現代大學英語精讀 Paper Tiger 英漢版本.doc

Lesson 1 Paper TigersWhat happens to all the Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends?當考試結束時，所有的亞裔美國人都會有怎樣的表現呢？By Wesley Yang Published May 8,2011para 1 Sometimes Ill glimpse my reflection in a window and feel astonished by what I see. Jet-black hair. Slanted eyes. A pancake-flat surface of yellow-and-green-toned skin. An expression that is nearly reptilian in its impassivity. Ive contrived to think of this face as the equal in beauty to any other. But what I feel in these moments is its strangeness to me. Its my face. I cant disclaim it. But what does it have to do with me?有時我會從窗戶里瞥見我的倒影，我會對我所看到的感到驚訝。烏黑的頭發(fā)。斜眼。黃綠色膚色的薄煎餅狀的表面。一種近乎爬行動物般冷漠的表情。我想方設法地認為這張臉在美貌上與其他任何人都不相上下。但在這些時刻我感覺到的是它對我來說很奇怪。這是我的臉。我不能否認。但這和我有什么關系呢？Para 2 Millions of Americans must feel estranged from their own faces. But every self-estranged individual is estranged in his own way. I, for instance, am the child of Korean immigrants, but I do not speak my parents native tongue. I have never dated a Korean woman. I dont have a Korean friend. Though I am an immigrant, I have never wanted to strive like one. 一定有無數的美國人對他們自己的長相會有一種疏離感,但是其中每個人的原因卻又不盡相同。以我自己為例,我是韓國移民的后裔,但我卻不會講我父母的母語。我從未跟韓國女性約過會,甚至都沒有韓國朋友。雖然我是移民,但是我從未想過像移民那樣努力奮斗。para 3 You could say that I am a banana. But while I dont believe our roots necessarily define us, I do believe there are racially inflected assumptions wired into our neural circuitry. And although I am in most respects devoid of Asian characteristics, I do have an Asian face.你可能會說我是亞裔美國人。雖然我并不認為一個人的種族出身就會決定他的一切,但我相信對各個種族的成見已經深深地植入了我們的思想里。盡管在很多方面,我已經沒了什么亞洲人的特點，但我確實長著一張亞洲人的臉。para 4 Here is what I sometimes suspect my face signifies to other Americans: An invisible person, barely distinguishable from a mass of faces that resemble it. A conspicuous person standing apart from the crowd and yet devoid of any individuality. An icon of so much that the culture pretends to honor but that it in fact patronizes and exploits. Not just people “who are good at math” and play the violin, but a mass of stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots who simply do not matter, socially or culturally.我有時懷疑我的長相對于其他美國人來說代表著什么:像一個長著大眾臉的隱形人;一個站在人群里很顯眼但毫無個性的人;一個美國文化表面上十分尊重而實際上卻鄙視并利用的形象。我們不只是那些”數學學得很好”和會拉小提琴的人,而且是一大群憋屈得要死、壓迫得不行、被虐得快殘了的循規(guī)蹈矩的半機器人,對社會和文化根本就沒什么影響力。para 5 Ive always been of two minds about this sequence of stereotypes. 對于以上各種成見，我總在兩種想法間搖擺不定。On the one hand, it offends me greatly that anyone would think to apply them to me, or to anyone else, simply on the basis of facial characteristics. On the other hand, it also seems to me that there are a lot of Asian people to whom they apply. 一方面，僅僅因為相貌特征就將我或其他任何人與這些成見對號入座，這讓我覺得不舒服；但另一方面，我自己確實也發(fā)現了不少這樣的亞洲人。para 6 Let me summarize my feelings toward Asian values: Damn filial piety. Damn grade grubbing. Damn Ivy League mania. Damn deference to authority. Damn humility and hard work. Damn harmonious relations. Damn sacrificing for the future. Damn earnest, striving middle-class servility. 