苏炜 海南农场下放读书记

The first novel I really fell in love with I rescued from being used as toilet paper.

我真正喜欢上的第一本小说差点用作了厕纸，是被我抢救回来的。

When I was a teenager, growing up during China’s Cultural Revolution, our reading list was extremely limited. We weren’t allowed to read anything that was “feudalist,” “capitalist” or “revisionist.” That meant all classical Chinese poetry and fiction; all Western literature; all writing from our treacherous rival, the Soviet Union. Nobody told us specifically what we could read. But the ingenious thing about Chairman Mao’s commandments was that when you subtracted all the books that were objectionable — backward, bourgeois, tainted by religious thought, adulterated by wrongheaded Soviet ideas — that cut out pretty much the entire literary legacy of the human race.

我十几岁的时候，中国正值“文化大革命”，我们能读到的东西非常有限。任何“封建主义”、“资本主义”和“修正主义”的东西都不能读，这就意味着所有中国古典诗词和小说、西方文学，以及来自闹翻的对手——苏联的文学作品都不能碰。没有人告诉我们能读什么。但是毛主席的戒律的高明之处就在于，剔除所有不受欢迎的内容——落后的、小资的、涉及宗教思想的、掺有错误苏联思想的——人类的整个文学遗产几乎一点不剩了。

I was 15 and had just started to read in earnest when I arrived on Xipei Rubber Plantation in southern China, on the island of Hainan. Like most well-off city kids, I was coming to the countryside to be “re-educated” through agricultural labor. I came voluntarily; with my entire family either scatteRed or behind bars for political reasons, there wasn’t much left for me in my hometown, Guangzhou. My luggage consisted of two wooden crates containing my father’s collection of Chinese classics, which I’d rescued after my house was ransacked. I couldn’t read them, though — not because they were forbidden, but because the form of Chinese in which they were written was too antiquated for me to understand.

那年我15岁，来到海南岛的西培橡胶农场，刚刚开始喜欢上读书。和大多数家境良好的城市孩子一样，我来到农村干农活，接受“再教育”。我是自愿前来的，因为政治原因，我的家人不是分散各地，就是进了监狱。家乡广州已经没有什么值得留恋。我的行李里有两个木质板条箱，里面装着父亲收集的中国古典文学，是我家被抄家时抢救下来的。不过我还没法去读它们，不是因为它们是禁书，而是因为它们是用文言文写的，我还看不懂。

I was a bookish kid with almost no books to read. When my work squad took breaks from watering rubber saplings, I hid in the shade of the rubber trees, out of the pounding tropical heat, and leafed through my dad’s old books. Shrimpy, bespectacled, the youngest kid in the unit — and worst of all, the child of counterrevolutionaries — I was immediately singled out for punishment by the older city boys, those who would have been in high school if the schools hadn’t been closed down. They pried open my boxes, stole my stuff, put water in my kerosene lamp so the oil would explode when I tried to light it, keeping me from reading at night.

我是一个爱读书的孩子，但却无书可读。每当我们的劳动小组完成了灌溉橡胶树苗的工作，可以休息片刻的时候，我就躲进橡胶树荫，远离热带的酷暑，翻看父亲的旧书。我是单位里年龄最小的孩子，戴着眼镜，佝偻着身子——最糟的是，还出身于反革命家庭——就这样，我很快被那些城里来的大男孩们拎出来欺侮，如果当时学校没有关门，他们本应在上高中的。他们撬开我的箱子，偷走我的东西，往我的煤油灯里倒水，在我点灯的时候，煤油就会爆炸，这样我就在夜里没法看书了。

Then, one morning, as I was preparing to go to work, I saw a thick wad of paper nailed to a door with a heavy metal spike. It was a novel by Liu Qing, and it was called “To Build a New Life.”

