韓裔小說家筆下的未來中國環境移民
Starting with his first novel, “Native Speaker,” the Korean-American author Chang-rae Lee has written of immigrant experiences in the United States. His latest novel, “On Such a Full Sea,” centers on a Chinese woman named Fan who is a laborer in a city called B-Mor, a future version of Baltimore. The novel is a dystopian tale, set in an era when nations around the world are suffering from overwhelming environmental degradation. Fan is one of tens of thousands of Chinese from smog-choked Shanxi Province who have taken jobs as food production workers in B-Mor to escape their toxic homeland.
從小說處女作《母語人士》(Native Speaker)開始，韓裔美國作家李昌來(Chang-rae Lee)寫了很多在美國的移民經歷。在他的最新小說《在如此完滿的大海上》(On Such a Full Sea)中，主人公是一個名叫“範”(Fan)的中國女人，生活在一個名爲B-Mor的城市，而B-Mor其實是未來的巴爾的摩。這部小說講述了一個反烏托邦的故事，設定各國處在鋪天蓋地的環境退化災難之中。範來自霧霾嚴重的山西省，那裏有數以萬計的中國人和她一樣，逃離環境毒化的家鄉，前往B-Mor當食品生產工人。
Mr. Lee, who also teaches creative writing at Princeton University, was in Beijing for the annual Bookworm Literary Festival, which runs to March 29. Last Sunday, I hosted a conversation with him that included questions from an audience at the Bookworm. Following are lightly edited excerpts, transcribed by Becky Davis:
李昌來在普林斯頓大學(Princeton University)教授創意寫作課程，本次他前往北京參加一年一度的老書蟲國際文學節(Bookworm Literary Festival)期間，我主持了與他的對話，其中包括書蟲節聽衆的提問。書蟲節將於3月29日週日閉幕。以下是稍作編輯的對話摘要，由貝基·戴維斯(Becky Davis)從錄音轉錄爲文字。Q. Earlier today, I was at the Chinese prime minister’s press conference. He said China hadn’t done enough on pollution and that he really needs to push forward in the war against pollution. In your latest novel, “On Such a Full Sea,” the future that you envision is one in which China loses the war on pollution. Can you tell us why you see this being the future of the world?
問：今天早些時候，我參加了中國總理的記者招待會。他說，中國在防治污染方面做得不夠，他需要大力推動反污染的鬥爭。在你的最新小說《在如此完滿的大海上》中，你設想中國未來在這場鬥爭中失敗。你能講講爲什麼會設定這樣的未來世界嗎？
A. It’s not just China — it’s really everyone, in the book.
答：這不只是中國——在這本書裏，其實所有國家都是這樣。The book is set some vague number of years ahead, 150 to 200 years, I’m not that specific about it. But I am very specific about the kinds of implications for the people of the society, which is that they all suffer from a certain kind of inevitable disease, which they call “sea,” which is something that’s sort of lurking out there mysteriously. They can’t really address it. And obviously that comes from the violation of the environment.
這本書設定了一個不太確切的未來時刻，是未來150到200年之間，我沒有把年份弄得很具體。但我非常具體地描述了那個社會的公衆所處的境況，即他們全都患上了某種不可避免的疾病，他們稱這種疾病爲“海”，是一種潛伏在外面的神祕東西。他們沒法真正應對這個問題。顯然，這種疾病來自環境污染。They’re always talking about being careful about the things that you eat, the water that you drink. One of the conceits of the book is that there is a production facility called B-Mor in the former Baltimore, and this production facility is a facility that provides pristine fishes and vegetables for an elite class of people. And the very fact of its existence is that everything outside is too poisoned and too ruined to trust.
他們總是在談論要小心注意吃的東西，喝的水。書中設定了一個生產基地，名爲B-Mor，位於以前的巴爾的摩。這個生產基地爲精英階層提供未受污染的魚類和蔬菜。它的存在表明，外面的一切東西都毒化了，受到了毀損，不能信任。I don’t get into the environmental issues very much. There’s some guy who kept writing me every week after the book came out and said, can you just come out and say that this is a “Cli-Fi” novel? I don’t know, he must have had a trademark [on the term] or something. There’s climate anxiety [in the novel], but it’s not that geeky about it. It’s almost a psychic condition, of feeling beleaguered.