讓我總結一下我對亞洲價值觀的感受：該死的孝道。該死的好好學習。該死的常春藤聯盟狂熱。該死的服從權威。該死的謙遜努力。該死的和諧關系。該死的為未來犧牲。該死的認真努力的中產階級奴性。para 7 I understand the reasons Asian parents have raised a generation of children this way. Doctor, accountant, engineer: These are good jobs open to whoever works hard enough. What could be wrong with that pursuit? Asians graduate from college at a rate higher than any other ethnic group in America, including whites. They earn a higher median family income than any other ethnic group in America，including whites. This is a stage in a triumphal narrative, and it is a narrative that is much shorter than many remember. Two thirds of the roughly 14 million Asian-Americans are foreign-born. There were less than 39,000 people of Korean descent living in America in 1970, when my elder brother was born. There are around 1 million today. 我理解亞洲父母為何用這種手段撫養(yǎng)整整一代子女。醫(yī)生、律師、會計、工程師:無論是誰,只要足夠努力就能得到這些好的工作機會。難道追求這些好工作有錯嗎?亞裔美國人從大學畢業(yè)的比率比包括白人在內的美國其他種族人群都高。他們家庭收入中位數也比包括白人在內的美國其他種族人群高。這些只是亞裔取得成功故事中的一個縮影,這遠比很多人記憶中的成功故事要短得多。在約1400萬的亞裔美國人中,有三分之二的人不是在美國出生的。在1970年,美國只有不到39000名韓國后裔,而今天,韓國后裔達到了大約100萬人。para 8Asian American success is typically taken to ratify the American Dream and to prove that minorities can make it in this country without handouts. Still, an undercurrent of racial panic always accompanies the consideration of Asians, and all the more so as China becomes the destination for our industrial base and the banker controlling our burgeoning debt. But if the armies of Chinese factory workers who make our fast fashion and iPads terrify us, and if the collective mass of high-achieving Asian American students arouse an anxiety about the laxity of American parenting, what of the Asian American who obeyed everything his parents told him? Does this person really scare anyone?亞裔美國人的成功總被用來證實美國夢,證明那些少數族裔在這個國家依靠自己也能取得成功。但是,想到亞洲人時,總是伴隨著潛在的種族恐慌特別是在中國成了美國的工業(yè)基地和控制迅速增長的債務的債主的時候。但是,如果那些制造出快速時尚服飾和iPad的中國的勞動力大軍讓我們感到懼怕的話,如果眾多的優(yōu)秀亞裔學生讓美國父母為他們那寬松的教育方式感到焦急的話,那對于處處聽從父母安排的亞裔學生,人們又是怎么想的呢?這些亞裔學生真就那么令人懼怕嗎?para 9 Earlier this year, the publication of Amy Chuas Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother incited a collective airing out of many varieties of race-based hysteria. 今年早些時候,蔡美兒所著的虎媽戰(zhàn)歌的出版激起了各種帶有種族成見的歇斯底里說辭。But absent from the millions of words written in response to the book was any serious consideration of whether Asian Americans were in fact taking over this country. If it is true that Asian-Americans are dominating in the elite high schools and universities, is it also true that Asian-Americans are dominating in the real world? My strong suspicion was that this was not so, and that the reasons would not be hard to find. If we are a collective juggernaut that inspires such awe and fear, why does it seem that so many Asians are so readily perceived to be ,as I myself have felt most of my life, the products of a timid culture, easily pushed around by more assertive people, and thus basically invisible? 