Mother Tongue (母语) by Amy Tan
Mother Tongue (母语)
Amy Tan
The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.—by Ruth Benedict
个人的生命历程，首当其冲，是对其传统文化模式和标准的接受—鲁思.本尼迪克特
I am not a scholar of English or literature .I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others.
我既不是英语语言学家，也不是文学专家。我只能就英语及其在美国和其它国家的变化谈些个人观点，仅此而已。
I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language—the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trad
e. And I use them all—all the Englishes I grew up with. 我是个作家，按作家的定义，我是那种一直热爱语言的人。我着迷于日常生活中的语言。我花费了很长时间来思考语言的力量—语言是如何唤起情感、视觉景象、复杂思想或简明真理。语言是我的执业工具。我应用所有的英语—与我一生相伴的所有英语形式。
Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life, and my book, The Joy Luck Club. The talk was going along well enough until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her.I was saying things like,”The intersection of memory upon imagination”and “There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus ”---a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.
最近发生的一些事使我对我所用的不同形式的英语有了更为深刻的认识。我当时正为很多人做讲座，同样的讲座已经搞过很多次。内容是关于我的写作、生活及小说《喜福会》。讲座进行的很顺利，直到我
突然意识到了一个重要的不同之处，这个不同使整个讲座变得不对味了。我的母亲来了。这可能是她头一次听我用一种从未跟她讲过的英语做这么长的的讲座。我在讲，比如“记忆与想象的交错”“我的作品一个侧面反映了…..”等等等等，言词中充满了精心雕琢的语法词组，也重负着，我突然感觉到，所有那些我在学校和教科书里学到的诸如名词化形式、过去完成时、条件词组等标准语法形式，这些英语形式我在家从未曾与母亲使用过。Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use with her. We were talking about the price of new and used furniture and I heard myself saying this: "Not waste money that way." My husband was with us as well, and he didn't notice any switch in my English. And then I realized why. It's because over the twenty years that we have been together I've often used the same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with.
就在上个星期，我与母亲一起沿街散步，这期间我再次发现自己对所用的英语形式的意识，那是种只跟母亲才说的英语。我们当时正在聊新家具和二手家具的价格，我听见自己这样说道：“别浪费钱那样”我先生也在，可他并没有注意到我语言上的任何变化。于是我到了原因。那是因为在我们共处的二十多年中，我经常用这种英语与他交谈，有时甚至他也用。这种英语已经成了我们的亲密语言，一种与家庭谈话相关的、不同英语，是伴我成长的语言。
You should know that my mother's expressive command of English belies how much she actually understands. She reads the Forbes report, listens to Wall Street Week, converses
daily with her stockbroker, reads all of Shirley Macline’s books with ease---all kinds of things I can’t begin to understand. Yet some of my friends tell me they only understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother's English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It's my mother tongue. Her language, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world.
应该让你们了解一下我母亲富于表现力的英语运用掩盖了多少她真实的理解。她读的是《福布斯》报告，听的是华尔街每周论坛，每天都和她的股票经纪人通话，可以轻松阅读雪莉.麦克兰妮的所有书—而所有这些我还没有弄明白是怎么回事呢。可我的一些朋友跟我说，母亲的话他们只能听懂了一半。有些说听懂了十之八九，有些什么也没听懂，就好像她完全在说中国话。但对我而言，母亲的英语非常清楚、非常自然。这就是我的“母语”。她的语言，在我听来，既生动、率直，又充满了观察和意象。就是这种语言帮我形成了看待事物、表达思想、了解世界的方法。
Lately, I've been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have desc
ribed it to people as "broken" or “fractured” English. But I wince when I say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than "broken", as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness. I've heard other terms used, "limited English", for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people's perceptions of the limited English speaker.
最近，我一直在思考母亲所使用的这种英语。像其他人一样，我曾把它说成是“蹩脚的英语”或者“破碎的英语”。但是这样做使我心理很不痛快。除了“蹩脚的”我想不出其他的词来描述它，就好像它坏掉了，需要修补，好像它缺乏某种整体性和完整性，这个问题一直困扰着我。我也听到过其他的用词，比如“有限的英语”。但是这个字眼也好不到哪去，好像一切都被限制住了，包括人们对英语能力有限的人的理解。
I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother's "limited" English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.
对此我有切身体会，因为在我成长的过程中，母亲“有限的”英语曾限制了我对她的了解。我曾为她的英语感到羞愧。我那时认为她的英语能反映出她说话内容的水平。也就是说，因为她不能很好地表达，所以她的想法也不会很好。并且我有大量的事实证据来支持我的观点：百货公司售货员、银行职员、饭店服务员都不拿她当回事，要么服务不周到，要么装听不懂，有的甚至对她不理不睬。
My mother has long realized the limitations of her English as well. When I was fifteen, she used to have me call people on the phone to pretend I was she. In this guise, I was forced to ask for information or even to complain and yell at people who had been rude to her. One time it was a call to her stockbroker in New York. She had cashed out her small portfolio and it just so happened we were going to go to New York the next week, our very first trip outside California. I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not very convincing, "This is Mrs. Tan."
