American Translation

By Amy Tan

《喜福会》讲述的是四位华裔母亲和她们在美国长大的女儿之间的故事。这几位华裔妇女虽移居美国已有几十年，但她们从小受过的中国传统教育却无法从她们的血液中抹去。她们按中国的传统思想教育和管束自己的女儿。这期选登的是樱樱·圣克莱尔和莉娜·圣克莱尔这对母女之间的故事。

母亲樱樱·圣克莱尔有着屈辱而辛酸的过去：因无情的丈夫另觅新欢，她溺死了初生的婴儿报复丈夫，然后逃离家庭，另寻生路。在受尽了生活的折磨之后她变成了一个“看不见的幽灵”，一个能未卜先知、预测灾难的女巫般的人物。然而在美国出生的女儿莉娜·圣克莱尔却在美利坚重复着母亲的故事。她自认为在学业、智力、工作能力等各方面都不比丈夫逊色，是她协助丈夫创办了他们自己的建筑设计公司。但事实上，她的婚姻和生活都处于“账目均摊”的阴影之下，最终使她丧失了自尊和自信。而这一切都在母亲的预料之中。

“Wah!” cried the mother upon seeing the mirrored armoire（法式大衣橱）in the master suite（主卧） of her daughter’s new condominium（分契式公寓）. “You cannot put mirrors at the foot of the bed. All your marriage happiness will bounce back（反弹）and turn the opposite way.”

To this day, I believe my mother has the mysterious ability to see things before they happen.She has a Chinese saying for what she knows.Chunwang chihan（唇亡齿寒）: If the lips are gone,the teeth will be cold. Which means, I suppose, one thing is always the result of another.

One time when I was growing up in San Francisco, she looked at the way our new apartment sat too steeply on the hill. She said the new baby in her womb（子宫）would fall out dead, and it did.

When a plumbing and bathroom fixtures store opened up across the street from our bank, my mother said the bank would soon have all its money drained away（流失）. And one month later, an of ficer of the bank was arrested for embezzlement（挪用公款）.

I remember this ability of my mother’s, because now she is visiting my husband and me in the house we just bought in Woodside. And I wonder what she will see.

My mother and I are alone in the house. I start to water the plants. She is standing on her tiptoes,peering at（凝视）a list stuck on our refrigerator door.

The list says “Lena” and “Harold” and under each of our names are things we’ve bought and how much they cost:

Lena

chicken, veg., bread, broccoli, shampoo, beer$19.63

作者及其作品

图书封面

Maria (clean + tip) $65

groceries (see shop list) $55.15

Petunias（矮牵牛花）, potting soil（盆栽土）$14.11

Photo developing $13.83

Harold

Garage stuff $25.35

Bathroom stuff $5.41

Car stuff $6.57

Light Fixtures $87.26

Road gravel（铺路用的碎石） $19.99

Gas $22.00

Car Smog Check（排气检查）$35

Movies & Dinner $65

Ice Cream $4.50

“What is this writing?” asks my mother in Chinese.

“Oh, nothing really. Just things we share,” I say as casually as I can.

And she looks at me and frowns but doesn’t say anything. She goes back to reading the list, this time more carefully, moving her finger down each item.

And I feel embarrassed, knowing what she’s seeing.I’m relieved that she doesn’t see the other half of it,the discussions. Through countless talks, Harold and I reached an understanding about not including personal things like “mascara （睫毛膏）,” and“shaving lotion（剃须润肤乳）,” “hair spray（发胶）”or “Bic shavers（比克牌剃须刀）,” “tampons （卫生棉条）,” or “athlete’s foot powder（爽足粉）.”

When we got married at city hall, he insisted on paying the fee. And when we bought the house,we agreed that I should pay only a percentage of the mortgage based on what I earn and what he earns, and that I should own an equivalent percentage of community property; this is written in our prenuptial（婚前的） agreement.Since Harold pays more, he had the deciding vote on how the house should look. It is sleek（井然有序的）, spare, and what he calls “ fluid,”nothing to disrupt the line, meaning none of my cluttered（杂乱的）look. As for vacations, the one we choose together is fifty- fifty. The others Harold pays for, with the understanding that it’s a birthday or Christmas present, or an anniversary gift.

And we’ve had philosophical（冷静的）arguments over things that have gray borders, like my birth control pills, or dinners at home when we entertain people who are really his clients or my old friends from college, or food magazines that I subscribe to（订阅）but he also reads only because he’s bored, not because he would have chosen them for himself.

And we still argue about Mirugai, the cat—not our cat, or my cat, but the cat that was his gift to me for my birthday last year.