但是,在眾多對該書的評論之中,沒有任何一條認真地考慮過“亞裔美國人是否曾經真的主導過這個國家”的問題。假設亞裔學生集體在名牌高中和大學的成績和表現確實更好,那么亞裔美國人是否在現實世界中獲得了同樣的主導地位?我懷疑結果并非如此,而其原因也不難發(fā)現。我經常感到,如果我們真像描繪的那樣是一個令人敬畏懼怕的集體,那為什么還有那么多亞裔經常被認為是一種過于謹小慎微文化的產物,很容易被那些更加自信的人所左右。從根本上來說,這不就是隱形人嗎?para 10 A few months ago, I received an e-mail from a young man named Jefferson Mao, who after attending Stuyvesant High School had recently graduated from the University of Chicago. He wanted my advice about “ being an Asian writer”. This is how he described himself:” I got good grades and I love literature and I want to be a writer and an intellectual; at the same time , Im the first person in my family to go to college, my parents dont speak English very well, and we dont own the apartment in Flushing that we live in. I mean, Im proud of my parents and my neighborhood and what I perceive to be my artistic potential or whatever, but sometimes I feel like Im jumping the gun a generation or two too early.”幾個月前,一個名叫杰弗遜毛的年輕人給我發(fā)了一封電子郵件。他曾就讀于史岱文森高中,現已從芝加哥大學畢業(yè)。他向我征求建議,想要成為一名亞裔作家。他是這么描述自己的:“我成績優(yōu)異,熱愛文學并且想成為一名作家和知識分子;另外,我是家里的第一個大學生,父母英語說得不好,我們至今都沒能買下我們在法拉盛租住的公寓。我的意思是,我為自己的父母和社區(qū)感到自豪,我認為自己有藝術等方面的潛能,但有時候,我感覺自己作為第一代移民家庭的兒子就有這種想法,是不是太過心急了?也許再等一兩代才比較合適。”PARA 11 One bright , cold Sunday afternoon, I ride the 7 train to its last stop in Flushing, where the storefront signs are all written in Chinese and the sidewalks are a slow-moving river of impassive faces. Mao is waiting for me at the entrance of the Main Street subway station, and together we walk to a nearby Vietnamese restaurant. 一個晴朗而寒冷的星期日下午,我乘坐地鐵7號線到法拉盛的最后一站。那里所有的店面都掛著中文招牌,人行道上緩慢走動的人流帶著一張張毫無表情的面孔。毛在緬街地鐵站的入口處等著我,我們一起去了附近的一家越南菜館。PARA 12 Mao has a round face with eyes behind rectangular wire-frame glasses. Since graduating , he has been living with his parents, who emigrated from China when Mao was eight years old. His mother is a manicurist; his father is a physical therapists aide. Lately, Mao has been making the familiar hour-and-a-half ride from Flushing to downtown Manhattan to tutor a white Stuyvesant freshman. 毛,圓臉,戴著一副長方形金屬框眼鏡。畢業(yè)后,他和父母住在一起。他們全家在毛八歲的時候從中國移民到了美國。母親是一名美甲師,父親是助理理療師。最近,毛經常搭乘從法拉盛到曼哈頓市區(qū)這段再熟悉不過的一個半小時的地鐵,為一名史岱文森高中一年級白人學生輔導功課。PARA 13 Entrance to Stuyvesant, one of the most competitive public high schools in the country, is determined solely by performance on a test: 史岱文森高中是美國競爭最激烈的公立高中之一,錄取完全依據考試成績:the top 3.7 percent of all New York City students who take the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test hoping to go to Stuyvesant are accepted. There are no set-asides fort the underprivileged or, conversely, for alumni or other privileged groups. There is no formula to encourage “diversity” or any nebulous concept of “well-roundedness” or “character”. Here we have something like pure meritocracy. This is what it looks like: Asian Americans, who make up 12.6 percent of New York City, make up 72 percent of the high school. 在參加特殊高中入學考試的所有紐約市學生中,只有成績排名在前3.7%的考生才能被錄取。學校不會留出名額給貧困學生,另一方面,也不會對校友及特權群體加以照顧。學校的招生政策并不鼓勵“多元化”或者“全面發(fā)展”“個性”這樣模糊不清的觀念。學校純粹以成績決定一切。