双语·当呼吸化为空气 晚上妈妈经常默默流泪

晚上，妈妈经常默默流泪，独自在床上啜泣。她害怕这里落后的教育条件会让她的孩子变成“废人”，于是不知从哪里找来了“大学学前书单”。她在印度主修的是生理学，二十三岁就结了婚，来到这个陌生的国家，生活的重心完全转移到三个孩子身上，所以书单上很多书她自己也没读过。但她绝不会让自己的孩子输在这上面。十岁的时候，她就让我读《1984》，里面关于性的描写让我震惊不已，然而，也是这样点点滴滴的潜移默化，让我深深地爱上了语言文字。
At night, she broke into tears, sobbing alone in her bed. My mother, afraid the impoverished school system would hobble her children, acquired, from somewhere, a “college prep reading list.” Trained in India to be a physiologist, married at twenty-three, and preoccupied with raising three kids in a country that was not her own, she had not read many of the books on the list herself. But she would make sure her kids were not deprived. She made me read 1984 when I was ten years old; I was scandalized by the sex, but it also instilled in me a deep love of, and care for, language.

《1984》之后，我们按照书单，非常系统地读了无数作家的作品：《基督山伯爵》、埃德加·爱伦·坡的作品、《鲁滨孙漂流记》、《艾凡赫》、果戈理的戏剧、《最后的莫希干人》、狄更斯、马克·吐温、简·奥斯丁、《水手比利·巴德》……十二岁的时候，我开始自己挑书看了。哥哥苏曼又给我寄来大学里读的书：《君主论》、《堂·吉诃德》、《老实人》、《亚瑟之死》、《贝奥武甫》以及梭罗、萨特、加缪等人的作品，等等。有的印象不深，有的则对我产生了很大的影响。《美丽新世界》奠定了我初期的道德哲学，还成为我申请大学时论述文的主题，我在文中提出，快乐幸福并非生命的意义。在必经的青春期烦恼中，《哈姆雷特》无数次陪伴着我走过。《致羞涩的情人》和其他浪漫的诗歌让我和我的朋友在整个高中生涯经历了不少“快乐的倒霉事”。比如，晚上，我们经常偷偷溜出去，在啦啦队队长的窗户下面唱《美国派》。（我们理直气壮地认为，她爸爸是当地一名牧师，不大可能贸然开枪。）搞完这种深夜恶作剧回去的时候，要是被抓住了，我忧心忡忡的母亲就会详细地盘问我是否吸毒，把每种青少年可能吸食的毒品都细细数过一遍。但她从未意识到，于我而言，毒品没有吸引力，最最令人上瘾的，是上周她递给我的那套浪漫诗歌选集。书籍成为我最形影不离的密友，就像精心制作的镜头，为我展开新世界的大好风景。
Endless books and authors followed, as we worked our way methodically down the list: The Count of Monte Cristo, Edgar Allan Poe, Robinson Crusoe, Ivanhoe, Gogol, The Last of the Mohicans, Dickens, Twain, Austen, Billy Budd. . . By the time I was twelve, I was picking them out myself, and my brother Suman was sending me the books he had read in college: The Prince, Don Quixote, Candide, Le Morte D’Arthur, Beowulf, Thoreau, Sartre, Camus. Some left more of a mark than others. Brave New World founded my nascent moral philosophy and became the subject of my college admissions essay, in which I argued that happiness was not the point of life. Hamlet bore me a thousand times through the usual adolescent crises.“To His Coy Mistress” and other romantic poems led me and my friends on various joyful misadventures throughout high school—we often sneaked out at night to, for example, sing “American Pie”beneath the window of the captain of the cheerleading team. (Her father was a local minister and so, we reasoned, less likely to shoot.)After I was caught returning at dawn from one such late-night escapade, my worried mother thoroughly interrogated me regarding every drug teenagers take, never suspecting that the most intoxicating thing I’d experienced, by far, was the volume of romantic poetry she’d handed me the previous week. Books became my closest confidants, finely ground lenses providing new views of the world.

为了让自己的孩子都受到良好的教育，妈妈开车带我们来到位于金曼北边将近两百公里，也是离金曼最近的大城市拉斯维加斯，我们在那里进行了“学业能力倾向初步测验”（PSAT）、“学术能力评估测试”（SAT）和“大学入学考试”（ACT）。她加入学校董事会，重整了教师队伍，要求课程设置加入大学预修课程。她在这方面实在太出色了，视改革金曼教育系统为己任，并且付诸实践。突然间，我们那所高中就感觉视野开阔了，不再局限于那两道山脊之间，而是翻山越岭，向外探索。
In her quest to see that her children were educated, my mom drove us more than a hundred miles north, to the nearest big city, Las Vegas, so we could take our PSATs, SATs, and ACTs. She joined the school board, rallied teachers, and demanded that AP classes be added to the curriculum. She was a phenom: she took it upon herself to transform the Kingman school system, and she did. Suddenly there was a feeling in our high school that the two mountain ranges that bounded the town no longer defined the horizon: it was what lay beyond them.