现代大学英语精读第二版(第六册)学习笔记(原文及全文翻译)——1 - Paper Tigers(纸老虎)

Unit 1 - Paper Tigers

Paper Tigers

Wesley Yang

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 don't have a Korean friend. Though I am an immigrant, I have never wanted to strive like one.

You could say that l am a banana. But while I don't 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.

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 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.

I've always been of two minds about this sequence of stereotypes. 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.

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.

I understand the reasons Asian parents have raised a generation of children this way. Doctor, lawyer, 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. There are around 1 million today.

Asian 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?

Earlier this year, the publication of Amy Chua's "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother incited a collective airing out of many varieties of race-based hysteria. 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 they are collectively dominating in 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, the products of a timid culture, easily pushed around by more assertive people, and thus basically invisible?

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, I'm the first person in my family to go to college, my parents don't speak English very well, and we don't own the apartment in Flushing that we live in. I mean, I'm proud of my parents and my neighborhood and what I perceive to be my artistic potential or whatever, but sometimes I feel like I'm jumping the gun a generation or two too early."

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.

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 therapist's aide. Lately, Mao has been making the familiar hour-and-a-half ride from Flushing to downtown Manhattan to tutor a white Stuyvesant freshman.

Entrance to Stuyvesant, one of the most competitive public high schools in the country, is determined solely by performance on a test: 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 for 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.

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 don't believe in. They believe—and have proved—that the constant practice of test taking will improve the scores of whoever commits to it. 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, "It's 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."

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. 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 niade the place so brutally competitive that a B average could place you in the bottom third of the class.

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.

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 Berkeley's 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?

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 decor 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.

You can't help but feel like there must be another way, he explains over a bowl of pho. "It's like, we're 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 they're decently intelligent and work decently hard in school…"

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 within their own ethnic group. His attention focused on the mostiy group whose members seemed able to manage the crushing workload whilt 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 carwash."

At Stuy, it's completely different: If you looked at the pinnacle, the girls and the guys are not only good-looking and socially affable, they also get the best grades and star in the school plays and win election to student government. It all converges at the top. It's like training for high society. It was jarring for us Chinese kids. You got the sense that you had to study hard, but it wasn't enough.

Mao was becoming clued in to the fact that there was another hierarchy behind the official one that explained why others were getting what he never had—a high-school sweetheart" figured prominently on this list—and that this mysterious hierarchy was going to determine what happened to him in life. "You realize there are things you really don't understand about courtship or just acting in a certain way. Things that somehow come naturally to people who go to school in the suburbs and have parents who are culturally assimilated." I pressed him for specifics, and he mentioned that he had visited his white girlfriend's parents' house the past Christmas, where the family had "sat around cooking together and playing Scrabble." This ordinary vision of suburban American domesticity lingered with Mao: Here, at last, was the setting in which all that implicit knowledge "about social norms and propriety" had been transmitted. There was no cram school that taught these lessons.

Before having heard from Mao, I had considered myself at worst lightly singed by the last embers of Asian alienation. Indeed, given all the incredibly hip Asian artists and fashion designers and so forth you can find in New York, it seemed that this feeling was destined to die out altogether. And yet here it was in a New Yorker more than a dozen years my junior. While it may be true that sections of the Asian American world are devoid of alienation, there are large swaths where it is as alive as it has ever been.

A few weeks after we meet, Mao puts me in touch with Daniel Cliu, his close friend from Stuyvesant. Chu graduated from Williams College last year, having won a creative writing award for his poetry. He had spent a portion of the $18,000 prize on a trip to China, but now he is back living with his parents in Brooklyn Chinatown.

Chu remembers that during his first semester at Williams, his junior adviser would periodically take him aside. Was he feeling all right? Was something the matter? "I was acclimating myself to the place," he says. "I wasn't totally I happy, but I wasn't depressed." But then his new white friends made similar remarks. "They would say, 'Tan, it's kind of hard, sometimes, to tell what you're thinking.'"

Chu has a pleasant face, but it would not be wrong to characterize his demeanor as reserved. He speaks in a quiet, unemphatic voice. He doesn't move his features much. He attributes these traits to the atmosphere in his household. "When you grow up in a Chinese home," he says, "you don't talk. You shut up and listen to what your parents tell you to do."

At Stuyvesant, he had hung out in an exclusively Asian world in which friends were determined by which subway lines you traveled. But when he arrived at Williams, Chu slowly became aware of something strange: The white people in the New England wilderness walked around smiling at each other. "When you're in a place like that, everyone is friendly."