母亲也很早意识到了她的英语对她的限制。我十五岁时，她经常让我冒充她来给别人打电话。打着母亲的幌子，我替她查问消息、投诉、甚至朝那些对她不礼貌的人大喊大叫。有一次是给母亲在纽约的股票经纪人打电话。她刚刚结清了一小笔股票，而碰巧下个星期我们打算去纽约，这将是我们第一次到加利福尼亚以外的地方去旅行。我拿起电话，用稚嫩的让人难以相信的声音说道：“我是谭夫人。”
And my mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, "Why he don't send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money."
母亲站在我的身后，大声对我耳语：“为什么他不给我支票，已经晚了两个星期了。这么疯狂他对我撒谎，损失我的钱。”
And then I said in perfect English, "Yes, I'm getting rather concerned. You had agreed to send the check two weeks ago, but it hasn't arrived."
我于是用流利的英语说道：“是的，我现在很担心。两个星期前您就同意将支票寄过来了，但是到现在我还没有收到。”
Then she began to talk more loudly, "what he want, I come to New York tell him front of his boss, you cheating me?" And I was trying to calm her down, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker, "I can't tolerate any more excuses. If I don't receive the check immediately, I am going to have to speak to your manager when I'm in New York next week." And sure enough, the following week there we were in front of this astonished stockbroker, and I was sitting there red-faced and quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting at his boss in her impeccable broken English.
母亲的声音更大了，“他想要什么，我要到纽约当着他老板的面告诉他，你欺骗了我？”我一面使他平静下来，让她别出声，一边告诉经纪人，“我再也不能容忍任何借口。如果我不能马上收到支票，下星期到纽约时，我将直接你的经理谈。”不出所料，此后第二个星期我们出现在那个吃惊的股票经纪人面前，sort of和kind of
我满脸通红地坐在一边，没有出声，我的母亲，那位真正的谭夫人，正用她那无可挑剔的蹩脚的英语朝他的老板大声叫喊。
We used a similar routine just five days ago, for a situation that was far less humorous. My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment, to find out about a benign brain tumor a CAT scan had revealed a month ago. She said she had spoken very good English, her best English, no mistakes. Still, she said, the hospital did not apologize when they said they had lost the CAT scan and she had come for nothing. She said they did not seem to have any sympathy when she told them she was anxious to know the exact diagnosis, since her husband and son had both died of brain tumors. She said they would not give her any more information until the next time and she would have to make another appointment for that. So she said she would not leave until the doctor called her daughter. She wouldn't budge. And when the doctor finally called her daughter, me, who spoke in perfect English -- lo and behold -- we had assurances the CAT scan would be found, promises that a conference call on Monday would be held, and apologies for any suffering my mother had gone through for a most regrettable mistake.
就在五天前，我们又故技重施，但是这次的情形却远没有那么幽默。我的母亲按约定去一家医院咨询她脑部的良性肿瘤问题，这个肿瘤是一个月前做CT扫描时发现的。她说她已经讲得非常好了，是她讲得最
好的英语，没有错误。可她说，那家医院在告知她CT照片已丢失，让她白白跑了一趟时却并没有做任何道歉。母亲说，她告诉他们因为她的先生和儿子都死于脑瘤，所以她非常急于知道确切的诊断结果，而在她讲述这一切时，院方似乎没有表示任何的同情。她说只有等到下次预约，医院才可能有消息给她，而为此她不得不安排另外一次预约。于是她告诉他们，在医生给她女儿打电话之前她那也不会去。她是不会让步的。当那位医生最终打通了她的女儿，也就是能说一口流利英语的我的电话时，你瞧，他们保证说CT照片会被到，并承诺在星期一举行会诊，而且因这非常遗憾的错误而为我母亲带来的任何不便，他们对此道歉。
I think my mother's English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life as well. Sociologists and linguists probably will tell you that a person's developing language skills are more influenced by peers. But I do think that the language spoken in the family, especially in immigrant families which are more insular, plays a large role in shaping the language of the child. And I believe that it affected my results on achievement tests, IQ tests, and the SAT. While my English skills were never judged as poor, compared to math, English could not be considered my strong suit. In grade school I did moderately well, getting perhaps B's, sometimes B-pluses, in English and scoring perhaps in the sixtieth or seventieth percentile on achievement tests. But those scores were not good enough to override the opinion that my true abilities lay in math and science, because in those areas I achieved A’s and scored in the ninetieth percentile or higher.
