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黄小邪 09-16-2005 08:53

跑跑

去看跑跑一家。跑跑妈妈李作家在奥克兰(Oakland)一私立college教授creative writing。她的短篇小说集《A Thousand Years of Good Prayers》将于9月20号登场。然后是一系列的book tour。惜乎因了跑跑八个月大的弟弟舀舀,她的爱尔兰之行取消——她被提名爱尔兰一重要文学奖项。

跑跑带着腮边的巧克力遗迹,花老虎般蹦跳着随爸爸来接。数月不见,又有些腼腆了,一被挑逗,就将小花脸埋在爸爸腿上。

穿过古树幽径,见他们的新家高踞山坡上,有西班牙风格。门外有些花草,但院子大都荒芜着。他们7月才搬来,想必前任住户留居不久,无心庭园。但卧室窗外密密的一排修竹,绿幽幽的,不知何人何岁种下,逸趣盎然,倒像隐居生活。跑跑与我在竹下戏耍蹦跳一阵,又央妈妈打开水龙头给竹子浇水。水龙旋转,水花四溅,跑跑看得手舞足蹈。又张罗去浇其他花草,烈日当空,妈妈说:它们会着凉感冒的。方作罢。

跑跑最近的口头禅是一连串的“why”,任何事打破砂锅问到底,纵妈妈聪明善对,有时也给问得张口结舌。跑跑不听话了,爸妈就联手吓唬说要没收他的宝贝玩具和书,起初还忌惮,后来就笑嘻嘻拿书出来说:给,没收吧。

与很多这里长大的华裔孩子一样,最近才开始学说中文,说多了就说:唉,说得我头疼。不然就混着说,“garage 太 dirty”(车库太脏)这类句子常冒出来。

脑子真好,还记得去年我跟他玩穿珠子时“hot pink”“hot purple”那些笑话,又嚷要找珠子出来。寻了一阵,想起留在Iowa,给表妹揉揉玩了。

大家开车出去,饱餐了火锅。带跑跑去旁边的玩具店,我们俩都看得眼花缭乱。不过跑跑总能在纷乱表象中立即找到关键——开关,那些宝贝就唱起来,亮起来,或高吼起来:“fire!fire!bang-bang-bang-bang”……但他东玩西瞧,倒看不出特别钟情哪个。最后还是爸爸要他挑,他选了7个忍者,不同颜色的衣服,不同的刀枪剑戟。

回家闲谈,大家陪他拿忍者们耍弄一番。为个小缘故,跑跑也是累了,大哭起来,被爸爸关了禁闭。听得哭声渐小且间隔时间长些,偷偷推门看时,见他脸上笑着,摆弄着玩具,不时伪装出哭声——据跑跑爸妈说,这是他最近常玩的游戏。

卡拉 09-16-2005 09:48


A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
Stories
Written by Yiyun Li

Fiction - Short Stories (single author) | Random House | Hardcover | September 2005 | $21.95 | 1-4000-6312-4

 
ABOUT THIS BOOK

Brilliant and original, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers introduces a remarkable new writer whose breathtaking stories are set in China and among Chinese Americans in the United States. In this rich, astonishing collection, Yiyun Li illuminates how mythology, politics, history, and culture intersect with personality to create fate. From the bustling heart of Beijing, to a fast-food restaurant in Chicago, to the barren expanse of Inner Mongolia, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers reveals worlds both foreign and familiar, with heartbreaking honesty and in beautiful prose.

“Immortality,” winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for new writers, tells the story of a young man who bears a striking resemblance to a dictator and so finds a calling to immortality. In “The Princess of Nebraska,” a man and a woman who were both in love with a young actor in China meet again in America and try to reconcile the lost love with their new lives.

“After a Life” illuminates the vagaries of marriage, parenthood, and gender, unfolding the story of a couple who keep a daughter hidden from the world. And in “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” in which a man visits America for the first time to see his recently divorced daughter, only to discover that all is not as it seems, Li boldly explores the effects of communism on language, faith, and an entire people, underlining transformation in its many meanings and incarnations.