其結果就是亞裔人口在紐約市的比例為12.6%,而在這所高中卻占到了72%。PARA 14 This year, 569 Asian Americans scored high enough to earn a slot at Stuyvesant, along with 179 whites, 13 Hispanics, and 12 blacks. Such dramatic overrepresentation, and what it may be read to imply about the intelligence of different groups of New Yorkers, has a way of making people uneasy. But intrinsic intelligence, of course, is precisely what Asians dont believe in. They believe and have proved that the constant practice of test taking will improve the scores of whoever commits to it. 今年有569名亞裔學生憑借高分被史岱文森高中錄取，一起被錄取的還有179名白人、13名拉美裔和12名黑人。如此夸張的比例以及可能會對紐約不同種族智力水平的暗示，總會引起人們的不安。但是，亞裔恰恰并不相信天賦。他們相信，并已通過實踐證明，任何人只要依靠不斷的考試練習就能提高分數。All throughout Flushing, as well as in Bayside, one can find “cram schools”, or storefront academies, that drill students in test preparation after school, on weekends, and during summer break. “Learning math is not about learning math,” an instructor at one called Ivy Prep was quoted in The New York Times as saying. “Its about weightlifting. You are pumping the iron of math.” Mao puts it more specifically: “You learn quite simply to nail any standardized test you take.”在法拉盛以及貝賽德，到處都可以找到“填鴨學校”或是各種小規(guī)模的補習學校，利用放學后、周末和暑假時間培訓學生的應試技巧。引用常春藤預備學校的一名老師接受紐約時報采訪時所說的一句話：“學習數學不只是學習數學這么簡單，它是在舉重。你在鍛煉著你的數學二頭肌。”毛更加簡明扼要地說：“學習就是為了搞定你要參加的任何標準化考試?！盤ARA 15 And so there is an additional concern accompanying the rise of the Tiger Children, one focused more on the narrowness of the educational experience a non-Asian child might receive in the company of fanatically pre-professional Asian students. Jenny Tsai, a student who was elected president of her class at the equally competitive New York public school Hunter College High School, remembers frequently hearing that “the school was becoming too Asian, that they would be the downfall of our school.” A couple of years ago, she revisited this issue in her senior thesis at Harvard, where she interviewed graduates of elite public schools and found that the white students regarded the Asian students with wariness.因此伴隨著虎子們呈現上升的趨勢,人們也在擔心,和這些狂熱的早早便抱有專業(yè)意向的亞裔孩子在一起,非亞裔孩子的教育經歷會變得更加狹隘。詹尼蔡是一所同樣競爭激烈的紐約公立學校享特學院附屬中學的學生,曾被選為班長,她清楚地記得,時常會聽到有人說“學校里的亞裔太多了,他們會搞垮學?！?。 幾年前,她在哈佛的畢業(yè)論文中再次探討了這個問題,她采訪了公立精英學校的畢業(yè)生,發(fā)現白人學生會以戒備的心態(tài)來看亞裔學生。In 2005, The Wall Street Journal reported on “white flight” from a high school in Cupertino, California, that began soon after the children of Asian software engineers had made the place so brutally competitive that a B average could place you in the bottom third of the class.2005年,華爾街日報報道了加州庫珀蒂諾的一所高中的白人學生逃離的現象,事情起因于亞裔軟件工程師的子女使得這所學校里的競爭變得異常殘酷，即使平均成績?yōu)锽,也只能排在班級后三名。PARA 16 Colleges have a way of correcting for this imbalance: The Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade has calculated that an Asian applicant must, in practice, score 140 points higher on the SAT than a comparable white applicant to have the same chance of admission. This is obviously unfair to the many qualified Asian individuals who are punished for the success of others with similar faces. 