作家李翊云：放逐中文，用英語講述自我的故事

《親愛的朋友，寫給生活中的你》(Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life)

By Yiyun Li 李翊云 著

208 pp. Random House. $27. 208頁 蘭登書屋(Random House) 27美元

“Why write autobiographically?” the Chinese-American author Yiyun Li asks in this new collection of essays, “Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life,” the closest thing to an autobiography she has ever published. It is a question Li takes seriously and explores tirelessly, not least because she professes an unease with the assertion of the pronoun “I.” It is a “melodramatic” word, Li writes. “The moment that I enters my narrative my confidence crumbles.” This a remarkable statement in a volume that is essentially memoir.

“為什么寫自傳體作品?”華裔美籍作家李翊云在其新文集《親愛的朋友，寫給生活中的你》中問道——該書是她出版過的作品中最接近自傳的一部。李翊云對(duì)上述問題嚴(yán)陣以待，不知疲倦地進(jìn)行探討，在很大程度上是因?yàn)檎f出“我”這個(gè)人稱代詞時(shí)她會(huì)感到不安。它是一個(gè)“具有強(qiáng)烈情感色彩”的詞，李翊云寫道。“進(jìn)入我的敘事的那一刻，我的自信便會(huì)土崩瓦解，”在一本基本堪稱回憶錄的作品里，這是一個(gè)頗為不同尋常的聲明。

Such diffidence is difficult to detect in her fiction, where the first person has been deployed to devastating effect, albeit infrequently. But then the narrative “I” of a short story is perhaps best seen as a means of self-effacement, and it’s notable that Li’s remarkable fiction — two elegant novels and two story collections — is all assiduously unautobiographical, from the forgotten granny living in China to the gay immigrant seeking asylum in the United States.

世人很難透過她的虛構(gòu)作品發(fā)現(xiàn)這種膽怯——她在其中對(duì)第一人稱的運(yùn)用堪稱絕妙，盡管次數(shù)很少。但出現(xiàn)在短篇小說中的敘事性的“我”，或許最好被視為一種隱匿自我的手段;而且值得一提的是，李翊云那些了不起的虛構(gòu)作品——兩本優(yōu)美的長篇小說和兩本短篇小說集——全都嚴(yán)格地與其自身經(jīng)歷無關(guān)，不論是描繪住在中國的被遺忘的老奶奶，還是描繪在美國尋求庇護(hù)的同性戀移民時(shí)都是如此。

Yet the particulars of Li’s life are scarcely less interesting than those of her characters. Li was born in Beijing, four years before the end of Mao’s fatally destructive Cultural Revolution. The daughter of a nuclear physicist and schoolteacher, she grew up with more access to literature, both foreign and Chinese, than most children of her generation. In 1996, after graduating from college and serving a year in the army, Li arrived in Iowa to study immunology, armed with “an anthropologist’s fascination with America.” It took one part-time writing class for Li to change her professional course irrevocably, but the decision is threaded through with a troubled and deeply equivocal relationship with the self: “When I gave up science, I had a blind confidence that in writing I could will myself into a nonentity.”

不過，李翊云自身生活經(jīng)歷的精彩程度并不比她筆下的人物遜色。由毛澤東發(fā)起、具有致命破壞力的文化大革命再過四年才會(huì)終結(jié)的時(shí)候，李翊云在北京出生。作為一名核物理學(xué)家和一名教師的女兒，她在成長過程中可以比那個(gè)年代的大多數(shù)孩子更多地接觸到中外文學(xué)。從大學(xué)畢業(yè)并在軍中服役一年后，李翊云于1996年到愛荷華州學(xué)習(xí)免疫學(xué)，她的內(nèi)心當(dāng)時(shí)充滿“人類學(xué)家那種對(duì)美國的迷戀”。業(yè)余時(shí)間參加的一個(gè)寫作班不可逆轉(zhuǎn)地改變了她的職業(yè)軌跡，但和自我的那種令人困擾而又極為模糊的關(guān)系貫穿著她做決定的過程。“放棄科學(xué)的時(shí)候，我有一種盲目的自信：通過寫作，我可以讓自我消弭。”

Li’s transformation into a writer — and her striking success (she is the winner of a MacArthur “genius” grant, among other prestigious awards) — is nothing short of astonishing. But most of the essays here tend to center on the personal unraveling that accompanied this metamorphosis: two hospitalizations following suicide attempts and time spent at a recovery program “for those whose lives have fallen apart.”

