韩裔小说家笔下的未来中国环境移民
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.
从小说处女作《母语人士》(Native Speaker)开始，韩裔美国作家李昌来(Chang-rae Lee)写了很多在美国的移民经历。在他的最新小说《在如此完满的大海上》(On Such a Full Sea)中，主人公是一个名叫“范”(Fan)的中国女人，生活在一个名为B-Mor的城市，而B-Mor其实是未来的巴尔的摩。这部小说讲述了一个反乌托邦的故事，设定各国处在铺天盖地的环境退化灾难之中。范来自雾霾严重的山西省，那里有数以万计的中国人和她一样，逃离环境毒化的家乡，前往B-Mor当食品生产工人。
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:
李昌来在普林斯顿大学(Princeton University)教授创意写作课程，本次他前往北京参加一年一度的老书虫国际文学节(Bookworm Literary Festival)期间，我主持了与他的对话，其中包括书虫节听众的提问。书虫节将于3月29日周日闭幕。以下是稍作编辑的对话摘要，由贝基·戴维斯(Becky Davis)从录音转录为文字。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?
问：今天早些时候，我参加了中国总理的记者招待会。他说，中国在防治污染方面做得不够，他需要大力推动反污染的斗争。在你的最新小说《在如此完满的大海上》中，你设想中国未来在这场斗争中失败。你能讲讲为什么会设定这样的未来世界吗？
A. It’s not just China — it’s really everyone, in the book.
答：这不只是中国——在这本书里，其实所有国家都是这样。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.
这本书设定了一个不太确切的未来时刻，是未来150到200年之间，我没有把年份弄得很具体。但我非常具体地描述了那个社会的公众所处的境况，即他们全都患上了某种不可避免的疾病，他们称这种疾病为“海”，是一种潜伏在外面的神秘东西。他们没法真正应对这个问题。显然，这种疾病来自环境污染。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.
他们总是在谈论要小心注意吃的东西，喝的水。书中设定了一个生产基地，名为B-Mor，位于以前的巴尔的摩。这个生产基地为精英阶层提供未受污染的鱼类和蔬菜。它的存在表明，外面的一切东西都毒化了，受到了毁损，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.
我没有非常深入地阐释环保问题。这本书出版之后，有个人每周都写信给我，希望我能站出来说这是一本“气候变化小说”。我不清楚，他肯定有个和这个词有关的商标什么的。这本书中涉及了关于气候的焦虑感，但没有达到那种怪咖程度。它差不多算是一种焦头烂额的心理状态。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，我们只是到处闲逛了逛。我在这里买了第一个口罩，我还有点喜欢它。但后来我发现，口罩本身就散发出某种化学味道。所以我想，也许对你来说，在这里戴口罩其实比直接呼吸空气更糟糕。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?
问：你本来打算写一本关于中国的小说，但你在有一次乘火车路过巴尔的摩之后，决定把背景设置在那里。在你最初的小说构思中，为什么要把一本书的背景设置在中国呢？你来了中国一两趟，做了一些调研，能介绍一下这方面的情况吗？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：我最初的想法是写一部关于中国工厂工人的社会结构小说。因此，大约在2011年，我去了深圳。我姐姐住在香港，所以去那里很方便。我差不多连哄带骗地进入了一家工厂。对我来说，这次访问真正的很有意义。我之前从没有去过工厂，对于将会在那里看到什么存在各种成见。实际上那里并不是那么可怕。我不知道大家是否去过那里——所有工厂都在那儿。说那是工厂，还不如说是他们的定居点。我去的这家工厂，这个具体的定居点，生产的是驱动DVD拖盘或侧视镜的微型电机。所以，这不是一个非常庞大的工业园区。它看起来更像一个校园，但真的很寒碜，感觉有些破败。毫无美感可言。Q. It wasn’t like Princeton.
问：它和普林斯顿不像。A. No, no. At Princeton, every blade of grass is accounted for. It’s a little creepy.
答：不，不。在普林斯顿，每根草都被解读过。这有点让人起鸡皮疙瘩。Q. That’s a dystopian novel!
问：那才是一部反乌托邦小说！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：实际上，反乌托邦作品的关键总是乌托邦。但是，这个地方是......正是我想写的这本书所需要的素材。它有一个小型医疗中心。有个锈迹斑斑的篮球架。有食堂。当然还有宿舍，一个小房间住八个人，上下铺，有一些轻便电热炉，还有一株绿植。人们试图在这种状况下过点像样的日子，很明显，他们是自愿待在那里的。当然，大部分工人都是年轻女性。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.
我当时全都准备好了，就要展开写作。我回到普林斯顿的书桌前，开始写小说。但我觉得好像……这得怪你们记者了，为我对中国发生的各种事情做了非常出色的初步调研。我想，在过去五到七年时间里，我一直对中国非常感兴趣，不仅是对中国发生的各种好事，而且也对中国、中国的力量，以及中国的环境怀有一种畏惧。所有这一切让中国显得与众不同，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，我再次回到书桌前，我感觉好像写得……其实写得还行。但我觉得基本上只是在写你们记者写的东西。在我看来，我没有添加任何新东西进去。我不想写出来的只是一个报道，因为，当你写一本小说时，它不仅仅是陈述。当然，当你写一篇出色的新闻文章时，也不能只是进行陈述。但小说，尤其是需要能写很长篇幅的小说，确实需要采用不同类型的角度。你需要不同类型的方法来处理材料，让它看似不可能，但仍然显得很真实，甚至可能还很美妙。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.