在我看来，母亲的英语还差点限制了我人生的发展。社会学家和语言学家可能会告诉你，一个人语言技巧的发展更多的受其同伴的影响。但我却认为在家庭中，尤其是在相对更为封闭的移民家庭中所使用的语言，对其子女语言的形成起着更为重要的作用。我相信我的家庭语言就对我的期末考试、智商测试、还有学能考试结果产生了影响。虽然我的英语考试从未不及格过，但和数学相比，英语算不上我的强项。上小学时，我的英语中等，好像总是得B，偶尔会拿到B+，期末考试时好像一百人中能排在三、四十名左右。但这些分数丝毫不会动摇那些认为我在数学和理科方面很有潜力的观点，因为在这些学科考试中，我一直拿A，而且百人排名在前十位，甚至更高。
This was understandable. Math is precise; there is only one correct answer. Whereas, for me at least, the answers on English tests were always a judgment call, a matter of opinion and personal experience. Those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-the-blank sentence completion, such as, "Even though Tom was _________, Mary thought he was _______:" And the correct answer always seemed to be the most bland combinations of
thoughts, for example, "Even though Tom was shy, Mary thought he was charming;' with the grammatical structure "even though" limiting the correct answer to some sort of semantic opposites, so you wouldn't get answers like, "Even though Tom was foolish, Mary thought he was ridiculous." Well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what Tom could have been and what Mar
y might have thought of him. So I never did well on tests like that.
这是可以理解的。数学是精确的；只有一个正确答案。而英语考试是依靠个人判断，取决于个人观点和经历，至少对我来说是这样的。英语考试的题目往往设计成填空完成句子，比如：“尽管汤姆很---，但是玛丽却认为他--；”正确答案总像是一些观点的乏味组合，例如，“尽管汤姆很害羞，但是玛丽却认为他挺有魅力；”语法结构“尽管”限定了正确答案只能是某种语义上相反的搭配，所以你不会得出这样的答案，“尽管汤姆很愚蠢，但玛丽却认为他很可笑。”而在我母亲看来，汤姆是什么样的人，而玛丽又会怎样看他是很少有限定的。所以，在这种考试中我的表现一向不怎么样。
The same was true with word analogies, pairs of words in which you were supposed to find some sort of logical, semantic relationship-for example, "Sunset is to nightfall as _____is to _____." And here you would be presented with a list of four possible pairs, one of which showed the same kind of relationship: red is to stoplight, bus is to arrival, chills is to fever, yawn is to boring. Well, I could never think that way. I knew what the tests were asking, but I could not block out of my mind the images already created by the first pair, " sunset is to nightfall" -- and I would see a burst of colors against a darkening sky, the moon rising, the lowering of a curtain of stars. And all the other pairs of words-red, bus, stoplight, boring-just threw up a mass of confusing images, making it impossible for me to sort out something as logical as saying: "A sunset precedes nightfall" is the same as "a chill precedes a fever.”
The only way I would have gotten that answer right would have been to imagine an associative situation, for example, my being disobedient and staying out past sunset, catching a chill at night, which turns into feverish pneumonia as punishment, which indeed did happen to me.
词汇类比题也是一样的，就是那种让你在两组词之间出某种逻辑和语义上的联系的试题，例如，“日落和夜幕降临就像--和--。”然后给你四组可能的搭配，其中一对词，体现相同的逻辑语义：红和停车灯，公共汽车和到达，寒战和发烧，哈欠和乏味。而我呢，从来就不会这样的思考。明知道测试的目的是什么，可第一组词在我脑海中构成的景象就是挥之不去，“日落和夜幕降临”—我会看见缤纷的彩映衬在逐渐暗下去的天空中，月亮在缓缓升起，星点缀的幕布正在徐徐落下。其他所有的词—红，公共汽车，停车灯，乏味—只会形成一团乱糟糟的画面，而让我不出如此有逻辑的表达：“日落预示着夜幕降临”、“寒战预示着发烧”两者有着同样的逻辑关系。唯一能让我得出正确答案的方法就是想象一个相关的场景，比如，我不听话，天黑了还不回家，结果晚上发寒战，发展成了高烧肺炎，以此来惩戒我，这种事情的确在我身上发生过。
I have been thinking about all this lately, about my mother's English, about achievement tests. Because lately I've been asked, as a writer, why there are not more Asian Americans represented in American literature. Why are there few Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so many Chinese students go into engineering? Well, these are broad sociological questions I can't be
gin to answer. But I have noticed in surveys -- in fact, just last week -- that Asian students, as a whole, always do significantly better on math achievement tests than in English. And this makes me think that there are other Asian-American students whose English spoken in the home might also be described as "broken" or "limited.' And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing and into math and science, which is what happened to me.
