法辨认。如果前面一辆车毫无预兆就停车，通常是因为司机正给朋友打电话问路。我第一次去赛珍珠创作《大地》的地方，那是一个安徽省最贫穷闭塞的小镇，大量的泥城墙、泥房子和泥道路都已消失，除了街市，没留下什么赛珍珠仍然认识的东西。我突然发现下面的一条小路，于是司机猛踩刹车，在一条新修的四车道高速公路中间停下来，我们去查看的时候，车就被扔在那。那条小路像赛珍珠描绘的一样，有卖水果、蔬菜的小摊，一堆堆不同颜色的谷物和豆子，笼养和散养的鸡，一箱箱的白鸽，大框里红色和黑色的小龙虾，塑料碗里盛着水，里面有鱼、虾、蟹、蛙、柔软的鳟鱼、银白色的比目鱼，还有白色的水虫子。裁缝和擦皮鞋的男孩在排水沟旁工作，空气中弥漫着新出炉的点心、煎饼和蛋饼上烤芝麻的味道。
Places like this disappear too fast for maps. Any number of people told me about going back home after a few years away, only to find the streets where they grew up had vanished as completely as if they had never existed. In one of Buck’s earliest stories a hot-water seller watches his home, his business and his entire community being bulldozed to make way for the first modern road that ripped through Nanjing’s old city in 1927. This year Xinran arranged for me to meet a maker of paper lanterns who had the same thing happen to him during a more recent clearance round Nanjing’s Confucius temple.
像这样的地方消失的太快，来不及印到地图上。有人曾告诉我，他们离家多年后返乡，却发现他们从小长大的街道完全消失了，就像从未存在过一样。赛珍珠早期的故事讲到1927年，一个卖热水的小贩亲眼目睹他的家、他的生意和他的整个社区被铲倒，为了给南京老城区修建第一条现代化的道路让地方。今年欣然安排我间一个做纸灯笼的手工艺者，最近南京夫子庙周边改造时，他的身上也发生了同样的故事。
His family belonged to a fraternity of 200-300 lantern-makers, now forcibly dispersed. They sold their seasonal wares on stalls round the temple at New Year from the reign of the first Ming emperor in the 15th century until Chairman Mao very nearly stamped out the trade during the Cultural Revolution. Today, Mr Lu’s cramped workshop in another part of town is still crammed with dragons, lions, unicorns, frogs, fish, lobsters, rabbits, exquisite pink silk lotus blossoms and tiny paper water-lilies, all cut, coloured and pasted by hand. His masterpiece last year was a traditional nine-dragon setpiece: a six-foot-long painted coffer designed to be carried shoulder-high with exuberant illuminated paper dragons prancing or coiled round the sides in red, green, blue, yellow and orange.
他的家族隶属于一个200-300人的灯笼制造者协会，现在被强行解散了。从16世纪第一代明王朝时，他们就在夫子庙附件摆摊，卖一些季节性小商品，后来在文化大革命期间毛主席差的禁止这一行当。现在，陆先生局促的工作坊里塞满了各种图案的灯笼：龙、狮子、独角兽、蛙、鱼、龙虾、兔子，精致的粉色丝质莲花，小的纸质水百合，所有的剪裁、上色和粘贴都由手工完成。他去年的杰作是一个传统的九龙造型：一个6英寸长、可高举在肩上的涂色箱子，侧面是红、绿、蓝、黄和橙色的发光纸龙，或昂首阔步，或低头盘踞。
All of these are the product of hard labour in the sweltering heat of summer or in the freezing winter (in March, people were still wearing their padded coats indoors and out, in shops, restaurants, classrooms, even in their own homes). An order in hand for nine large lotus lanterns—a speciality invented by Mr Lu himself after close study of the originals on Nanjing’s Lotus Lake—could be met only by working late into the night for a week. The individual paper petals of the countless water-lilies designed to be floated every year on the lake had to be minutely and evenly scored, folded and crimped by hand, until two years ago when Mr Lu installed a simple, hand-operated drum-and-cable machine that can turn them out, two or three at a time, every four or five minutes. Even so each flower still needs to be individually assembled, tied and glued round a coloured nightlight.