These and other daring stories form a mesmerizing tapestry of revelatory fiction by an unforgettable writer.

PRAISE

“Yiyun Li is a true storyteller. Great stories offer us the details of life on the riverbanks: birth, family, dinner, and love, all framing the powerful flow of terror, death, political change, the river itself. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is as grand an epic and as tenderly private as a reader could wish.”
–Amy Bloom, author of Come to Me

“With great tenderness, tact, and humor, these stories open a world that is culturally remote from us, and at the same time as humanly intimate as if its people were our own family and their thoughts the thoughts that lie nearest our own hearts.”
–Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead and Housekeeping

“This extraordinary collection reminds you just how big a short story can be. With wit, ruthlessness, and an understanding of human nature–its grand follies, private sorrows, and petty dreams–A Thousand Years of Good Prayers may remind you of Flannery O’Connor, though Li is an original. Read this book and marvel at a writer both at the height of her powers and at the start of a brilliant career.”
–Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Giant’s House

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and attended Peking University. She came to the United States in 1996 to study medicine and started writing two years later. After receiving a master’s degree in immunology from the University of Iowa, she attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received an MFA. Li is a recipient of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for new writers. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, and Prospect. She lives in Oakland, California with her husband and their two sons.

Troublemaker 09-16-2005 10:02
我的天呢!

这个黄小邪一定是个“妖精”,所有的字都是带着好几个灵魂的,会把读者带到不同的时空,产生不同的心境。。。

还有这个卡拉!

你真的是比古狗都古狗了,下一回一定得找个你搜不到的东西。

不过,换句话说,也是因为有了你们这样的才子才女们,我们BAC的人才真的是有福了。。。

黄小邪 09-16-2005 12:30
哈哈,我倒希望变个妖精看卡拉这“古狗”怎么“狗”的……

卡拉 09-16-2005 16:54
再股沟一个,Yiyun Li 的片片,才32岁,也是PLMM啊!




卡拉 09-16-2005 17:10
[SOURCE: The Gettysburg Review, Vol. 16, No. 2 / Summer 2003 p.185]

This story I am going to tell you, it is a true story.

  The year was 1968. The girl was nineteen, the secretary of the Communist Youth League for her class in a local high school in Hunan Province, China. You probably don’t know much about Hunan, but I am sure you have heard of at least one person from the province—Chairman Mao, our father, leader, savior, our god and our dictator.

  So it was in 1968 that the nineteen-year-old Hunan girl, after seeing many men and women being kicked and beaten to death by her fellow Red Guards, expressed her doubts about Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution he had started two years earlier, in a letter to her boyfriend, who was serving in the military. He turned in the letter to the company officer. The officer reported to his superiors, who in turn telegraphed the Revolutionary Committee of her town. Three days later, she was arrested.

  She was jailed for ten years, ten long years during which she kept writing to officials of all levels to appeal her case. The letters accumulated as evidence of her failure to reform, and ten years later, in a retrial, she was sentenced to death.
She was executed in the spring of 1978, two years after Chairman Mao’s death. Hundreds of people attended the execution in a local stadium. A bullet took her twenty-nine-year-old life, and that was the end of her story.

But the story I am telling you, it is not over yet.

  Because I still have to tell you what happened before the final moment. Minutes before the execution, an ambulance rushed into the stadium, and several medical workers jumped out. I call them medical workers because I don’t know if they were doctors. Do doctors kill? But these medical workers, they were professional, efficient. Working quickly so as not to delay the execution, they removed the girl’s kidneys. No anesthesia.

  The bullet entered her brain after the kidneys were taken out. The brain was the sinning organ. The kidneys were amnestied, airlifted to a hospital in the province capital, and transplanted into an older man’s body. The man was the father of a member of the province Revolutionary Committee.

  The kidneys outlived her, for how many years I do not know.

The story I am telling you, it does not end when the brain was murdered. Not yet.