后来的一天早晨，我正要去干活，看到有扇门上用一支粗大的钉子钉着厚厚一摞纸。那是柳青的小说，名叫《创业史》。

The older boys liked to steal books from the shuttered plantation library and pin them to their doors, so they could tear off pages to use as bathroom tissue when they went to the latrine. Plucking up my courage, I knocked on the door:

年纪大的男孩们喜欢从当时已经关门的农场图书馆偷书，把它们钉在自己的门上，上厕所时就撕下几张来当厕纸。我鼓起勇气敲响了那扇门。

“Can I have that?” I asked.

“这个能给我吗？”

“Only if you find something else I can wipe myself with,” the boy replied.

“那你给我找点别的东西擦屁股，”那个男孩回答。

The leader of my work squad was a man named Hong Dejiang, one of the better-educated of the local laborers. With an elementary-school education, he could read at a basic level. Hong saw that I was hardworking and liked books. I asked him if he had any paper I could trade. After carefully removing all the pictures of Mao from a copy of Red Flag magazine — we’d have gotten in trouble if we were found using the chairman’s image as toilet paper — Hong tore up the remaining pages and gave them to me so I could swap them for the book.

我的劳动小组的组长叫洪德江（音译），是受过较好教育的本地人之一。他上过小学，有最基本的阅读能力。他知道我干活卖力，又喜欢书。我就问他有没有什么纸可以让我拿去交换。洪找来一本《红旗》杂志，小心翼翼地把上面所有毛主席像都撕扯下来——在那个时候，如果有人发现你用毛主席像当厕纸就会有麻烦——把剩下的纸页给了我，让我去换那本书。

After that, Hong let me move my desk into his own quarters — a single room less than 10 feet square, occupied mostly by the bed on which his family slept — and lent me his own small kerosene lamp. Every evening after supper, after bathing by the well, I’d go quietly to his room and read for an hour or two. Then, when the whole family had fallen asleep and my eyes had started to smart from reading by dim lamplight, I’d slip outside, closing the door gently behind me.

后来，洪让我把我的桌子搬进他的房间，那是个不到10平方英尺的单间，他全家人都睡在上面的那张床占了大部分空间。他还把自己的小煤油灯借给我。每天吃完晚饭，在井边洗完澡，我都会悄悄到他的房间里去读一两小时的书。等到他全家人进入梦乡，我的眼睛也开始因为在昏暗的灯光下阅读而酸痛时，我就会悄悄走出去，轻轻关上房门。

My real education began in that room. After reading three or four other books that I saved from a similar fate, I moved on to the copies of Balzac and Turgenev that some of the city kids were circulating secretly among themselves. We all knew who the other would-be intellectuals were. To avoid getting caught, people would tear the covers off books. I first read 19th-century classics like “Eugénie Grandet” or “Le Père Goriot” in these faceless editions. Before long I was tackling tougher material: Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” and Cao Xueqin’s “Dream of the Red Chamber,” which my dad had kept in a locked drawer at home and whose three volumes I’d paged through yearningly as I was just learning to read.

我真正的教育就是在这个房间里开始的。读过三四本遭受类似命运、被我救下来的书之后，我便开始阅读一些城里孩子们私下流传的巴尔扎克和屠格涅夫的书。我们这些自诩有知识的人彼此都互相认识。当时人们会把书的封面撕下来，以防被抓到。我第一次读到《欧也妮·葛朗台》(Eugénie Grandet)、《高老头》(Le Père Goriot)等19世纪的经典作品，都是这种没有封面的书。不久后我又开始读更难的书籍：托尔斯泰的《安娜·卡列尼娜》、曹雪芹的《红楼梦》，在家里的时候，父亲把《红楼梦》藏在一个锁着的抽屉里，如今我如饥似渴地阅读着这部三卷本的巨著，就好像刚刚学会读书一样。

I lent my father’s books around the countryside, trading them for other ones I wanted to read. Ten years later, when I came back from Hainan to go to university, my father picked me up on the pier. One of the first sentences out of his mouth was, “Did you bring back my books?” I did. I brought back the entire set.

在农村，我把父亲的书借出去换回自己想读的书。十年后，我从海南回到家乡上大学，父亲来到码头接我。一见我就说：“我的书你带回来了吗？”我带回来了，整套书我都带回来了。