所有这些，都是炎炎夏日和冰冷冬季（3月份，人们在室内、户外、商场、餐厅、教室、甚至自己家里还穿着厚厚的大衣），匠人们手工劳动的结晶。一个9只巨大莲花的手工灯笼的订单——陆先生在近距离研究南京莲花湖上的原型后的独创造型——要每天工作至深夜，用一周的时间才能完成。每年漂浮在湖面上水百合一片片的花瓣，需要精心细、平均的画线，手工摺叠。直到两年前，陆先生才安装了一种简单、手工操作的转轴电缆设备，可以每四五分钟、制作两三个花瓣。即便如此，每个花瓣仍需一个个手工组装、捆绑，粘到彩色的夜灯周围。
Mr Lu, who is 70, has been practising and refining his skills since he was ten. “Nowadays the young people can’t stick at it for even one day,” he complains. He and his wife, also 70, face an uncertain future with dwindling custom, no one to take over from them and employees increasingly reluctant to work all day every day for less than the state retirement pension. Far worse, from their point of view, is the indifference or contempt of the young for a rich, complex, ancient art of colour and form that goes back 500 years and takes a lifetime to master.
陆先生已经70岁了，他从10岁起就开始实践提炼自己的技术。“现在的年轻人一天也坚持不了，”他抱怨道。他太太也70岁了，传统在逐渐消失，他们面临的是不确定的未来。没人继承他们的手艺，工人们也越来越不情愿整天工作，收入比国家规定的退休金还少。在他们看来，更痛心的是年轻人对这种丰富、复杂而又古老的色彩与造型艺术、对这种可追溯到500年前、需花一生来学习的艺术形式的冷漠和蔑视。
Yet people like this are perhaps better off than the lost generation now in their 50s, men and women who grew up unskilled and uneducated when the schools were shut for ten years in the Cultural Revolution, forcing them to work as drivers, cleaners or manual labourers. The much younger women I met belong to what is generally agreed to be the luckiest of all the generations, born in the 1980s and 1990s to a time of prosperity and social mobility no longer so stringently constrained by political or practical exigencies of hunger and want. “They think differently,” one of their elders said to me.
但这些或许比现在50多岁的迷失的一代要好。这一代的男男女女成长的阶段，学校因文化大革命关闭了十年，他们没有技术，也没受过教育，只能从事司机、清洁工和手工劳动之类的工作。我遇到的更年轻的女性属于普遍认为最幸运的一代，他们出生于20世纪80、90年代，社会繁荣，社会的流动性也不再严格受制于政治或对事物、物质的迫切需求。“他们的想法不一样，”一位长辈跟我说。
Buck described a young Chinese university colleague with a postgraduate degree from America who flatly denied, during one of the many great famines, that such things could happen in China. She had seen desperation and misery at first hand in Chicago slums, but nothing Buck could say would persuade her to climb Nanjing city wall to see for herself refugees from the villages round about camping out without food or shelter.
赛珍珠曾提到，在一次大饥荒中，一个有美国研究生学位的中国大学的同事断然否认，中国会发生这样的事。赛珍珠曾亲眼见到芝加哥贫民窟里绝望悲惨的景象，但赛珍珠说什么也无法劝说她爬上南京的城墙，亲眼看看周边村子里的难民在城外扎营，没有事物，也没有遮挡物。
I found similar indignation from polite but insistent students. Didn’t I know how much China had changed, they asked. The modern world had made a clean break with the sad primitive outmoded countryside depicted in “The Good Earth”. Didn’t I realise how little that world had to do with them now? People everywhere wanted to know what I meant by the title of my biography, “Burying the Bones”. I explained that it came from a passage in Buck’s memoirs about how, as a small girl, she made secret grave mounds for tiny dismembered limbs or fragments of skull—the remains of newborn girls thrown out for the dogs to devour—that she found in the tall grass beyond her parents’ back gate.