  Because I still have to tell you what happened to the young woman’s body, minus her kidneys. Like the families of many counterrevolutionaries, her family paid for the bullet that took her life. Twenty-four cents it was, the price of a thin slice of pork in 1978. They signed the paper and paid for the bullet, but they did not dare to pick up the body after the execution. So the girl was left outside the town, in a wild land of stray dogs, crows, and other scavengers. One of the others got to the body first, a fifty-seven-year-old janitor. When jars were later discovered at his home, he admitted to having raped the body. Then he amputated the sex organs and preserved them in formaldehyde for his personal collection.

  He was sentenced to seven years of imprisonment.

But the story I am telling you—you may have guessed this by now—the story I am telling you, it is not over yet.

  At the time, in the city in Hunan Province, before the final sentence of the young woman, there were people who tried to organize and appeal on her behalf. They did not stop at the woman’s execution, fighting now not for her life but her innocence. Ping-Fan, depurge, was what it was called, for in our country, as in any other communist nation, innocence was determined not by one’s behavior but by the tolerance of such behavior at a certain time. I grew up reading stories of depurge in newspapers and magazines, of people who had been labeled as counterrevolutionaries for ten, twenty, or even thirty years, and now were reabsorbed into our communist family. Some were still alive, but most who were depurged had long been dead. Still, a readmission to the society was celebrated by grateful family members in tears. So you see, in our country, one’s story does not end at one’s death.

  Back in the Hunan town, people gathered for the young woman’s posthumous reputation. Hundreds of people joined the protest, and every one of them was punished in the end, years in prison for some, dismissal or suspension from work for luckier ones. One of them, a woman thirty-two years old, an organizer of the protest and mother of a two-year-old boy, was sentenced to death. She signed on the sentence paper and was reported to have thrown away the pen and said, “What makes you all fear death so? Everybody dies.”

I am not sure how to tell the story I want to tell you. Sometimes when I think about the story, it becomes a grotesque kaleidoscope spinning with patterns and colors that startle my eyes. Sometimes I have to shut my eyes in order not to see.

  And shut my mind’s eye so I can stop imagining: the clean incision when the scalpel cut into the skin, hastily disinfected for the sake of the kidneys; the short moment between the operation and the death; the parents who gave up not only the daughter’s life but her body; or the boy who grew up not knowing his mother and who was taught to thank the government five years later when she was depurged.

  What makes you all fear death so? I do not have an answer. I run away from the deaths of the two young women because I have only enough courage to tell the stories of those alive—for instance, the audience who filed into the stadium and watched the young woman suffer and die. The execution must have taken place in the morning, as all executions have in my country for hundreds of years. Did people go to the stadium first before they went to work, or did they parade to the stadium from different working units, singing Chinese and Soviet marching songs?

  I try to see the world through my eyes of 1978. That spring I was five and a half years old, a problematic kid in day care, disliked by all the aunties, as we called the day care teachers. One, Auntie Wang, especially hated me. I knew she hated me, but I did not know why. I feared her more than any other kid feared her; I feared her more than I feared any other person in my life. I was always the first to stop playing and run to her when she called out any order. I would stand in front of her, looking with expecting eyes, waiting for her to praise my promptness. But she saw through my willingness and brushed my head aside with a heavy hand. “Stop looking at me like that. I know you do this just to make us believe you are a good kid. Don’t think you can deceive me.”

  I tried not to cry, not knowing that what angered her was my blunt, wide-eyed stare. Auntie Wang turned to another auntie and said, “This is a kid who has too much of her own will.” The other auntie agreed.

  I did not know what they meant. I did not have any will except to please Auntie Wang so she would smile at me, or praise me, or at least not yell at me every time I played the guerilla leader. In the day care our favorite game was battle game, boys the male guerilla fighters, girls the female guerilla fighters. Our enemy was Japanese invaders, the reactionary nationalist army, American soldiers in Korea or Vietnam, all in the forms of houses and trees, rails and weeds. I was always the guerilla leader because I was the one who made up the story for our battle games, the one to lead them to charge or retreat.

  But before I had won my first battle this morning, Auntie Wang grabbed my collar and brought me to a full stop. “What are you making them do?” she said.

I tried not to look at her, but I did. “Play guerillas,” I said.

“No guerilla playing today,” Auntie Wang said and waved to my soldiers standing beside me. “Go play other games.”