我母亲的英语、我的期末考试，我最近一直在思考这一切。因为最近有人问过身为作家的我为什么亚裔美国人很少能在美国文学界有所建树呢？为什么亚裔美国人很少报名上创作课？为什么如此多的中国学生去学工程技术？这些是社会学问题，涉及面很广，我也不知道该如何回答。但我在一些统计调查中发现--实际上就在上个星期—亚裔学生，从整体上看，在数学考试中的表现都要明显好于英语考试。这使我想到还有一些亚裔美国学生，他们在家里说的英语也可能被认为是“蹩脚的”或“有限的”。也许他们的老师也在引导他们远离写作而进入数学和科学领域，就像我的老师那样。
Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me.
I became an English major my first year in college, after being enrolled as premed. I started writing nonfiction as a freelancer the week after I was told by my former boss that writing was my worst skill and I should hone my talents toward account management.
幸运的是，我碰巧具有反叛的本性，喜欢挑战证明别人对我的看法是错的。在被录取为医生预科生后，我在大学第一年就成了一名英语专业的学生。我的前任老板告诉我，我的写作是最糟糕的，我应该把我的才能发挥在账目管理上，在他说完这番话之后一个星期，我开始作为自由职业者创作非小说类纪实文章。
But it wasn't until I985 that I finally began to write fiction. And at first I wrote using what I thought to be wittily
crafted sentences, sentences that would finally prove I had mastery over the English language. Here's an example from the first draft of a story that later made its way into The Joy Luck Club, but without this line: "That was my mental quandary in its nascent state." A terrible line, which I can barely pronounce.
直到1985年，我终于开始写小说了。起初我写东西都是用我认为精雕细琢的句子，最终目的是证明我对英语语言的驾驭能力。有个例子是我的一个故事的第一稿，这个故事后来被放到了《喜福会》中，但其中这句话被删去了：“那是我萌芽状态中的精神困惑。”很糟糕的一句话，我现在几乎都读不出来了。Fortunately, for reasons I won't get into today, I later decided I should envision a reader for the stories I would write. And the reader I decided upon was my mother, because these were stories about mothers.
So with this reader in mind -- and in fact she did read my early drafts -- I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better term might be described as "simple"; the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might be described as "broken"; my translation of her Chinese, which could certainly be described as "watered-down"; and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure. I wanted to capture what language ability tests can never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.
幸运的是，我后来决定应该事先想好一个人来做我要写小说的读者，这样的做的原因我今天不想提了。这个最终被我选定的读者是我的母亲，因为这些小说都是围绕母亲的。于是脑海中铭记这个读者—事实上她的确读了我的初期草稿—我开始写小说了，用我成长过程中的所有的英语：我与母亲交流所使用的英语，由于不到更好的字眼就用“简单”来形容吧；母亲与我交流时所使用的英语，同样不到更好的字眼就用“蹩脚”来形容吧；我为母亲的汉语做的英语翻译，当然只能用“掺了水”来形容；我想象中的能说流利英语的母亲对她所说汉语的自我翻译，也就是她的内在语言，我想保留的就是这种英语的精华，但既不是以英语结构，也不是以汉语的结构。我想捕捉的是语言能力测试永远也不能体现的东西：母亲的想法、情感、意象、话语中的韵律和她思想的本质。
Apart from what any critic had to say about my writing, I knew I had succeeded where it counted when my mother finished reading my book and gave me her verdict: "So easy to read."
我知道，无论任何评论家对我的作品做出怎样的评价，当我母亲读完我的书，并给出她的评价：“很好读”时，我的目的就达到了。
Lengthy 长篇的；intersection 交汇；wrought 精心制作的；
Nominal 名义上的intimacy 亲密的；belie 掩饰；
Converse 谈话；stockbroker 股票经纪人；imagery 意象；
Fractured 折断的；wince 畏缩的；soundness 完整性；
Empirical 亲身体验的；guise 借口；portfolio 投资组合；
Impeccable 完美的；benign 良性的；diagnosis 诊断；
Budge 让步；regrettable 令人遗憾的；linguist 语言学家；
Peer 同龄人；insular 封闭的；percentile 百分位数；
Override 否决，不同意；bland乏味的，清淡的；semantic 语义的；
Analogy 类比；precede 领先，优于；disobedient 违背；
Pneumonia 肺炎；rebellious 叛逆的；disprove 证明..虚假的；
Premed医学预科生；nonfiction 纪实文学；freelancer 自由职业者；
Hone 磨练培养；witty 机智的；mastery 精通；
Quandary 困惑；nascent 萌芽的；verdict观点；

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