递交于04-30-2008 12:25
“这篇游记与《更衣记》很相似，既有英文稿，也有中文稿，两稿的内容还不完全
一样。”A Return to the Frontier
by Eileen Chang
When I got off the plane in Taipei on my way to Hong Kong, I did not
expect to see anyone I knew. I had asked the Chus not to meet me,
knowing they were busy just then. But it was possible that they would
get somebody else to come in their stead, so I was not surprised when
an efficient-looking man in neat western clothes approached me.“You
are Mrs. Richard Nixon?”He said in English.
I had seen many photographs of the blonde Mrs. Nixon and never
imagined I resembled her. Besides, he should be able to tell a fellow
Chinese even behind her dark glasses. But with a woman's inability to
disbelieve a compliment altogether, no matter how flagrantly untrue, I
remembered that she was thin, which I undoubtedly was. Then there was
those glasses.“No, I am sorry,”I said, and he walked away to search
among the other passengers.
It struck me as a little odd that Mrs. Nixon should come to Formosa,
even if everybody is visiting the Orient just now. Anyhow there must
have been some mix-up, as there was only this one embassy employee to
greet her.
“Did you know Mrs. Nixon is coming today? ”I asked my friends Mr. And
Mrs. Chu, who had turned up after all.
“No, we haven't heard, ”Mr. Chu said. I told them about the man who
mistook me for her and what a joke that was.“Um,”he said unsmiling.
Then he said somewhat embarrassedly,“There's a man who is always
hanging around the airport to meet American dignitaries. He's not
quite sane. ”
I laughed, then went under Formosa's huge wave of wistful yearning for
the outside world, particularly America, its only friend and therefore
in some ways a foe.
“How does it feel to be back? ”Mr. Chu asked. Although I had never
been there before, they were going along with the official assumption
that Formosa is China, the mother country of all Chinese. I looked
around the crowded airport and it really was China, not the strange
one I left ten years ago under the Communists but the one I knew best
and thought had vanished forever. The buzz of Mandarin voices also
made it different from Hong Kong. A feeling of chronological confusion
came over me.
“It feels like dreaming. ”And taking in all the familiar faces
speaking the tones of homeland, I exclaimed,“But it's not possible!
”Mr. Chu smiled ruefully as if I had said,“But you are ghosts. ”
Mrs. Chu told me as we left the airport,“This is an ugly city, but the
minute you get out of town it is beautiful.“
They lodged me in a mountain inn. I got the General's Suite, where the
generals stay when they come uphill to report to the Generalissimo,
who lives a few steps away across the road. The suite was reached
through a series of deserted little courtyards, with its own rock
garden and lotus pond. In the silence there was just the sound of the
evening drizzle on the banana palm and in the bathroom a tap of
sulphur water constantly running out of a stone lion mouth and
splashing over the rim of the cement tank. There were rattan furniture
on the tatami flooring and a wardrobe and bed with stained sheets. I
told myself not to be fastidious. But there were bedbugs. Finally I
had to get up near dawn to sleep on the ledge of the honor recess,
where in Japanese living rooms the best vase and picture scroll are
displayed. The maid was frightened when she come in the morning and
could not find me.
It was plain that the generals had feminine companionship while
spending the night awaiting audience with the Generalissimo. I
wondered at the ease of procuring girls almost next door to that
Christian and Confucian founder of the New Life Movement. Surely it
was unseemly with“Heaven's countenance only a foot away, ”as we used
to describe an audience with the emperor. After I left Taipei for the
countryside, I realized that prostitution was more open on this land
than perhaps anywhere else in the world. In a small-town newspaper
five or six advertisements of this type appeared in one day:“Joy and
Happiness Prostitutes' Domicile, 1st class. 124 Shin Ming Road. Swarms
of pretty girls like clouds, offering the best services. ”
In the countryside Formosa peels back, showing older strata. There
were more native Formosans than refugees. The mixed emotions of my
homecoming of sorts gave way to pure tourist enthusiasm.
From time to time Mrs. Chu, sitting next to me in the bus, whispering
next to me in the bus, whispered urgently, “shandi, shandi! ”I just
caught a glimpse of a shandi, or mountain dweller, a gray little
wraith with whiskers tattooed on her cheeks carrying a baby on her
back and loitering outside a shop along the highway. “Shandi, shandi!