The boys and girls scattered. I tried to slip away, but Auntie Wang stopped me with a thundering yell. “You, did I tell you to leave?”
 
“No,” I said.

“Right. Time-out for you this morning. Now squat here.”

  I squatted between her and another auntie, who was busy knitting a sweater for her son. Auntie Wang reserved this special punishment for me. Other kids served five or ten minutes of time-out standing in front of her, but she always had me squat, for half an hour at least.

Many years later I read in an article that having prisoners squat for hours is a common practice in Chinese prisons. Squatting while holding the legs, putting the whole body’s weight on the heels of the feet, back bending and hips drooping—such a primitive position creates pain as well as shame, the article said.

  I wonder if Auntie Wang was an inventive person or if she simply knew the practice. Either way, I had to squat in such a position so often that I was no longer bothered by it. Yes, my legs still cramped, but I could still watch my friends with cramping legs. I saw boys chase one another in meaningless circles, girls gather wildflowers and grass leaves. They did not know how to play a guerrilla game without me.

  I sighed. Auntie Wang caught me immediately. “Why did you sigh? Do you think I am wrong to punish you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You are lying. Did you not sigh? I heard you. You are dishonest. Do you hate me?”

  “No,” I said, trying hard to hold back my tears.

  “Liar. I know you hate me. I know you do,” Auntie Wang said.

  Such exchanges happened often when I was on time-out. I did not know what made Auntie Wang so persistent in tormenting me. Did she have much fun having me in the day care? I do not know the answer. Many years later, when I was already in America, my mother met her in a shop. Auntie Wang recognized my mother right away and asked about me. In the next five years, as my mother told me, they met in the street many times, and Auntie Wang asked about me every time. I wonder if she remembers me for the same reason I remember her. Sometimes I wonder about it, knowing I will never get to know the real reason, accepting her comment that I was a kid with too much of my own will as the only explanation.

  So on this unlucky day, I was bracing myself for a long squatting period when the police patrol drove into an open field by our play yard. There were two tall metal poles at the center of the field. On evenings when movies were shown in the open field, a piece of white cloth would be stretched between the two poles, with people sitting on both sides of the screen watching the same war movie and speaking the lines in a collective voice along with the heroic actors. During daytime the field was left for weeds and insects, and I was surprised to see the police car drive in there, calling through a loudspeaker for the residents to gather in ten minutes. Retired men and women walked out of the apartment buildings carrying folding chairs and stools. Some even carried umbrellas to shield them from the morning sun. The electric bell clanked in the nearby elementary school. A minute later students of all grades rushed out of the school building, pushing and shouting and ignoring the teachers’ orders.

  I was so excited by what was going on that I forgot to squat. I stood up and looked for my sister among the schoolchildren. Immediately Auntie Wang came and snatched me off the ground. I was scared, but she did not have time to scold me. She placed me at the end of the long rope that we all held onto when we went out of the day care. I held the rope and started to stomp my feet as other kids did, waiting impatiently to be taken outside our play yard.

  As we walked onto the open field, the old men and women patted and squeezed our cheeks. Other, younger adults had also arrived from different working units. We sat down in the grass at the very front. Workers were building a temporary stage with bamboo sticks and wooden planks. The students from the elementary school sat behind us. I looked back and found my sister in the secondgrade line, and I grinned at her, glad that she was not as close to the stage as I was.

  As we waited, the aunties chattered among themselves and passed around a bag of dried tofu snacks. I caught a black ant and put it in my palm, let it walk over my fingers, something my parents told me not to do because, as they said, my hand was too hot for an ant and it would have a fever walking on my fingers. I watched the ant looking in a feverish way for an exit to leave my hand. When I was tired of the ant, I flipped it with a finger and saw it land on the neck of Auntie Wang, sitting not far from me. I held my breath, but she did not turn around. I hesitated and cried out a warning. “Auntie, auntie,” I said.

  “What?” she turned around and said. “Now it’s you again. Get up and squat. Keep quiet.”

  I got up on my feet, trying to keep my head and my back as close to my legs as I could, so my sister could not tell that I was being punished again.

