作家李翊云：放逐中文，用英语讲述自我的故事

《亲爱的朋友，写给生活中的你》(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页 兰登书屋(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.

“为什么写自传体作品?”华裔美籍作家李翊云在其新文集《亲爱的朋友，写给生活中的你》中问道——该书是她出版过的作品中最接近自传的一部。李翊云对上述问题严阵以待，不知疲倦地进行探讨，在很大程度上是因为说出“我”这个人称代词时她会感到不安。它是一个“具有强烈情感色彩”的词，李翊云写道。“进入我的叙事的那一刻，我的自信便会土崩瓦解，”在一本基本堪称回忆录的作品里，这是一个颇为不同寻常的声明。

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.

世人很难透过她的虚构作品发现这种胆怯——她在其中对第一人称的运用堪称绝妙，尽管次数很少。但出现在短篇小说中的叙事性的“我”，或许最好被视为一种隐匿自我的手段;而且值得一提的是，李翊云那些了不起的虚构作品——两本优美的长篇小说和两本短篇小说集——全都严格地与其自身经历无关，不论是描绘住在中国的被遗忘的老奶奶，还是描绘在美国寻求庇护的同性恋移民时都是如此。

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.”

不过，李翊云自身生活经历的精彩程度并不比她笔下的人物逊色。由毛泽东发起、具有致命破坏力的文化大革命再过四年才会终结的时候，李翊云在北京出生。作为一名核物理学家和一名教师的女儿，她在成长过程中可以比那个年代的大多数孩子更多地接触到中外文学。从大学毕业并在军中服役一年后，李翊云于1996年到爱荷华州学习免疫学，她的内心当时充满“人类学家那种对美国的迷恋”。业余时间参加的一个写作班不可逆转地改变了她的职业轨迹，但和自我的那种令人困扰而又极为模糊的关系贯穿着她做决定的过程。“放弃科学的时候，我有一种盲目的自信：通过写作，我可以让自我消弭。”

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.”

李翊云转型为作家——并取得了不起的成功(她拿过多项大奖，其中包括麦克阿瑟“天才”奖)——是一件令人极为惊讶的事情。但这里的大多数文章都把重心放在了与这种蜕变相伴而生的崩溃经历上：两度在企图自杀后入院治疗，还花时间参加了一个“面向其生活已支离破碎的那些人”的恢复项目。

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.

对一个宣称“痛苦是我的私事”、认为“隐形”是一种“奢侈”的人来说，书写这些经历肯定不会轻松——李翊云不是那种喜欢详尽描绘自己的生活的回忆录作者。她偶尔会提及被母亲那令人窒息的爱包裹的童年，面对依恋恐惧的漫长时光，以及一种极有可能是在秉持宿命论的父亲影响下滋生出来的挥之不去的虚无主义;并动情地回忆了与伟大的爱尔兰已故短篇小说家威廉·特里弗(William Trevor)的交往——特里弗本人便是隐匿自我的大师，成了她的良师益友。

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难以捉摸的作家，有时候，她对关于痛苦与记忆的目的性的思考读起来就像是一系列格言(“不耐烦是做出改变或强加于人的冲动”;“一个人越是老去，就越是容易爱”)。这样的话或许不至于令人醍醐灌顶，有时候却能让我们一窥作者那宽广而不断探索的心灵。读者绝不会对李翊云是一位敏锐的思想者有所怀疑，但她倾向于借助他人之间的往来书柬——不论是屠格涅夫写给亨利·詹姆斯(Henry James)的，还是契科夫写给柴可夫斯基的——来升华自己的情感，有时让人觉得如同一个虔诚的修女正仔细钻研经书。

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.

这本文集中最令人难忘的并不是最具私人色彩的文章，而是描述李翊云与她称之为“私人语言”的英语之间关系的文字。“多年来，我的大脑已经放逐了中文，”她写道。“选择做失去母语庇护的孤儿，在当时是一个重大的决定，现在仍然是。”读者能感觉到这一决定的分量——感觉到它寻求埋葬的记忆的乱麻。当李翊云把她抛弃中文的决定比作“一种自杀”的时候，这种说法相当令人震撼，感觉就像无声的心碎，几近无法承受。

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.”

这些文字背后隐藏着不可估量的痛失，但通过牺牲其母语，李翊云以微妙的方式从她后来习得的语言中塑造了某种可读形式的“自我”。英语是李翊云写作时的第一语言，也是她唯一可以用来讲述这个故事的语言，李翊云在故事中说，她终于有了“被忽略但却未被疏远”之感。