我在那些彬彬有礼而又顽固的学生身上发现了相似的愤怒情绪。他们问，难到你不知道中国发生了多大的变化吗？现代化的世界已与《大地》中描述的悲伤原始落后的农村截然不同。难到我不知道那个世界与他们没有多少联系吗？各地的人们都想知道我的传记作品《埋骨》的名字有什么寓意。我解释，书名来源于赛珍珠传记中的一段。她偷偷的挖坟，埋葬那些被肢解的、小小的腿骨和头骨碎片—— 它们来自于那些被扔出来喂狗的新生女婴残留的尸体 —— 她在家后门外高高的草丛中发现的。
It seemed to me an image of amnesia, public and private. Heads always nodded in my audience when I said that all of us have bones to bury, things that are never talked about in families, things a whole nation might prefer to forget. People in China now dismiss their ugly memories just as people all over Europe dismissed the Holocaust for many years after the war. “Children can’t bear to remember what happened to their parents,” says Xinran, who recorded the life stories of men and women in their 70s and 80s in “China Witness” (2008), the only one of her books that remains banned today even in translation.
这在我看来是公开与隐蔽失忆的表现。我说我们都有自己的骨头要埋，有些东西我们从未在家庭里谈论过，总有些东西整个国家可能更倾向于遗忘，这时听众里总有人点头。现在的中国人摒弃他们丑恶的回忆，就像所有欧洲人多年仍不愿谈论战后的大屠杀一样。“孩子们无法忍受记住发生在他们父辈身上发生的事情。”欣然说，她在《见证中国》中记录了现在七八十岁的人的生活故事，这是她在中国唯一一本连英文版都受禁的书。
Buck insisted that our grandparents’ world belongs also to us. The past made us what we are now, and we forget it at our peril. At the end of my last talk at Nanjing university, a student pointed out that burying the bones has a further meaning in China, where the dead are traditionally returned to the earth from which they came so that they may find peace. He might have added that it is only when the past has been acknowledged and accepted that it can finally be laid to rest.
赛珍珠坚持说，我们祖辈的世界也属于我们。过去成就了我们的现在，忘记过去是很危险的。我在南京大学最后一次演讲结束时，一位学生指出，埋骨对中国有更深远的意义。传统意义上人死后被埋入黄土，他们的所来之处，这样他们可以找回安宁。他或许也补充，只有当过去被承认接受时，它才会最终安眠。
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相关译文来自无觅插件
发表于： 14:51:19
好长的文章啊。感谢译者。
发表于： 21:14:36
夏Summer：好长的文章啊。感谢译者。
呵呵，多谢，的确翻了很久
发表于： 08:26:10
小错粗一处：&在家庭十五中也没有话语权。&——应为“事务”吧？好翻译，瑕不掩瑜！
发表于： 09:39:50
iRainbow：小错粗一处：\&在家庭十五中也没有话语权。\&——应为“事务”吧？好翻译，瑕不掩瑜！
已修改，多谢~~
发表于： 12:30:53
谢谢MMaggie 的分享~
发表于： 16:35:08
谢谢分享。很好的文章。
我早就知道的，中国还有那样的地方、那样的人，并且一点也不少。不过大家都只能隐隐约约的提到，从来不敢正面直指。包括本文。
也许就像文中说的一样，敢于直指的文字已经被屏蔽了。
发表于： 20:57:49
自毛主席主席掌权以来 女性的地位便天翻地覆
发表于： 01:47:03
好长啊马克
发表于： 21:33:19
好文，支持楼主，辛苦了。
发表于： 11:14:06
翻译地非常粗糙
发表于： 11:30:26
【像一块巨大的磁铁，横扫这片土地的人们的生活】这句译文是什么意思？
原文：changes that .... have swept people off the land like a giant magnet
翻译菜菜鸟，喜欢语言及文学，希望提升自己的翻译水平。借用网上看到的一句话：遵道而行,但到半途须努力;慧心不远，欲登绝顶莫辞辛劳。
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