  The truck drove into the open field as I was struggling to keep a decent squatting position. Policemen, dressed up in snow white uniforms, jumped down from the covered truck. Then four men, all heavily bound with ropes, were pushed out of the truck and led onto the stage. Two policemen stood behind each man, pushing his head down. A police officer with a loudspeaker came onto the stage, announcing that the four counterrevolutionary hooligans had been sentenced to death and the sentence would be carried out after they were paraded through all the neighborhoods of the district. Then he raised a fist and shouted, “Death to the counterrevolutionary hooligans!”

  The aunties signaled us, and I raised my fist, still in the squatting position. We shouted the slogan along with the elementary school students, the uncles and aunts from all the working units, and the retirees, who had already started to leave the meeting with their chairs. The hooligans were escorted back to the truck, and a minute later the police car and the truck pulled out of the open field and drove away to the next meeting place. I felt disappointed at the shortness of the meeting. Auntie Wang walked up to me and put her hand to my head, in the shape of a handgun. “You see that? If you have too much of your own will, you will become a criminal one day. Bang,” she said, pulling her finger as if to trigger the gun, “and you are done.”

So I could have been there in the Hunan stadium, five years old or seventy-five years old, a child trapped in her small unhappiness or an old man already getting tired of the long morning. Did I see the violent struggle of the young woman as the medical workers tried to pin her limbs down? Did I hear the muffled cries that came from her gagged mouth?

  No, I did not see, and I did not hear. I was dozing off, out of boredom. I woke up in time to see another man, a young villager, in a provincial court in central China, stand up and say into the microphone, “I was an orphan. I was illiterate. I did not know how to be a good man. I promise I will learn to be a good man. I ask the people to listen to me.”

  It was the winter of 1991, and I was one of the freshmen of Peking University in the middle of a one-year brainwashing in a military camp in central China. The Harvard of China, as the university advertised itself, Peking University had been the hotbed of every student movement in Chinese history, including the one in 1989 in Tiananmen Square that ended in bloodshed. For the next four years, to immunize the incoming students to the disease that was called freedom, all freshmen were sent to the military for a year of brainwashing, or political reeducation, as it was called.

  Being in the military made me think of myself as a victim of the regime. Having to use toilet stalls that had no doors angered me. Having to listen to the officers call us disgusting wild cats in the mating season after being caught singing a love song in the break or Americans’ walking dogs after being caught reading English in political education class, their spittle on our faces, angered me. Anger sustained us as hope would sustain one in such a situation. Anger fed us instead of the radish stew that never filled our stomachs. Anger made us defy the officers’ orders in public and in secrecy. Anger helped us to endure the punishment with dignity.

  Anger made our lives meaningful, filling us with selves bigger than our true selves. What could be more satisfactory for boys and girls of eighteen and nineteen than to feel that pumped self growing inside as leavened dough?

  So that winter day I was sitting among; my fellow victims, a swollen self inside my dark green uniform, in a crowded theater that served as a makeshift court for three young men. We were sent to listen to the trial to learn how to be law-abiding citizens. On the stage were a judge, a public prosecutor, a one-man jury, and two assistants who recorded the trial. The three men on trial were held in separate pens. From where I sat, I could not see any of their faces, and I did not care to see.

  I closed my eyes once we were ordered to sit down. I dozed off during the public prosecutor’s opening statement, spoken in a local dialect that I could not understand well, and was lost in my own dreamland until the officer on duty walking from aisle to aisle tapped my shoulder heavily with her belt. I pulled myself straight and looked at the stage. The judge was asking questions, and the prosecutor was answering, waving a knife in front of him for emphasis. “What did the men do?” I asked the girl next to me in a whisper.

  “A train robbery,” the girl answered. “I don’t know for sure.”

  I closed my eyes, not curious whom they had robbed, what they had done to the train. I did not see anything in the three men that was worthy of my attention. Again I was awakened by the officer.

  For a while I sat there not thinking anything, looking at the back of the head in front of me and the head in front of that head. Then I traced my eyes along the head to the shoulder and to the wooden chair, where a line of characters was scrawled on its back in faint ink. I leaned forward and tried to read it. “Wang San eat dog shit!” I laughed to myself at the huge exclamation mark and pointed to the girl next to me, and she nodded with a smile.