我沒有非常深入地闡釋環保問題。這本書出版之後，有個人每週都寫信給我，希望我能站出來說這是一本“氣候變化小說”。我不清楚，他肯定有個和這個詞有關的商標什麼的。這本書中涉及了關於氣候的焦慮感，但沒有達到那種怪咖程度。它差不多算是一種焦頭爛額的心理狀態。Today, we were just walking around. I bought my first mask here, which I kind of liked. But then I noticed that the mask itself smelled sort of chemically. So I was thinking, maybe the mask is actually worse for you than the air.
今天，我們只是到處閒逛了逛。我在這裏買了第一個口罩，我還有點喜歡它。但後來我發現，口罩本身就散發出某種化學味道。所以我想，也許對你來說，在這裏戴口罩其實比直接呼吸空氣更糟糕。Q. You were originally going to write a novel about China but then you took the train past Baltimore, and decided to set it there. In your original conception of the novel, why did you want to set a book in China? You came to China on one or two trips to do some research — could you tell us about that?
問：你本來打算寫一本關於中國的小說，但你在有一次乘火車路過巴爾的摩之後，決定把背景設置在那裏。在你最初的小說構思中，爲什麼要把一本書的背景設置在中國呢？你來了中國一兩趟，做了一些調研，能介紹一下這方面的情況嗎？A. My original idea was to write a kind of social fabric novel about Chinese factory workers. So in about 2011 or so, I went to Shenzhen. My sister lives in Hong Kong, so it was an easy trip. I sort of finagled my way into a factory. It was a really fascinating visit for me. I hadn’t been to a factory and had all these preconceptions about what I would see. It actually wasn’t so horrible. I don’t know if people have gone to that area — that’s where you know all the factories are, you know. They’re not really factories so much as they are settlements. And this particular settlement, this factory that I went to was a facility that produced tiny electrical motors, the kind that drive a DVD tray or a side-view mirror. So it wasn’t a big, huge industrial complex. It was really more like a campus, but a really grubby one — kind of rundown. There was nothing aesthetically pleasing about it.
答：我最初的想法是寫一部關於中國工廠工人的社會結構小說。因此，大約在2011年，我去了深圳。我姐姐住在香港，所以去那裏很方便。我差不多連哄帶騙地進入了一家工廠。對我來說，這次訪問真正的很有意義。我之前從沒有去過工廠，對於將會在那裏看到什麼存在各種成見。實際上那裏並不是那麼可怕。我不知道大家是否去過那裏——所有工廠都在那兒。說那是工廠，還不如說是他們的定居點。我去的這家工廠，這個具體的定居點，生產的是驅動DVD拖盤或側視鏡的微型電機。所以，這不是一個非常龐大的工業園區。它看起來更像一個校園，但真的很寒磣，感覺有些破敗。毫無美感可言。Q. It wasn’t like Princeton.
問：它和普林斯頓不像。A. No, no. At Princeton, every blade of grass is accounted for. It’s a little creepy.
答：不，不。在普林斯頓，每根草都被解讀過。這有點讓人起雞皮疙瘩。Q. That’s a dystopian novel!
問：那纔是一部反烏托邦小說！A. Well, dystopias are always about utopias, of course. But this particular place was … it was exactly what I needed for the book I wanted to write. It had a little health center. It had a basketball hoop that was rusty. It had the dining hall. It had the dormitories of course, which housed eight people in one little room, in bunks, with a little hot plate and a plant there. People were trying to make a life out of it, obviously, and choosing to be there. And of course most of the workers were young women.
