现代大学英语精读PaperTiger英汉版本.doc

Lesson 1 Paper TigersWhat happens to all the Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends?当考试结束时，所有的亚裔美国人都会有怎样的表现呢？By Wesley Yang Published May 8,2011para 1 Sometimes Ill glimpse my reflection in a window and feel astonished by what I see. Jet-black hair. Slanted eyes. A pancake-flat surface of yellow-and-green-toned skin. An expression that is nearly reptilian in its impassivity. Ive contrived to think of this face as the equal in beauty to any other. But what I feel in these moments is its strangeness to me. Its my face. I cant disclaim it. But what does it have to do with me?有时我会从窗户里瞥见我的倒影，我会对我所看到的感到惊讶。乌黑的头发。斜眼。黄绿色肤色的薄煎饼状的表面。一种近乎爬行动物般冷漠的表情。我想方设法地认为这张脸在美貌上与其他任何人都不相上下。但在这些时刻我感觉到的是它对我来说很奇怪。这是我的脸。我不能否认。但这和我有什么关系呢？Para 2 Millions of Americans must feel estranged from their own faces. But every self-estranged individual is estranged in his own way. I, for instance, am the child of Korean immigrants, but I do not speak my parents native tongue. I have never dated a Korean woman. I dont have a Korean friend. Though I am an immigrant, I have never wanted to strive like one. 一定有无数的美国人对他们自己的长相会有一种疏离感,但是其中每个人的原因却又不尽相同。以我自己为例,我是韩国移民的后裔,但我却不会讲我父母的母语。我从未跟韩国女性约过会,甚至都没有韩国朋友。虽然我是移民,但是我从未想过像移民那样努力奋斗。para 3 You could say that I am a banana. But while I dont believe our roots necessarily define us, I do believe there are racially inflected assumptions wired into our neural circuitry. And although I am in most respects devoid of Asian characteristics, I do have an Asian face.你可能会说我是亚裔美国人。虽然我并不认为一个人的种族出身就会决定他的一切,但我相信对各个种族的成见已经深深地植入了我们的思想里。尽管在很多方面,我已经没了什么亚洲人的特点，但我确实长着一张亚洲人的脸。para 4 Here is what I sometimes suspect my face signifies to other Americans: An invisible person, barely distinguishable from a mass of faces that resemble it. A conspicuous person standing apart from the crowd and yet devoid of any individuality. An icon of so much that the culture pretends to honor but that it in fact patronizes and exploits. Not just people “who are good at math” and play the violin, but a mass of stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots who simply do not matter, socially or culturally.我有时怀疑我的长相对于其他美国人来说代表着什么:像一个长着大众脸的隐形人;一个站在人群里很显眼但毫无个性的人;一个美国文化表面上十分尊重而实际上却鄙视并利用的形象。我们不只是那些”数学学得很好”和会拉小提琴的人,而且是一大群憋屈得要死、压迫得不行、被虐得快残了的循规蹈矩的半机器人,对社会和文化根本就没什么影响力。para 5 Ive always been of two minds about this sequence of stereotypes. 对于以上各种成见，我总在两种想法间摇摆不定。On the one hand, it offends me greatly that anyone would think to apply them to me, or to anyone else, simply on the basis of facial characteristics. On the other hand, it also seems to me that there are a lot of Asian people to whom they apply. 一方面，仅仅因为相貌特征就将我或其他任何人与这些成见对号入座，这让我觉得不舒服；但另一方面，我自己确实也发现了不少这样的亚洲人。para 6 Let me summarize my feelings toward Asian values: Damn filial piety. Damn grade grubbing. Damn Ivy League mania. Damn deference to authority. Damn humility and hard work. Damn harmonious relations. Damn sacrificing for the future. Damn earnest, striving middle-class servility. 让我总结一下我对亚洲价值观的感受：该死的孝道。该死的好好学习。该死的常春藤联盟狂热。该死的服从权威。该死的谦逊努力。该死的和谐关系。该死的为未来牺牲。该死的认真努力的中产阶级奴性。para 7 I understand the reasons Asian parents have raised a generation of children this way. Doctor, accountant, engineer: These are good jobs open to whoever works hard enough. What could be wrong with that pursuit? Asians graduate from college at a rate higher than any other ethnic group in America, including whites. They earn a higher median family income than any other ethnic group in America，including whites. This is a stage in a triumphal narrative, and it is a narrative that is much shorter than many remember. Two thirds of the roughly 14 million Asian-Americans are foreign-born. There were less than 39,000 people of Korean descent living in America in 1970, when my elder brother was born. There are around 1 million today. 