  Then the youngest of the three criminals stood in his pen and spoke into the microphone in front of him in heavily accented mandarin Chinese. “I was an orphan. I was illiterate. I did not know how to be a good man. I promise I will learn to be a good man. I ask the people to listen to me,” he said and bowed to us.

  I laughed and whispered to the girl next to me, “What is he doing?”

  “I think the judge just asked him if he had anything to say to defend himself.”   “And that’s his defense?”

  “Probably.”

  “And what’s that to do with us?” I said, and we both laughed lightly, dismissing the image of the young man along with the graffiti on the back of the chair.

  That was the end of the trial. We did not catch how many years the young men were sentenced to, and we did not care to know. We left the theater feeling angered that one more afternoon of our lives had been wasted, not knowing we had missed one important moment, not knowing that we forgot to answer that crucial question: What has that to do with us?

Did anyone in the Hunan stadium ask the same question? Did anyone try to answer it? I want to know what the audience was thinking as it watched the young woman’s death. Was there an Auntie Wang in the crowd?

  I want to know, too, who those medical workers were, rushing in and out of the stadium in the ambulances. Was the surgeon the same one who, when I was ten years old, operated on my mother to take her gallbladder out? I saw him shortly after the operation, and he even joked with me, telling me that my mom would no longer be a quick-tempered person because she no longer had an organ to store her bile.

  I want to know the man with the transplanted kidneys. After the operation did he walk with a cane to the neighborhood center to attend the retirees’ biweekly meetings, where my eighty-one-year-old grandpa was made to stand for hours, listening to the old men and women criticize him because he once fought in the army against Communism?

  I want to know the boyfriend who turned in the letter to his officer. Was he
promoted for his action and admitted to the Communist Party? Did he become the officer who had us march in snow for hours when we were in the military, trying to kick our shaking legs with his leather boots?

  I want to know, too, the janitor. How did he get caught? What made him seek out a criminal’s body? Was he like the janitor in my father’s working unit, who always patted my head and gave me candies to eat? He once gave me a bag of mulberry leaves, kept moist by a wet handkerchief, for my silkworms. Did he intentionally or accidentally forget that the leaves were sprayed with pesticide, so that my silkworms all died overnight, so that I flunked my second grade nature class?

And above all the questions is the one question I have been trying to answer all along. What has that to do with me? Why do I feel compelled to tell the two women’s stories? Who were they?

  The first young woman was once the secretary of the Communist Youth League. She must have been a devoted daughter of the revolution to get the position. What led her astray from her faith? What made her stare back with blunt, questioning eyes? And those letters she wrote over the next ten years, page after page, what was she trying to say? What is in the letter that betrayed her, ending the ten years of imprisonment with a death sentence instead of freedom?

  And the second woman, the mother of a young boy, what made her so undaunted in the face of death? Did she like to read the stories of women heroes as I once did, my favorite heroine a nineteen-year-old Soviet girl named Zoya, who was caught burning down a German stable and was hanged to death? Did she admire Autumn-Jade, the woman hero I secretly hoped was one of my ancestors?

  Autumn-Jade was a student of my great-granduncle, the one we called Big Man in our family. Big Man was a revolutionary at the end of the last dynasty, fighting along with his comrades to establish a republic. He was known in history for two things—the female students he trained to be assassins and his peculiar death after a failed mission. Autumn-Jade was twenty-four, the most beautiful student of Big Man. She was sent to bomb the emperor’s personal representative; the bomb did not go off, and she was arrested, beheaded in the town center of our hometown. On the day of her execution, hundreds of people watched her paraded in the street, her body badly tortured. Many brought stacks of silver coins to bribe the executioner so they could get a bun immersed in her blood, something that was said to cure tuberculosis. How many bloody buns were consumed that day, how many men were cured? Soon after Autumn-Jade’s death, Big Man went alone on another assassination mission. He succeeded but got caught by the guards. His heart and liver were taken out and fried into a dish for the guards to eat.