答：實際上，反烏托邦作品的關鍵總是烏托邦。但是，這個地方是......正是我想寫的這本書所需要的素材。它有一個小型醫療中心。有個鏽跡斑斑的籃球架。有食堂。當然還有宿舍，一個小房間住八個人，上下鋪，有一些輕便電熱爐，還有一株綠植。人們試圖在這種狀況下過點像樣的日子，很明顯，他們是自願待在那裏的。當然，大部分工人都是年輕女性。And I was all set to write that novel. I went back to my desk in Princeton and started to write. But I felt as if … and this I’ve got to blame on you guys, journalists who have done such a great job in doing my initial research about all the things that were going on in China. I guess I had always been someone in the last five to seven years who had a lot of interest in China, about all the awesome things that were happening, but also this kind of dread about China, about its power, about its environment. All the things that make China special and noticeable.
我當時全都準備好了，就要展開寫作。我回到普林斯頓的書桌前，開始寫小說。但我覺得好像……這得怪你們記者了，爲我對中國發生的各種事情做了非常出色的初步調研。我想，在過去五到七年時間裏，我一直對中國非常感興趣，不僅是對中國發生的各種好事，而且也對中國、中國的力量，以及中國的環境懷有一種畏懼。所有這一切讓中國顯得與衆不同，值得注目。So I got back to my desk again and I felt as if I was writing. … You know, the writing was fine. But I think I was writing just basically what you guys [journalists] were writing. I wasn’t adding anything to that story, in my view. I didn’t want to just report on it, because you know, when you’re writing a novel, it’s not just about representation. Of course, when you’re writing a great journalistic piece it’s not just about that either. But the novel, especially as something that needs to be sustained for that many pages, really needs other kinds of angles. You need other kinds of approaches to the material to make it come alive in a way that’s unlikely but is still obviously truthful, and maybe beautiful.
所以，我再次回到書桌前，我感覺好像寫得……其實寫得還行。但我覺得基本上只是在寫你們記者寫的東西。在我看來，我沒有添加任何新東西進去。我不想寫出來的只是一個報道，因爲，當你寫一本小說時，它不僅僅是陳述。當然，當你寫一篇出色的新聞文章時，也不能只是進行陳述。但小說，尤其是需要能寫很長篇幅的小說，確實需要採用不同類型的角度。你需要不同類型的方法來處理材料，讓它看似不可能，但仍然顯得很真實，甚至可能還很美妙。I guess I had to admit to myself that that wasn’t happening. For whatever reason. Maybe I just wasn’t imagining the characters right. … You know, I had been so inspired by certain novels like Zola’s “Germinal.” It’s a great novel about coal miners in a town in 19th-century France and their struggles — their battle against the owners and the degradation that they suffered. And I was going to do all that, but I guess I just didn’t have that special, fresh angle on my material. So I put it away, kind of depressed, because I’d done all this work, and I was still excited about it.
我想當時我不得不向自己承認，我沒有做到這一點。無論原因是什麼。也許我只是沒有想象出恰當的角色。......你知道，某些小說一直給了我很大的啓發，比如左拉(Zola)的名著《萌芽》(Germinal)，講的是19世紀法國一個鎮上的煤礦工人以及他們的鬥爭——他們和礦主做鬥爭，和他們所處的惡化境況做鬥爭。我想要寫這樣一本小說，但我覺得自己還沒有找到一個特殊、新鮮的視角來處理素材。所以我停下來，感覺有點鬱悶，因爲我已經做了這麼多工作，不過我還是對這件事勁頭十足。That’s when I took this train ride from New York to D.C. For those of you who have not been on that train — it’s the regular train that goes every day, many times a day. Because I’d grown up in the New York area, I’d been on that train for probably 45 years of my life, going back and forth periodically. And for 45 years, I’d always seen, as you roll into Baltimore Penn Station, the east side of Baltimore that’s always been, as I can remember since I was a little kid, a neighborhood that’s forlorn. A classic American ghetto. The reasons for it are myriad and very complicated. Race, racism, economic decline, post-industrial stuff, all that kind of stuff. Anyway, that’s the kind of neighborhood it was.