我理解亚洲父母为何用这种手段抚养整整一代子女。医生、律师、会计、工程师:无论是谁,只要足够努力就能得到这些好的工作机会。难道追求这些好工作有错吗?亚裔美国人从大学毕业的比率比包括白人在内的美国其他种族人群都高。他们家庭收入中位数也比包括白人在内的美国其他种族人群高。这些只是亚裔取得成功故事中的一个缩影,这远比很多人记忆中的成功故事要短得多。在约1400万的亚裔美国人中,有三分之二的人不是在美国出生的。在1970年,美国只有不到39000名韩国后裔,而今天,韩国后裔达到了大约100万人。para 8Asian American success is typically taken to ratify the American Dream and to prove that minorities can make it in this country without handouts. Still, an undercurrent of racial panic always accompanies the consideration of Asians, and all the more so as China becomes the destination for our industrial base and the banker controlling our burgeoning debt. But if the armies of Chinese factory workers who make our fast fashion and iPads terrify us, and if the collective mass of high-achieving Asian American students arouse an anxiety about the laxity of American parenting, what of the Asian American who obeyed everything his parents told him? Does this person really scare anyone?亚裔美国人的成功总被用来证实美国梦,证明那些少数族裔在这个国家依靠自己也能取得成功。但是,想到亚洲人时,总是伴随着潜在的种族恐慌特别是在中国成了美国的工业基地和控制迅速增长的债务的债主的时候。但是,如果那些制造出快速时尚服饰和iPad的中国的劳动力大军让我们感到惧怕的话,如果众多的优秀亚裔学生让美国父母为他们那宽松的教育方式感到焦急的话,那对于处处听从父母安排的亚裔学生,人们又是怎么想的呢?这些亚裔学生真就那么令人惧怕吗?para 9 Earlier this year, the publication of Amy Chuas Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother incited a collective airing out of many varieties of race-based hysteria. 今年早些时候,蔡美儿所著的虎妈战歌的出版激起了各种带有种族成见的歇斯底里说辞。But absent from the millions of words written in response to the book was any serious consideration of whether Asian Americans were in fact taking over this country. If it is true that Asian-Americans are dominating in the elite high schools and universities, is it also true that Asian-Americans are dominating in the real world? My strong suspicion was that this was not so, and that the reasons would not be hard to find. If we are a collective juggernaut that inspires such awe and fear, why does it seem that so many Asians are so readily perceived to be ,as I myself have felt most of my life, the products of a timid culture, easily pushed around by more assertive people, and thus basically invisible? 但是,在众多对该书的评论之中,没有任何一条认真地考虑过“亚裔美国人是否曾经真的主导过这个国家”的问题。假设亚裔学生集体在名牌高中和大学的成绩和表现确实更好,那么亚裔美国人是否在现实世界中获得了同样的主导地位?我怀疑结果并非如此,而其原因也不难发现。我经常感到,如果我们真像描绘的那样是一个令人敬畏惧怕的集体,那为什么还有那么多亚裔经常被认为是一种过于谨小慎微文化的产物,很容易被那些更加自信的人所左右。从根本上来说,这不就是隐形人吗?para 10 A few months ago, I received an e-mail from a young man named Jefferson Mao, who after attending Stuyvesant High School had recently graduated from the University of Chicago. He wanted my advice about “ being an Asian writer”. This is how he described himself:” I got good grades and I love literature and I want to be a writer and an intellectual; at the same time , Im the first person in my family to go to college, my parents dont speak English very well, and we dont own the apartment in Flushing that we live in. I mean, Im proud of my parents and my neighborhood and what I perceive to be my artistic potential or whatever, but sometimes I feel like Im jumping the gun a generation or two too early.”几个月前,一个名叫杰弗逊毛的年轻人给我发了一封电子邮件。他曾就读于史岱文森高中,现已从芝加哥大学毕业。他向我征求建议,想要成为一名亚裔作家。他是这么描述自己的:“我成绩优异,热爱文学并且想成为一名作家和知识分子;另外,我是家里的第一个大学生,父母英语说得不好,我们至今都没能买下我们在法拉盛租住的公寓。我的意思是,我为自己的父母和社区感到自豪,我认为自己有艺术等方面的潜能,但有时候,我感觉自己作为第一代移民家庭的儿子就有这种想法,是不是太过心急了?也许再等一两代才比较合适。”PARA 11 One bright , cold Sunday afternoon, I ride the 7 train to its last stop in Flushing, where the storefront signs are all written in Chinese and the sidewalks are a slow-moving river of impassive faces. Mao is waiting for me at the entrance of the Main Street subway station, and together we walk to a nearby Vietnamese restaurant. 