  I can never tell the story of Big Man and Autumn-Jade right. I cannot resist the temptation to make Autumn-Jade one of my family. I want Big Man in love with Autumn-Jade, the beautiful young woman who learned fencing, shooting, horse riding, and the chemistry of explosives from him. I want Big Man to go into the suicide mission as a tribute to Autumn-Jade, his comrade and his lover. I want the granduncle whom Big Man’s wife raised alone to be a son of Big Man and Autumn-Jade.

  I want to interfere with history, making things up at will, adding layers to legend. I want Autumn-Jade’s fearless blood running in the two young women’s bodies. Sometimes I imagine the second woman looking calmly into her executioners’ eyes when she was forced to kneel down to receive the bullet, as many years ago Autumn-Jade stood quietly in front of the ax and chanted her last poem. The scenes always move me, as they are the central scenes for a hero’s story. I want the story to be about bravery. But always I am stopped.

  It is a fact that heroes are created by anger and romance, but anger and romance do not carry us long. It is a fact that the first woman, after the death sentence, cried and begged for her life to anyone walking past her cell. It is a fact that she was crushed by the thought of dying at twenty-nine, a fact that she was no longer a sane person on the way to the stadium, weeping and singing and laughing and murmuring stories to herself.

  As if this were an imaginary world, like the world of made-up battle games in the day care, with history carried on my young shoulders. But sooner or later Auntie Wang will shout in her loud voice, and I will run to her again, wishing that this time she will be pleased by me, knowing she is not when I see her pursed lips. Again I am squatting in time-out, watching the white clouds above me, and the black ants busying themselves in the grass. Our game was interrupted, but our lives continue.

clean0551 09-16-2005 18:05
没有跑跑的片片吗?
我要看跑跑!

卡拉 09-16-2005 20:49
引用
下面是引用clean0551于2005-09-16 19:05发表的:
没有跑跑的片片吗?
我要看跑跑!

很遗憾,只有这张弟弟舀舀背影照,凑合点吧。


卡拉 09-16-2005 21:16
作者:彭 伦
来源:《文汇读书周报》)

一位仅有四年英文写作经验的中国姑娘李翊云突然引起美国文坛
密切关注。继最新一期《纽约客》杂志小说专号发表其短篇小说后,她又于近
日获得美国著名文学杂志《巴黎评论》刚刚设立的“普林姆顿年度新人奖”。
兰登书屋也已与她签订两部小说的出版合约。有趣的是,这位毕业于北京大学
生物系的姑娘去美原本是为了攻读生物学博士学位,赴美之前并没有中文创
作。

记者近日从《巴黎评论》电子简报上获知李翊云得奖的消息后,即通过电子邮
件与她取得联系。她告诉记者,她在国内时从未想过要当作家,也没写过什么
文学作品,1996年从北大本科毕业后来到美国爱荷华城,原本打算攻读生物学
博士学位,然而她在爱荷华大学听说了该校著名的作家工作室(The Writers'
Workshop)种种轶事之后,发现自己对用英文写作的兴趣与日俱增。2000年,
她开始创作严肃的文学作品。“我用英文写作很有乐趣,这主要是因为我一开
始就用英文写作,渐渐就习惯了用英文思考。”目前她正在爱荷华大学的作家
工作室和非虚构写作项目攻读艺术硕士学位(Master in Fine Arts)。这所大
学的写作课程蜚声国际,白先勇、聂华苓、叶维廉等华人作家都曾在此学习,
1990年代的普利策文学奖得主中超过一半是这里的毕业生。

李翊云是去年正式登上美国文坛的。文学季刊《葛底斯堡评论》夏季号发表她
的散文《那与我何干?》(What Has That to Do withMe?),紧接着,《巴
黎评论》秋季号发表她的短篇小说《不朽》(Immortality),年底出版的《纽
约客》小说专号又发表她另一个短篇。今年1月刚上任的《巴黎评论》主编、30
岁的布丽吉特·休斯在接受《新闻周刊》采访时兴奋地说,发现李翊云的文学
才华是比她当主编更大的新闻。当她从大量自发投稿中发现这位无名作者的小
说时一眼就看上了。她认为这是《巴黎评论》发表的一篇完美的小说。《不
朽》讲述了一位自幼丧父的演员在成名之后又回到寡母身边的故事。