這時候，我乘火車從紐約前往華盛頓特區，可能你沒有坐過那班火車——它是普通列車，每天都會發很多班。我是在紐約地區長大的，所以我坐那班火車可能有45年了，過段時間就往返一次。這45年來，每次進入巴爾的摩賓州車站，我都會看到巴爾的摩東側那片社區。我記得，從我孩提時代開始，那就一直是個絕望孤獨的社區。那是個典型的美國貧民窟，形成的原因有很多，非常複雜。族裔、種族主義、經濟衰退、後工業化問題，如此種種。無論如何，那個社區就是那樣的。I was looking at this neighborhood, and not thinking at all of writing about it, and I just got angry and frustrated as a citizen. I said, I can’t believe I’ve been seeing this neighborhood for probably four decades in various states of neglect, disrepair, maybe hope, a little bit. The current iteration that I saw was that it was all boarded up, these very modest 2oth-century modest row houses. They’d be just boarded up with plywood so that the street was completely cleared of anything, so that no one was supposed to live there anymore. It was absolutely cleared out of people. It was like a neutron bomb went off. The buildings were still standing, but the people were all gone.
我看着這個社區，完全沒有要寫它的念頭，我只是從公民的角度感到很生氣，很失望。我說，我簡直不敢相信，在大約40年的時間裏，我看着這片社區總體上就處在無人理睬、破敗失修，也許還有一絲絲希望的狀態。當時我看到的最新狀況是，所有房子都用木板封起來了，它們是20世紀那種不起眼的排式房屋。它們被膠合板封起來，這樣街上就徹底沒有了任何東西，所以應該是沒人住在那裏了。絕對空無一人。就好像一顆中子彈爆炸過，建築物仍然矗立，但人都不在了。And I thought to myself — what a waste! We need so much affordable housing in our cities, and in Baltimore especially. I thought, why don’t we just invite an environmentally ruined village in China over? People can’t live there. Fifty thousand people — bring them over here, let them have it. Right? Let’s see what they do with it! They’ve got to do something good with it. Who knows what they’ll do?
我心想——這太浪費了！我們的城市需要大量廉價住房，尤其是巴爾的摩。我想，何不去中國找一個環境被毀壞殆盡的鄉村，請那裏的人到這裏來住呢？在那裏是沒法生活的。5萬人——請他們過來，給他們住。看看他們會怎麼對待這些！他們肯定會帶來一些好的東西。誰知道他們能做出什麼事來？And I kept sort of tossing that idea about, and I said, gee, that would be kind of a fun idea. Kind of an immigration story en masse. You know, usually an immigration story is like, my family, this community. But to bring everyone over at once in an engineered way, with a real purpose, a mission to revitalize. And I said of course that’s not going to work. No one’s going to allow that, even if people needed it.
這個想法我一直在琢磨着，我心想，嘿，這倒是個挺好玩的點子。有點移民衆生相的意思。你知道一個移民故事通常就是講我的家庭之類，這個社區的事。但這是奔着一個切實的目標，一種復興的使命，有計劃地把所有人一次性搬遷過來。我心想那當然是不可能實現的。就算人真的有這個需求，也不可能得到許可。But then I just kept rolling about the idea, and I thought, well maybe in the future, in a very different future, America might need a certain kind of assistance, a certain kind of revitalization. Maybe all these forlorn urban areas — in 100 years, 200 years, that’s still a problem, still something that needs to be addressed, and maybe that would happen. So I said, O.K., I’ll set the book in the future. But of course once you do that, you have to talk about the rest of the future, the rest of the context. So that’s how this book happened.
但想法在我腦子裏還是一直轉着，我想，也許在未來，一個跟現在很不一樣的未來裏，美國會需要某種特定的協助，某種振興。這些荒涼的城區——未來100、200年裏，也許仍然是個問題，仍然需要去面對，那麼到時也許就能實現這個想法。於是我就說，好吧，我把這本書設定在未來。但當然，一旦你要這麼做，未來的其餘部分，語境的其餘部分，你也得說說。這本書就是這麼來的。I still took a lot of the research that I did on my Shenzhen trip. Not the details of that visit, but I guess the feeling, the ethos of those workers, the sense of community that they had. And really, this novel started out as a novel about community, but a certain kind of community. But then it became larger.