“This, you do not share!” exclaims my mother in an astonished voice. And I am startled （震惊的）, thinking she had read my thoughts about Mirugai. But then I see she is pointing to “ice cream” on Harold’s list. My mother must remember the incident on the fire escape landing, where she found me, shivering and exhausted, sitting next to that container of regurgitated （反胃的） ice cream.I could never stand the stuff after that. And then I am startled once again to realize that Harold has never noticed that I don’t eat any of the ice cream he brings home every Friday evening.

“Why you do this?”

My mother has a wounded sound in her voice,as if I had put the list up to hurt her. I think how to explain this, recalling the words Harold and I have used with each other in the past: “So we can eliminate false dependencies…be equals…love without obligation…” But these are words she could never understand.

So instead I tell my mother this: “I don’t really know. It’s something we started before we got married. And for some reason we never stopped.”

……

During dinner, Harold keeps the conversation going. He talks about the plans for the house:the skylights, expanding the deck（露天平台）,planting flower beds of tulips and crocuses（番红花）, clearing the poison oak（毒葛）, adding another wing, building a Japanese-style tile bathroom.And then he clears the table and starts stacking the plates in the dishwasher.

“Who’s ready for dessert?” he asks, reaching into the freezer.

“I’m full,” I say.

“Lena cannot eat ice cream,” says my mother.

“So it seems. She’s always on a diet.”

“No, she never eat it. She doesn’t like.”

And now Harold smiles and looks at me puzzled,expecting me to translate what my mother has said.

“It’s true,” I say evenly. “I’ve hated ice cream almost all my life.”

Harold looks at me, as if I, too, were speaking Chinese and he could not understand.

“I guess I assumed you were just trying to lose weight… Oh well.”

“She become so thin now you cannot see her,”says my mother. “She like a ghost, disappear.”

“That’s right! Christ, that’s great,” exclaims Harold, laughing, relieved in thinking my mother is graciously（好心地）trying to rescue him.

The only decoration is an odd-looking piece right next to the bed: an end table（茶几） made out of a slab（厚板）of unevenly cut marble and thin crisscrosses of black lacquer（漆）wood for the legs. My mother puts her handbag on the table and the cylindrical（圆柱的）black vase on top starts to wobble（摇晃）. The freesias（小苍兰）in the vase quiver.

“Careful, it’s not too sturdy,” I say. The table is a poorly designed piece that Harold made in his student days. I’ve always wondered why he’s so proud of it. The lines are clumsy. It doesn’t bear any of the traits of “ fluidity”that are so important to Harold these days.

“What use for?” asks my mother, jiggling the table with her hand. “You put something else on top,everything fall down. Chunwang chihan.”

……

“What’s going on here?”

“I just don’t think you should get credit for your ice cream anymore.”

He shrugs his shoulders, amused. “Suits me.”

“Why do you have to be so goddamn fair!” I shout.

Harold puts his magazine down, now wearing his openmouthed exasperated（激怒的）look. “What is this?Why don’t you say what’s really the matter?”

“I don’t know… I don’t know. Everything… the way we account for everything. What we share. What we don’t share. I’m so tired of it, adding things up,subtracting, making it come out even. I’m sick of it.”“You were the one who wanted the cat.”“What are you talking about?”

“All right. If you think I’m being unfair about the exterminators（杀虫剂）, we’ll both pay for it.”

“That’s not the point!”

“Then tell me, please, what is the point?”

“I just think we have to change things,” I say when I think I can control my voice. Only the rest comes out like whining （抱怨，发牢骚）. “We need to think about what our marriage is really based on… not this balance sheet（资产负债表）, who owes who what.”

“Shit,” Harold says. And then he sighs and leans back, as if he were thinking about this. Finally he says in what sounds like a hurt voice, “Well, I know our marriage is based on a lot more than a balance sheet. A lot more. And if you don’t then I think you should think about what else you want, before you change things.”

And now I don’t know what to think. What am I saying? What’s he saying? We sit in the room, not saying anything. The air feels muggy（闷热的，潮湿的）.I look out the window, and out in the distance is the valley beneath us, a sprinkling of thousands of lights shimmering in the summer fog. And then I hear the sound of glass shattering, upstairs, and a chair scrapes across a wood floor.

Harold starts to get up, but I say, “No, I’ll go see.”The door is open, but the room is dark, so I call out,“Ma?”

I see it right away: the marble end table collapsed on top of its spindly（细长的） black legs. Off to the side is the black vase, the smooth cylinder broken in half, the freesias strewn（撒满的，散播的） in a puddle of water.

电影剧照

And then I see my mother sitting by the open window, her dark silhouette（轮廓） against the night sky. She turns around in her chair, but I can’t see her face.

“Fallen down,” she says simply. She doesn’t apologize.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say, and I start to pick up the broken glass shards（碎片）. “I knew it would happen.”

“Then why you don’t stop it?” asks my mother.

And it’s such a simple question.