”Again the breathless little cry and a nudge. I saw gypsylike children
in ragged T-shirts and skirts, carrying smaller children.“They all
come to town when there's a Japanese picture on, ”Mrs. Chusaid.
“Oh, do they speak Japanese? ”
“Very well. ”
Many of the bus passengers talked Japanese. They were the early
Chinese settlers, and a surprising number of their young people still
spoke Japanese. The bus stopped at what seemed to be the middle of
nowhere and a young man got off. The conductor followed him. Suddenly
there was a fight, the two rolling over and over on the
wayside.“Chigaru yo! Chigaru yo!”I could make out the one Japanese
word the young man kept shouting:“Mistake! Mistake!“The driver got off
to help beat him. The passenger learned that this man was always
stealing rides. I thought how un-Chinese these people were. In Hong
Kong I had seen a streetcar conductor following a free rider to the
street and grad hold of his necktie, in place of the pigtail which
used to be the first thing reached for in a brawl. But that was just a
scuffle and exchange of words. Last year a bus conductor was taken to
the police station on the complain of a woman he had hit with his
ticket puncher, a murderous tool conductors were forever rattling to
remind people to buy tickets. But there were never any real fights
like this.
Finally the driver and conductor let the man go. He got on his feet
panting and dusting himself. They drove off. He stood at attention in
his torn khaki shirt and saluted the bus as it passed. He did not look
old enough to have been in the army in Japanese days, but that
reverence was distinctly Japanese. Oddly enough, it also reminded me
of the Communist Chinese lining up all the porters, sweepers, and
peddlers on the railway platform, each presenting his broom, pole, and
basket like arms as the train pulled out. Workers have been told to
love their machine, but to have them pay their respects to it in this
little ritual seemed strange.
From FormosaI went on to Hong Kong, which I had not seen for six
years. The city was being torn down and rebuilt into high apartment
buildings. Whole streets were dug up, with a postbox buried up to its
neck, still functioning. The refugees were settled down, hoping only
to live out their lives in Hong Kong. The younger generation speak
Cantonese in school and refuse to speak anything else at home, a good
excuse not to talk to their parents that other teenagers may envy.
The more or less well-to-do homes I saw were getting increasingly
Americanized, with amahs becoming too expensive and washing machines
taking their place alone with the lastest-model refrigerators and
hi-fi phonographs bought on the installment plan. Christmas had become
a great occasion for gifts and parties for non-Christians too. Boys
and girls handed each other Christmas cards in school. One girl wrote
to a woman columnist: “I am nineteen years old. My father and I
escaped from north China a year ago, crossing the country with great
difficulty. We made the last stretch to Macao in a small boat which
was fired on by the Communists. My father covered me with his body so
he got wounded and died in the hospital in Macao. I came to Hong Kong,
where a friend of father's got me a job paying about HK$100 a month
[less than twenty American dollars], just enough to keep alive and
rent a bunk. I am the only one without Christmas in all Hong Kong.
Please tell me if I should go back the mainland.”
Side by side with harrowing escapes like this, there is a lot of what
seems to be needless and fool-hardy traffic of refugees going back for
visits.
“We've grown poor from sending parcels, ”my landlady told me once with
a little laugh. She never could leave off explaining why they had to
take in a lodger. She and her husband set both sets of parents and
other dependents noodles, pop rice, preserved meats and herbs, sugar,
soy, peanut oil, and soap each month and clothing in season. Of one
brand of British-made chicken cubes, her mother-in-law had written
ecstatically: “These cubes have solved all the problems of our two
meals a day. ”The sugar they dissolved in water and drank as a tonic.
Her brother, in a labor camp for harboring a friend accused of being a
Nationalist spy, is still able to write her asking for pills for his
ailing kidney and swollen legs. Her brother, in a labor camp for
harboring a friend accused of being a Nationalist spy, is still able
to write her asking for pills for his ailing kidney and swollen legs.
Her younger sister is doctor assigned to work in the country. “She has
to go out on sick calls at night, where it's pitch dark and the ground
is uneven and she's afraid of snakes. You know how young girls are,
”she said, just as she apologized for her daughters monopolizing the
bathroom: “You know how young girls are. ”
I was there to see a great packing. The landlady had a relative going
back—a woman in her seventies—who could take things in for them. The
landlady's husband wrestled with loads and ropes all over the kitchen
floor. She baked a cake and made stewed pork.
“They can use the pot too,” she said.