在深圳的那次調研至今還是能帶給我很多東西。我想重要的不是那段經歷的細節，而是感受，那些工人的氣質，那種擁有一個社區的感覺。實際上，這部小說在一開始就是一部講社區的小說，只不過是某種特定的社區。然後纔開始擴展開來。[During the question-and-answer session, a young man asked Mr. Lee about his understanding of Chinese culture, citing a scene in “On Such a Full Sea.” There is a plot spoiler here for those who have not yet read the novel.]
[在問答環節，一個年輕人援引了《在如此完滿的大海上》中的一個片段，請李昌來談談對中國文化的理解。這裏有對書中情節的透露，望尚未閱讀這部小說的讀者知悉。]Q. When I was reading the book, there was a point for me when the story really turned and I became invested. And that was when the Joseph character, the boy, drowns and then there’s the funeral scene, because that just rang so true for me in my experience of Chinese funerals. It got me really curious how much of, is it a question of how much you really know about Chinese culture or is it like overlap with your understanding of Korean culture? What is it about Chinese culture that stands out from Korean culture or American culture, that’s distinctive for you? What is something inherent besides the obvious differences?
問：在看這本書的時候，對我來說有一個轉折點，讓我開始投入進去了。就是那個叫約瑟夫的男孩溺死後的葬禮，因爲它顯得很真實，喚起了我自己參加中式葬禮的經歷。這讓我很想知道，你對中國文化實際上有多少了解，或者說這種文化是不是跟你對韓國文化的理解有重合？對你來說，中國文化跟韓國文化或美國文化相比，有什麼格外不一樣的地方？除了那些明顯的差異以外，它們有什麼內在的不同點？A. I don’t know that there is. There is a little bit that it just bleeds over from Korean funerals, I suppose. I’d seen Chinese ones on film. [laughs] I think my editor was like, oh, you’re really going into all this business about … Why are you going into this scene? I had a hard time explaining it to her. Because I felt like that scene — and I’m really glad you brought it up — that scene, it was important to me because it’s when the community comes together and really taps into a feeling. It’s the first time that Fan really notices that and feels like there’s been a real bonding, even with all these disparate people that don’t really care about each other. That this one moment is sort of crystallizing a feeling.
答：我不知道。我認爲，有些地方和韓式葬禮類似。我通過電影看過中式葬禮。[笑] 我覺得我編輯的反應是這樣的，哦，你真的要深入到所有這些東西里去……你爲什麼要寫這一幕？我艱難地就此對她作了解釋。因爲我感覺那一幕——我真的很高興你提了出來——那一幕，它之所以對我很重要，是因爲整個社區在此刻團結在了一起，而且它真實地挖掘了一種感受。這是範第一次真正注意到這一點，而且感覺人們之間存在一種真實的聯繫，即使是與這些各不相同並且對彼此漠不關心的人。這一刻在某種程度上使一種感覺變得清清楚楚。And part of my anxiety about this community that I was writing about was that they’d gotten a little bit soft, a little bit comfortable, a little bit in some ways detached from one another, because the bonds of their community were so structurally sound and structurally kind of prescribed, that they’d forgotten about them. When everyone’s a cousin, everyone’s a cousin. No one’s like, right there. And so that was something that I felt that she would see or feel. And not just her — the “we.” They begin to feel something, that there’s this final burst, for the first time in a long time, this rush, this drug of feeling. And I guess that’s why that scene exists.
對於我所書寫的這個社區，我的一部分焦慮原因就是人們會變得有些軟弱、有些舒適，在某些方面有些彼此疏遠了，因爲他們社區的聯繫在結構上如此牢固，而且結構上早就固定下來，所以他們會忘掉這些。如果所有人都是親戚，也就沒什麼感覺了。好像沒人在那裏。所以，那就是我覺得她會看到或感受到的東西。而且不僅是她——是“我們”。他們開始感受到了一些東西，於是後來出現這個最後時刻的迸發，這是長期以來第一次，這種強烈的感覺，這種熾烈的感情。我認爲這就是那一幕存在的原因。