我想当时我不得不向自己承认，我没有做到这一点。无论原因是什么。也许我只是没有想象出恰当的角色。......你知道，某些小说一直给了我很大的启发，比如左拉(Zola)的名著《萌芽》(Germinal)，讲的是19世纪法国一个镇上的煤矿工人以及他们的斗争——他们和矿主做斗争，和他们所处的恶化境况做斗争。我想要写这样一本小说，但我觉得自己还没有找到一个特殊、新鲜的视角来处理素材。所以我停下来，感觉有点郁闷，因为我已经做了这么多工作，不过我还是对这件事劲头十足。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.
这时候，我乘火车从纽约前往华盛顿特区，可能你没有坐过那班火车——它是普通列车，每天都会发很多班。我是在纽约地区长大的，所以我坐那班火车可能有45年了，过段时间就往返一次。这45年来，每次进入巴尔的摩宾州车站，我都会看到巴尔的摩东侧那片社区。我记得，从我孩提时代开始，那就一直是个绝望孤独的社区。那是个典型的美国贫民窟，形成的原因有很多，非常复杂。族裔、种族主义、经济衰退、后工业化问题，如此种种。无论如何，那个社区就是那样的。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.
我看着这个社区，完全没有要写它的念头，我只是从公民的角度感到很生气，很失望。我说，我简直不敢相信，在大约40年的时间里，我看着这片社区总体上就处在无人理睬、破败失修，也许还有一丝丝希望的状态。当时我看到的最新状况是，所有房子都用木板封起来了，它们是20世纪那种不起眼的排式房屋。它们被胶合板封起来，这样街上就彻底没有了任何东西，所以应该是没人住在那里了。绝对空无一人。就好像一颗中子弹爆炸过，建筑物仍然矗立，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——这太浪费了！我们的城市需要大量廉价住房，尤其是巴尔的摩。我想，何不去中国找一个环境被毁坏殆尽的乡村，请那里的人到这里来住呢？在那里是没法生活的。5万人——请他们过来，给他们住。看看他们会怎么对待这些！他们肯定会带来一些好的东西。谁知道他们能做出什么事来？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.
这个想法我一直在琢磨着，我心想，嘿，这倒是个挺好玩的点子。有点移民众生相的意思。你知道一个移民故事通常就是讲我的家庭之类，这个社区的事。但这是奔着一个切实的目标，一种复兴的使命，有计划地把所有人一次性搬迁过来。我心想那当然是不可能实现的。就算人真的有这个需求，也不可能得到许可。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.
但想法在我脑子里还是一直转着，我想，也许在未来，一个跟现在很不一样的未来里，美国会需要某种特定的协助，某种振兴。这些荒凉的城区——未来100、200年里，也许仍然是个问题，仍然需要去面对，那么到时也许就能实现这个想法。于是我就说，好吧，我把这本书设定在未来。但当然，一旦你要这么做，未来的其余部分，语境的其余部分，你也得说说。这本书就是这么来的。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.
在深圳的那次调研至今还是能带给我很多东西。我想重要的不是那段经历的细节，而是感受，那些工人的气质，那种拥有一个社区的感觉。实际上，这部小说在一开始就是一部讲社区的小说，只不过是某种特定的社区。然后才开始扩展开来。[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.]
[在问答环节，一个年轻人援引了《在如此完满的大海上》中的一个片段，请李昌来谈谈对中国文化的理解。这里有对书中情节的透露，望尚未阅读这部小说的读者知悉。]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?
问：在看这本书的时候，对我来说有一个转折点，让我开始投入进去了。就是那个叫约瑟夫的男孩溺死后的葬礼，因为它显得很真实，唤起了我自己参加中式葬礼的经历。这让我很想知道，你对中国文化实际上有多少了解，或者说这种文化是不是跟你对韩国文化的理解有重合？对你来说，中国文化跟韩国文化或美国文化相比，有什么格外不一样的地方？除了那些明显的差异以外，它们有什么内在的不同点？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。我认为，有些地方和韩式葬礼类似。我通过电影看过中式葬礼。[笑] 我觉得我编辑的反应是这样的，哦，你真的要深入到所有这些东西里去……你为什么要写这一幕？我艰难地就此对她作了解释。因为我感觉那一幕——我真的很高兴你提了出来——那一幕，它之所以对我很重要，是因为整个社区在此刻团结在了一起，而且它真实地挖掘了一种感受。这是范第一次真正注意到这一点，而且感觉人们之间存在一种真实的联系，即使是与这些各不相同并且对彼此漠不关心的人。这一刻在某种程度上使一种感觉变得清清楚楚。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.
对于我所书写的这个社区，我的一部分焦虑原因就是人们会变得有些软弱、有些舒适，在某些方面有些彼此疏远了，因为他们社区的联系在结构上如此牢固，而且结构上早就固定下来，所以他们会忘掉这些。如果所有人都是亲戚，也就没什么感觉了。好像没人在那里。所以，那就是我觉得她会看到或感受到的东西。而且不仅是她——是“我们”。他们开始感受到了一些东西，于是后来出现这个最后时刻的迸发，这是长期以来第一次，这种强烈的感觉，这种炽烈的感情。我认为这就是那一幕存在的原因。