“How is one to carry a pot of stewed pork all the way to Shanghai? ”
“It will be frozen; the train is a refrigerator.”
She got up at dawn to see the old lady off, and she had to go alone to
help carry the luggage past the inspections at the Lohu border. The
next day she cried out when she came upon me: “Ha-ya, Miss Chang! I
almost didn't come back.”
“But what happened?”
“Huh-yee-ya! To begin with, there were altogether too many things. The
old lady's fault, too---she had so many things of her own. Oil drums,
crates of salted fish, whole cartons of cans. Clothes, bedding, pots
and pans, enough to furnish a house. The customs man was losing his
temper. Then he came upon some change in her purse, twenty, thirty
cents of Jen Ming Piao she had with her when she came out last time
and forgot to get rid of. You're not supposed to take Communist money
in, so all hell broke loose. ‘Where did this come from? Ha?’And‘What
do you mean by this? Ha?’Turned on me now:‘Who are you? AH?’“My
landlady screwed up her slant-eyed babe face to roar out the “Ahs” and
“Has” “Ai-ya—I said I knew nothing about this, I just came to see her
off, but all the time I was worried to death.“She frowned and clucked
with annoyance and dropped her voice to a whisper. “This old lady had
dozens of nylon stockings sewn inside her thick padded gown.”
“To sell?” I asked.
“No, just to give as presents; women wear them inside their slacks.”
“But why? When they can't even be seen?”And with all the hunger we
heard was around, I thought.
“Not full-length ones.” The landlady gestured toward her calves. “For
the wives of officials. She likes to bring everybody something. Very
capable old lady. She imports movies made in Hong Kong. What does she
want so much money for? Ha? Seventy and no children? Ha?”
I remembered coming out ten years ago, walking the last stretch across
the LohuBridge with its rough wood floor closed in on both sides by
guardhouses and fences. A group of us stood waiting after the Hong
Kong police on the other side of the barbed wire had taken our papers
away to be studied. They took a long time over it. It was midsummer.
The Hong Kongpoliceman, a lean tall Cantonese with monstrous dark
glasses, looked cool and arrogant as he paced around in his uniform
and shorts, smartly belted and creased. Beside us stood the Communist
sentry, a round-cheeked north country boy in rumpled baggy uniform.
After an hour in the hot sun the young soldier muttered angrily,
speaking for the first time, “These people! Keep you out here in this
heat. Go stand in the shade.”He jerked his head at the patch of shade
a little distance back. But none of us would look at him. We just
smiled slightly, pressing close to the wire fence as if afraid to be
left out. Still, for a moment I felt the warmth of race wash over me
for the last time.
That fateful bridge has often been compared to the Naiho Bridge
between the realms of the living and the dead. Like most clich’s, it
is true when you experience it yourself. It makes me impatient to hear
westerners quibble about the free world not being really free. Too bad
that many of us have to go back over the bridge when we can't make a
living outside.
I have an aunt who has stayed in Shanghai because she could not leave
her new house. Her son, just out of college, joined his father in Hong
Kong but did not like it there. He went back in 1952, just when I was
about to leave. His mother took him to have his fortune told one
evening and I went along. He would find a job soon, the fortuneteller
said. But there might be trouble. He might go to prison. The
prediction sounded reasonable at the time, with a movement on against
businessmen and many suicides and arrests. The youngish fortuneteller
looked like a shop assistant in his gabardine gown. I had no
confidence in him and resolutely avoided his eye although I needed
badly to have my own fortune told.
I have an aunt who has stayed in Shanghai because she could not leave
her new house. Her son, just out of college, joined his father in Hong
Kong but did not like it there. He went back in 1952, just when I was
about to leave. His mother took him to have his fortune told one
evening and I went along. He would find a job soon, the fortuneteller
said. But there might be trouble. He might go to prison. The
prediction sounded reasonable at the time, with a movement on against
businessmen and many suicides and arrests. The youngish fortuneteller
looked like a shop assistant in his gabardine gown. I had no
confidence in him and resolutely avoided his eye although I needed
badly to have my own fortune told.