大學自有它的辦法來調整這種失衡: 據普林斯頓大學社會學家托馬斯埃斯彭沙德的計算,在實際情況中,一個亞裔申請者,他的SAT成績必須比同他實力相當的白人申請者高出140分,才會獲得同樣的錄取機會,僅僅因為自己和這些成功人士有著同樣的亞裔面孔而受到懲罰,這對于眾多符合資格的亞裔學生來說,顯然是不公平的。PARA 17 You could frame it as a simple issue of equality and press for race-blind quantitative admissions standards. In 2006, a decade after California passed a voter initiative outlawing any racial engineering at the public universities, Asians composed 46 percent of UC Berkeleys entering class; one could imagine a similar demographic reshuffling in the Ivy League, where Asian Americans currently make up about 17 percent of undergraduates. But the Ivies, as we all know, have their own private institutional interests at stake in their admissions choices, including some that are arguably defensible. Who can seriously claim that a Harvard University that was 72 percent Asian would deliver the same grooming for elite status its students had gone there to receive?你可以認為問題僅僅是因為不平等產生的，并迫切要求推行不分種族的量化招生標準。2006年，即加州通過選民提議的廢除公立大學中任何關于種族工程的規(guī)定10年后，加州大學伯克利分校的新升班中，亞洲學生占了46%。可見，聯盟中的學生構成比例很可能會發(fā)生類似的變化，而目前這個群體在聯盟本科生的占比只有17%。然而眾所周知，常春藤聯盟在招生時會考慮自身的利益需求，而他們的一些政策也無可厚非。畢竟誰敢保證說，擁有72%亞裔學生的哈佛大學仍然能夠為那些想來哈佛鍍金的學子提供含金量不變的精英桂冠。PARA 18 Somewhere near the middle of his time at Stuyvesant, a vague sense of discontent started to emerge within Mao. He had always felt himself a part of a mob of “nameless, faceless Asian kids,” who were “l(fā)ike a part of the dcor of the place.” He had been content to keep his head down and work toward the goal shared by everyone at Stuyvesant: Harvard. But around the beginning of his senior year, he began to wonder whether this march toward academic success was the only, or best, path.當毛在史岱文森待了大約一半日子時,他的心中開始隱約產生不滿。他始終覺得自己是那一大群“沒有姓名、沒有個性的亞洲孩子”中的一分子,就像是“這地方的一個裝飾品”。他一直心甘情愿地埋頭苦讀,向著當時史岱文森所有學生的目標哈佛努力。然而升上高二沒多久,他就開始懷疑,這條通往學業(yè)成功的征途,是否是唯一的,或者最好的道路。PARA 19 “You cant help but feel like there must be another way”, he explains over a bowl of pho. “Its like, were being pitted against each other while there are kids out there in the Midwest who can do way less work and be in a garage band or something and if theyre decently intelligent and work decently hard in school. “你總會忍不住覺得一定還有另外一條路,”他邊吃著面前的一碗越南河粉,邊解釋道。 “我們這些亞裔孩子在互相較著勁,而中西部的孩子們需要做的功課則少得多,可以參加車庫樂隊之類的活動,如果這些人本身相當聰明,在學校里學習也很用功的話”PARA 20 Mao began to study the racially inflected social hierarchies at Stuyvesant, where, in a survey undertaken by the student newspaper this year, slightly more than half of the respondents reported that their friends came from within their own ethnic group. His attention focused on the mostly white group whose members seemed able to manage the crushing workload while still remaining socially active. “The general gist of most high school movies is that the pretty cheerleader gets with the big dumb jock, and the nerd is left to bide his time in loneliness. But at some point in the future,” he says, “the nerd is going to rule the world, and the dumb jock is going to work in a carwash”.