李翊云轉(zhuǎn)型為作家——并取得了不起的成功(她拿過多項(xiàng)大獎(jiǎng)，其中包括麥克阿瑟“天才”獎(jiǎng))——是一件令人極為驚訝的事情。但這里的大多數(shù)文章都把重心放在了與這種蛻變相伴而生的崩潰經(jīng)歷上：兩度在企圖自殺后入院治療，還花時(shí)間參加了一個(gè)“面向其生活已支離破碎的那些人”的恢復(fù)項(xiàng)目。

For someone who says that “pain was my private matter” and considers “invisibility” a “luxury,” writing about these experiences cannot have been easy — Li is not the type of memoirist to dwell on blow-by-blow descriptions of her life. There are episodic mentions of a childhood lived in the vortex of a mother’s suffocating love, a perennial reckoning with the fear of attachment, a haunting nihilism most likely fostered by a fatalistic father, and fondly remembered encounters with William Trevor, the late, great Irish short story writer — himself a master of self-effacement — who became a mentor and friend.

對(duì)一個(gè)宣稱“痛苦是我的私事”、認(rèn)為“隱形”是一種“奢侈”的人來說，書寫這些經(jīng)歷肯定不會(huì)輕松——李翊云不是那種喜歡詳盡描繪自己的生活的回憶錄作者。她偶爾會(huì)提及被母親那令人窒息的愛包裹的童年，面對(duì)依戀恐懼的漫長時(shí)光，以及一種極有可能是在秉持宿命論的父親影響下滋生出來的揮之不去的虛無主義;并動(dòng)情地回憶了與偉大的愛爾蘭已故短篇小說家威廉·特里弗(William Trevor)的交往——特里弗本人便是隱匿自我的大師，成了她的良師益友。

Li can be an elusive writer, and her meditation on the teleology of pain and memory sometimes reads like a series of aphoristic koans (“Impatience is an impulse to alter or impose”; “The more faded one becomes, the more easily one loves”). Such statements stop short of revelation, except insofar as they reveal the contours of a capacious, searching mind. The reader never doubts that Li is an incisive thinker, but her tendency to sublimate her own emotions in the correspondence between others, be it Turgenev to Henry James or Chekhov to Tchaikovsky, occasionally puts one in mind of a devout nun’s scrupulous study of her prayer book.

李翊云可能是一位令人難以捉摸的作家，有時(shí)候，她對(duì)關(guān)于痛苦與記憶的目的性的思考讀起來就像是一系列格言(“不耐煩是做出改變或強(qiáng)加于人的沖動(dòng)”;“一個(gè)人越是老去，就越是容易愛”)。這樣的話或許不至于令人醍醐灌頂，有時(shí)候卻能讓我們一窺作者那寬廣而不斷探索的心靈。讀者絕不會(huì)對(duì)李翊云是一位敏銳的思想者有所懷疑，但她傾向于借助他人之間的往來書柬——不論是屠格涅夫?qū)懡o亨利·詹姆斯(Henry James)的，還是契科夫?qū)懡o柴可夫斯基的——來升華自己的情感，有時(shí)讓人覺得如同一個(gè)虔誠的修女正仔細(xì)鉆研經(jīng)書。

The most memorable essay in the collection is not the most personal one but rather recounts Li’s relationship to English, which she calls her “private language.” “Over the years my brain has banished Chinese,” she writes. “To be orphaned from my native language felt, and still feels, a crucial decision.” The reader feels the weight of this decision — and senses the skein of memories it seeks to bury. When Li compares her abandonment of Chinese to “a kind of suicide,” the statement is quietly shocking, the feeling of muted heartbreak nearly unbearable.

這本文集中最令人難忘的并不是最具私人色彩的文章，而是描述李翊云與她稱之為“私人語言”的英語之間關(guān)系的文字。“多年來，我的大腦已經(jīng)放逐了中文，”她寫道。“選擇做失去母語庇護(hù)的孤兒，在當(dāng)時(shí)是一個(gè)重大的決定，現(xiàn)在仍然是。”讀者能感覺到這一決定的分量——感覺到它尋求埋葬的記憶的亂麻。當(dāng)李翊云把她拋棄中文的決定比作“一種自殺”的時(shí)候，這種說法相當(dāng)令人震撼，感覺就像無聲的心碎，幾近無法承受。

Immeasurable loss hovers just behind these pages, but in sacrificing her first tongue, Li tenuously acquires in her adopted one some legible form of “self.” English, Li’s first language in writing, is the only one in which she could have told this story, one in which Li says she feels, finally, “invisible but not estranged.”

這些文字背后隱藏著不可估量的痛失，但通過犧牲其母語，李翊云以微妙的方式從她后來習(xí)得的語言中塑造了某種可讀形式的“自我”。英語是李翊云寫作時(shí)的第一語言，也是她唯一可以用來講述這個(gè)故事的語言，李翊云在故事中說，她終于有了“被忽略但卻未被疏遠(yuǎn)”之感。