My cousin got a small job in Peking as predicted. Life was hard, he
wrote his mother. Get married, his mother wrote back. It's the only
way to have some happiness. But he was a quiet boy, slow to make up
his mind. Ten years later when I saw his father in Hong Kong this
time, I heard the son had wanted to get out again. Checking his
application for permit to leave, the authorities seized on the fact
that he had once joined a Nationalist group in college. He was
sentenced to three years' house arrest in his mother's modernistic
mansion, which they took the opportunity to search, probing the sofas
for American dollars. He has all comforts, even servants to stand in
line for the daily rations. But three years with Mother is evidently
considered enough punishment.
I heard about my mother's family from on of my uncle's married
daughters, the only one out. The other two stayed in because their
husbands, a doctor and the son of a high Nationalist official, chose
to stay. One of the sisters had died.
“So did my brother's wife,”said my cousin in Hong Kong.“And both men
remarried before their wives' bones were cold. Father died of cancer
after losing everything in the land reform. Mother is wretched living
with Brother. He doesn't earn enough and his new wife is a shrew. We
Huangs are finished.”
Looking back, I saw how my family and relatives had all been taught by
our ancestors to hang onto land, the only clean and solid thing, by
comparison to which all other possessions are showy, immoral,
therefore impermanent. No matter what fools one's children were, as
long as they did not slap land deeds on a gambling table they were
safe. Despite ancestral admonitions, in time of course all their
descendants tried their hands at other investments for better and
quicker profits. Many soon found they were not clever enough and
resigned themselves to the yearly income from the land—cut down by
wars, famines, inflations—and grew poorer and poorer. The Communists
merely hastened the end.
No one I know is in a commune or knows anybody who is in one, with the
exception of a Cantonese amah who went back to sweep the graves his
spring. Her family belongs to the village commune. It is still the
farmers, always the worst off, who are getting the worst of it. Having
heard of the food shortage, the amah brought in a bit of cooking oil
and salted fish of her own use.
When she arrived for a twenty day visit, the commune allowed her to
buy a large quantity of rice and small quantities of cooking oil and
pork as a special favor. The pork was divided among her family and
neighbors because they had not tasted meat all year. So went her
salted fish. Her last ten days there she lived on snails that a little
girl gathered for her from a pond.
There was no community dining hall. Everybody queued up with cans to
get the rice and what went with it, served through two holes dug in
the kennel-sized temple of the earth god. When they got home the food
was cold, of course.
Everyday at four in the morning a man beat a gong to summon everybody
to the fields. Breakfast at nine. Work at ten. Lunch at twelve. Work
again at one. Supper at six. Work again at seven. But not in the
fields this time—usually it was carrying coal or mud. Quit at ten at
night. Sometimes “ leap forward” to twelve midnight. No Sundays or
holidays, only a few days off at the New Year. This despite the slogan
“ Let the farmers rest.” Wages varied from a dollar something to fifty
or sixty cents Jen Ming Piao a month. Medicines had been free but now
you buy your own. Herd doctors were available but herbs are scarce.
We Chinese have always been at our best within a rigid frame, even in
poetry writing. It's when we are most hemmed in that we seem able to
rise above ourselves. After twenty centuries of rule by the family we
have been free for perhaps twenty years, and it has not been a
pleasant time for many of us, full of conflicts and self-doubts. Now
the state has taken the place of the big family, coming into every
moment and aspect of life with its familiar persuasive pressure. The
sheep has returned to the fold. Even hunger can feel right—up to a point.
Those who live near Macao swim a mile or escape by sampan in bands
sometimes as big as a hundred, fighting the machine guns of pursuin
motorboats with sharpened bamboo poles. But they will not stay put and
fight. The trouble with us Chinese is that we are too sensible. Sixty
thousand crashed the land border to Hong Kong last May. The border
guards who had shot at smaller numbers evidently held back because the
crowds were too big, the government having always avoided massacres if
possible. After this the communes were modified but not abandoned.
There is already talk now of their being revived in the area around
Canton.
Advance two steps, retreats a step—Mao Tse-tung has said this is his
way of making progress. Whether dance or march, the people drag on,
hoping to outlive their tormentors.
四海纵谈赠朋友：把这页给你的朋友寄去！
亦凡信息娱乐网之四海纵谈
递交于05-16-2008 10:05
递交于05-15-2008 17:05
递交于05-15-2008 14:32
递交于05-11-2008 13:44
递交于05-08-2008 16:52
oNeNe要不要先把40榴找到再去找大陸雞.... 05/01 07:
递交于04-30-2008 12:48
递交于04-30-2008 12:40
递交于04-30-2008 12:30