毛開始研究起史岱文森高中內部受種族影響的社會等級制度。史岱文森學生報今年做了一項校內調查,過半受調查者都聲稱他們的朋友和自己來自同一民族。他尤其關注大多數白人團體,這些人似乎可以在應付繁忙學業(yè)的同時,仍然堅持著活躍的社交活動?！按蠖鄶蹈咧猩娪暗墓费楣?jié)是漂亮的拉拉隊隊長跟了四肢發(fā)達、頭腦簡單的肌肉男,而書呆子則被晾在一邊,寂寞地獨自打發(fā)時日,”他說,“但在將來的某一天,這個書呆子將會統治世界,而肌肉男卻只能在洗車場工作。”PARA 21 “At Stuy , its completely different: If you looked at the pinnacle, the girls and the guys are not only good-looking and socially affable, they also get the best grades and star in the school plays and win election to student government. It all converges at the top. Its like training for high society. It was jarring for us Chinese kids. You got the sense that you had to study hard, but it wasnt enough.”但是在史岱文森,情況完全不同:如果你看一下尖子生隊伍,那些男生女生絕不僅僅是相貌出眾、八面玲瓏,他們獲得優(yōu)異的成績是校園劇的明星,并且在學生會選舉拔得頭籌。所有這些榮譽都集聚在頂端,就好像在為進入上流社會進行訓練。這讓我們這些中國孩子很受震動,你會覺得努力學習很必要,但光這樣是不夠的。PARA 22 Mao was becoming clued in to the fact that there was another hierarchy behind the official one that explained why others were getting what he never had“a high-school sweetheart” figured prominently on this listand that this mysterious hierarchy was going to determine what happened to him in life. “You realize there are things you really dont understand about courtship or just acting in a certain way. Things that somehow come naturally to people who go to school in the suburbs and have parents who are culturally assimilated.” 毛漸漸看清了一個事實,那就是在公認的等級背后,還有另外一個等級,可以解釋為什么別人能得到他從未得到過的那些東西“一個高中生美少女”醒目地位列其中,而這個神秘的等級將會決定他的生活?！澳銜庾R到自己在有些事情上確實懂得不多,比如追求女生,或僅僅按照特定路數行動。但這些事情對于某些人來說很自然,他們在郊區(qū)上學,父母都已融入當地文化。”I pressed him for specifics, and he mentioned that he had visited his white girlfriends parents house the past Christmas, where the family had “sat around cooking together and playing Scrabble .” This ordinary vision of suburban American domesticity lingered with Mao: Here, at last, was the setting in which all that implicit knowledge “about social norms and propriety” had been transmitted. There was no cram school that taught these lessons.我要求他舉個具體的例子，于是他提起曾在圣誕節(jié)后去自己白人女友家造訪的經歷?！八齻內胰藝谝黄鹱霾耍嫫醋钟螒?。”這一幕平常的美國郊區(qū)人家生活場景久久縈繞在毛的腦際；至少，就是在這里，所有“關于社會規(guī)范和禮儀”的那些只可意會無法言傳的知識被代代相傳。而這些東西沒有哪個補習班會教給你。PARA 23 Before having heard from Mao, I had considered myself at worst lightly singed by the last embers of Asian alienation. Indeed, given all the incredibly hip Asian artists and fashion designers and so forth you can find in New York, it seemed that this feeling was destined to die out altogether. And yet here it was in a New Yorker more than a dozen years my junior. While it may be true that sections of the Asian Americans world are devoid of alienation, there are large swaths where it is as alive as it has ever been. 在受到毛的郵件之前，我自己就曾覺得，我最多不過是被亞裔疏離感的最后余燼灼傷一點點而已。的確，如果考慮到亞洲藝術家和時裝設計師等等此類你能在紐約找到的成功亞裔人士令人難以置信的受追捧程度，似乎這種感覺將逐漸消逝殆盡。然而這種疏離感現在卻出現在一個比我小十幾歲的紐約人身上?；蛟S說有一部分亞裔美國人已經沒有了疏離感，這可能是真的，可是在很大一部分亞裔身上，疏離感仍然存在并鮮活如昔。PARA 24 A few weeks after we meet, Mao puts me in touch with Daniel Chu, his close friend from Stuyvesant. Chu graduated from Williams College last ye