创刊于1953年的《巴黎评论》是美国最著名的纯文学杂志,一向以挖掘新人著
称。菲利普·罗思、杰克·凯鲁亚克、V.S.奈保尔等名作家的早期作品都在该
刊发表。为纪念去年逝世的创始人乔治·普林姆顿,该刊今年首次设立“普林
姆顿奖”,奖金5000美元,奖励该刊上一年度发表的最佳新人作品。李翊云将
于3月8日到纽约领奖,并朗读她的作品。

李翊云告诉记者,目前,她正忙于写作新作。她的一部短篇小说集和一部长篇
小说将由兰登书屋出版。

**********************************
李翊云个人网站
http://www.yiyunli.com/

黄小邪 09-16-2005 21:16
我有跑跑和舀舀的,怕侵犯人隐私……没关系,内部交流,我立刻铁上来:)

lotus 09-20-2005 10:19
震撼。 What Has That to Do with Me by Yiyun Li 真真是才华横溢。  她写中华民族的苦难, 写得那么轻松, 却又那么痛苦。 不要说文采, 就是这样立意的华人作家都太少了。

无法想象这是学生物的人写的。

lotus 09-20-2005 10:20
What Has That to Do with Me 应该独立成贴

黄小邪 09-20-2005 10:50
学理科的人写小说,虚浮的修饰少,有冷静和锐利的力量。或者学医科,余华啊什么的。

lili 09-20-2005 12:41
读这个贴子, 从头到尾我的嘴都没合上。

卡拉 09-20-2005 14:30
引用
下面是引用lili于2005-09-20 13:41发表的:
读这个贴子, 从头到尾我的嘴都没合上。

不明白。是惊讶?还是好笑?

clean0551 09-20-2005 16:18
跑跑和舀舀,真可爱啊,偷偷抱着挨个狠亲一通!

lili 09-21-2005 13:00
引用
下面是引用卡拉于2005-09-20 15:30发表的:

不明白。是惊讶?还是好笑?


这末严肃的贴子, 怎末笑得出来,感慨呀。
惊讶呀。。 惊讶你的鬼斧神工, 惊讶一个学医的 能写出这末流畅的文字。
惊讶她跟我同龄 惊讶她跟我住的那末近 惊讶她的小宝宝 跟我的也差不多。。。
惊讶她的成就 。。。。

一个字。。。amazing!

Troublemaker 09-21-2005 13:14
Agree with lili!!!

Amazing!

pool1989 09-22-2005 00:41
引用
下面是引用黄小邪于2005-09-20 11:50发表的:
学理科的人写小说,虚浮的修饰少,有冷静和锐利的力量。或者学医科,余华啊什么的。


从医生到作家真是不少,英国的毛姆、德国的海因茨,中国以前的有鲁迅、郭沫若,现在有毕淑敏、池莉、冯唐等。。。

六六 09-22-2005 11:58
那个小的,真是可人啊!

fanfan 07-26-2007 01:53
引用
引用第18楼pool1989于09-22-2005 00:41发表的  :


从医生到作家真是不少,英国的毛姆、德国的海因茨,中国以前的有鲁迅、郭沫若,现在有毕淑敏、池莉、冯唐等。。。

鲁迅不是医生,他连医科都没有念完。
郭老是诗人,而且他的考古贡献还有问题。
毕淑敏是卫生员。
谢谢!

fanfan 07-26-2007 01:55
引用
引用第4楼卡拉于09-16-2005 16:54发表的  :
再股沟一个,Yiyun Li 的片片,才32岁,也是PLMM啊!




Not a so-called belle, just a common girl, okay?

Troublemaker 04-04-2009 14:36
hahaha

今天突然翻到这个帖,本来前边还是一直啧啧称赞的,后来被fanfan的跟贴逗笑了。

卡总,那就是一个极平常的GIRL, OKAY???

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