一个晴朗而寒冷的星期日下午,我乘坐地铁7号线到法拉盛的最后一站。那里所有的店面都挂着中文招牌,人行道上缓慢走动的人流带着一张张毫无表情的面孔。毛在缅街地铁站的入口处等着我,我们一起去了附近的一家越南菜馆。PARA 12 Mao has a round face with eyes behind rectangular wire-frame glasses. Since graduating , he has been living with his parents, who emigrated from China when Mao was eight years old. His mother is a manicurist; his father is a physical therapists aide. Lately, Mao has been making the familiar hour-and-a-half ride from Flushing to downtown Manhattan to tutor a white Stuyvesant freshman. 毛,圆脸,戴着一副长方形金属框眼镜。毕业后,他和父母住在一起。他们全家在毛八岁的时候从中国移民到了美国。母亲是一名美甲师,父亲是助理理疗师。最近,毛经常搭乘从法拉盛到曼哈顿市区这段再熟悉不过的一个半小时的地铁,为一名史岱文森高中一年级白人学生辅导功课。PARA 13 Entrance to Stuyvesant, one of the most competitive public high schools in the country, is determined solely by performance on a test: 史岱文森高中是美国竞争最激烈的公立高中之一,录取完全依据考试成绩:the top 3.7 percent of all New York City students who take the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test hoping to go to Stuyvesant are accepted. There are no set-asides fort the underprivileged or, conversely, for alumni or other privileged groups. There is no formula to encourage “diversity” or any nebulous concept of “well-roundedness” or “character”. Here we have something like pure meritocracy. This is what it looks like: Asian Americans, who make up 12.6 percent of New York City, make up 72 percent of the high school. 在参加特殊高中入学考试的所有纽约市学生中,只有成绩排名在前3.7%的考生才能被录取。学校不会留出名额给贫困学生,另一方面,也不会对校友及特权群体加以照顾。学校的招生政策并不鼓励“多元化”或者“全面发展”“个性”这样模糊不清的观念。学校纯粹以成绩决定一切。其结果就是亚裔人口在纽约市的比例为12.6%,而在这所高中却占到了72%。PARA 14 This year, 569 Asian Americans scored high enough to earn a slot at Stuyvesant, along with 179 whites, 13 Hispanics, and 12 blacks. Such dramatic overrepresentation, and what it may be read to imply about the intelligence of different groups of New Yorkers, has a way of making people uneasy. But intrinsic intelligence, of course, is precisely what Asians dont believe in. They believe and have proved that the constant practice of test taking will improve the scores of whoever commits to it. 今年有569名亚裔学生凭借高分被史岱文森高中录取，一起被录取的还有179名白人、13名拉美裔和12名黑人。如此夸张的比例以及可能会对纽约不同种族智力水平的暗示，总会引起人们的不安。但是，亚裔恰恰并不相信天赋。他们相信，并已通过实践证明，任何人只要依靠不断的考试练习就能提高分数。All throughout Flushing, as well as in Bayside, one can find “cram schools”, or storefront academies, that drill students in test preparation after school, on weekends, and during summer break. “Learning math is not about learning math,” an instructor at one called Ivy Prep was quoted in The New York Times as saying. “Its about weightlifting. You are pumping the iron of math.” Mao puts it more specifically: “You learn quite simply to nail any standardized test you take.”在法拉盛以及贝赛德，到处都可以找到“填鸭学校”或是各种小规模的补习学校，利用放学后、周末和暑假时间培训学生的应试技巧。引用常春藤预备学校的一名老师接受纽约时报采访时所说的一句话：“学习数学不只是学习数学这么简单，它是在举重。你在锻炼着你的数学二头肌。”毛更加简明扼要地说：“学习就是为了搞定你要参加的任何标准化考试。”PARA 15 And so there is an additional concern accompanying the rise of the Tiger Children, one focused more on the narrowness of the educational experience a non-Asian child might receive in the company of fanatically pre-professional Asian students. Jenny Tsai, a student who was elected president of her class at the equally competitive New York public school Hunter College High School, remembers frequently hearing that “the school was becoming too Asian, that they would be the downfall of our school.” A couple of years ago, she revisited this issue in her senior thesis at Harvard, where she interviewed graduates of elite public schools and found that the white students regarded the Asian students with wariness.因此伴随着虎子们呈现上升的趋势,人们也在担心,和这些狂热的早早便抱有专业意向的亚裔孩子在一起,非亚裔孩子的教育经历会变得更加狭隘。詹尼蔡是一所同样竞争激烈的纽约公立学校享特学院附属中学的学生,曾被选为班长,她清楚地记得,时常会听到有人说“学校里的亚裔太多了,他们会搞垮学校”。 几年前,她在哈佛的毕业论文中再次探讨了这个问题,她采访了公立精英学校的毕业生,发现白人学生会以戒备的心态来看亚裔学生。In 2005, The Wall Street Journal reported on “white flight” from a high school in Cupertino, California, that began soon after the children of Asian software engineers had made the place so brutally competitive that a B average could place you in the bottom third of the class.2005年,华尔街日报报道了加州库珀蒂诺的一所高中的白人学生逃离的现象,事情起因于亚裔软件工程师的子女使得这所学校里的竞争变得异常残酷，即使平均成绩为B,也只能排在班级后三名。PARA 16 Colleges have a way of correcting for this imbalance: The Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade has calculated that an Asian applicant must, in practice, score 140 points higher on the SAT than a comparable white applicant to have the same chance of admission. This is obviously unfair to the many qualified Asian individuals who are punished for the success of others with similar faces. 大学自有它的办法来调整这种失衡: 据普林斯顿大学社会学家托马斯埃斯彭沙德的计算,在实际情况中,一个亚裔申请者,他的SAT成绩必须比同他实力相当的白人申请者高出140分,才会获得同样的录取机会,仅仅因为自己和这些成功人士有着同样的亚裔面孔而受到惩罚,这对于众多符合资格的亚裔学生来说,显然是不公平的。PARA 17 You could frame it as a simple issue of equality and press for race-blind quantitative admissions standards. In 2006, a decade after California passed a voter initiative outlawing any racial engineering at the public universities, Asians composed 46 percent of UC Berkeleys entering class; one could imagine a similar demographic reshuffling in the Ivy League, where Asian Americans currently make up about 17 percent of undergraduates. But the Ivies, as we all know, have their own private institutional interests at stake in their admissions choices, including some that are arguably defensible. Who can seriously claim that a Harvard University that was 72 percent Asian would deliver the same grooming for elite status its students had gone there to receive?你可以认为问题仅仅是因为不平等产生的，并迫切要求推行不分种族的量化招生标准。2006年，即加州通过选民提议的废除公立大学中任何关于种族工程的规定10年后，加州大学伯克利分校的新升班中，亚洲学生占了46%。可见，联盟中的学生构成比例很可能会发生类似的变化，而目前这个群体在联盟本科生的占比只有17%。然而众所周知，常春藤联盟在招生时会考虑自身的利益需求，而他们的一些政策也无可厚非。毕竟谁敢保证说，拥有72%亚裔学生的哈佛大学仍然能够为那些想来哈佛镀金的学子提供含金量不变的精英桂冠。PARA 18 Somewhere near the middle of his time at Stuyvesant, a vague sense of discontent started to emerge within Mao. He had always felt himself a part of a mob of “nameless, faceless Asian kids,” who were “like a part of the dcor of the place.” He had been content to keep his head down and work toward the goal shared by everyone at Stuyvesant: Harvard. But around the beginning of his senior year, he began to wonder whether this march toward academic success was the only, or best, path.当毛在史岱文森待了大约一半日子时,他的心中开始隐约产生不满。他始终觉得自己是那一大群“没有姓名、没有个性的亚洲孩子”中的一分子,就像是“这地方的一个装饰品”。他一直心甘情愿地埋头苦读,向着当时史岱文森所有学生的目标哈佛努力。然而升上高二没多久,他就开始怀疑,这条通往学业成功的征途,是否是唯一的,或者最好的道路。PARA 19 “You cant help but feel like there must be another way”, he explains over a bowl of pho. “Its like, were being pitted against each other while there are kids out there in the Midwest who can do way less work and be in a garage band or something and if theyre decently intelligent and work decently hard in school. “你总会忍不住觉得一定还有另外一条路,”他边吃着面前的一碗越南河粉,边解释道。 “我们这些亚裔孩子在互相较着劲,而中西部的孩子们需要做的功课则少得多,可以参加车库乐队之类的活动,如果这些人本身相当聪明,在学校里学习也很用功的话”PARA 20 Mao began to study the racially inflected social hierarchies at Stuyvesant, where, in a survey undertaken by the student newspaper this year, slightly more than half of the respondents reported that their friends came from within their own ethnic group. His attention focused on the mostly white group whose members seemed able to manage the crushing workload while still remaining socially active. “The general gist of most high school movies is that the pretty cheerleader gets with the big dumb jock, and the nerd is left to bide his time in loneliness. But at some point in the future,” he says, “the nerd is going to rule the world, and the dumb jock is going to work in a