He made a point to start smiling more. "It was something that I had to actively practice," he says. "Like, when you have a transaction at a business, you hand over the money—and then you smile." He says that he's made some progress but that there's still plenty of work that remains. "I'm trying to undo eighteen years of a Chinese upbringing. Four years at Williams helps, but only so much."

I guess what I would like is to become so good at something that my social deficiencies no longer matter, he tells me. Chu is a bright, diligent, impeccably credentialed young man born in the United States. He is optimistic about his ability to earn respect in the world. But he doubts he will ever feel the same comfort in his skin that he glimpsed in the people he met at Williams. That kind of comfort, he says—"I think it's generations away."

Researchers were talking about what some refer to as the "bamboo ceiling"—an invisible barrier that maintains a pyramidal racial structure throughout corporate America, with lots of Asians at junior levels, quite a few in middle management, and virtually none in the higher reaches of leadership.

The failure of Asian Americans to become leaders in the white-collar workplace does not qualify as one of the burning social issues of our time. But it is a part of the bitter undercurrent of Asian American life that so many Asian graduates of elite universities find that meritocracy as they have understood it comes to an abrupt end after graduation. If between 15 and 20 percent of every Ivy League class is Asian, and if the Ivy Leagues are incubators for the country's leaders, it would stand to reason that Asians would make up some corresponding portion of the leadership class.

And yet the numbers tell a different story. According to a recent study, Asian Americans represent roughly 5 percent of the population but only 0.3 percent of corporate officers, less than 1 percent of corporate board members, and around 2 percent of college presidents. There are nine Asian American CEOs in the Fortune 500. In specific fields where Asian Americans are heavily represented, there is a similar asymmetry. A third of all software engineers in Silicon Valley are Asian, and yet they make up only 6 percent of board members and about 10 percent of corporate officers of the Bay Area" twenty-five largest companies. One succinct evocation of the situation appeared in the comments section of a website: "If you're East Asian, you need to attend a top-tier university to land a good high-paying gig. Even if you land that good high-paying gig, the white guy with the pedigree from a mediocre state university will somehow move ahead of you in the ranks simply because he's white."

Part of the insidious nature of the "bamboo ceiling" is that it does not seem to be caused by overt racism. A survey of Asian Pacific American employees of Fortune 500 companies found that 80 percent reported they were judged not as Asians but as individuals. But only 51 percent reported the existence of Asians in key positions.

More likdy, the discrepancy in these numbers is a matter of unconscious bias. Nobody would affirm the proposition that tall men are intrinsically bettej leaders, for instance. And yet while only 15 percent of the male population is at least six feet tall, 58 percent of all corporate CEOs are. Similarly, nobody would say that Asian people are unfit to be leaders. But subjects in a recently published psychological experiment consistently rated hypothetical employees with Caucasian-sounding names higher in leadership potential than identical ones with Asian names.

Maybe a traditionally Asian upbringing is the problem. In order to be a leader, you must have followers. Associates are initially judged on how well they do the work they are assigned. But being a leader requires different skill sets. "The traits that got you to where you are won't necessarily take you to the next level," says the diversity consultant Jane Hyun, who wrote a book called Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling. To become a leader requires taking personal initiative and thinking about how an organization can work differently. It also requires networking, self-promotion, and self-assertion. It's racist to think that any given Asian individual is unlikely to be creative or risk-taking. It's simple cultural observation to say that a group whose education has historically focused on rote memorization is, on aggregate, unlikely to yield many people inclined to challenge authority or break with inherited ways of doing things.

Aspiring Asian leaders had to become aware of "the relationship between values, behaviors, and perceptions." He offered the example of Asians who don't speak up at meetings. "So let's say I go to meetings with you and I notice you never say anything. And I wonder why. Maybe it's because you don't know what we're talking about. Or maybe it's because you're not even interested in the subject matter. Or maybe you think the conversation is beneath you. So here I'm thinking, because you never say anything at meetings, you're either dumb, or you don't care, or you're arrogant, when maybe it's because you were taught when you were growing up that when the boss is talking, what are you supposed to be doing? Listening."

How do you undo eighteen years of a Chinese upbringing?

Amy Chua returned to Yale from a long, exhausting book tour in which one television interviewer had led off by noting that Internet commenters calling her a monster. By that point, she had become practiced at the special kind of self-presentation required of a person under public siege. "I do not think that Chinese parents are superior," she declared at the annual gathering of the Asian American Students Alliance. "I think there are many ways to be a good parent."

Much of her talk to the students, and indeed much of the conversation surrounding the book, was focused on her own parenting decisions. But just as interesting is how her parents parented her. Chua was plainly the product of a brute-force Chinese education. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother includes many lessons she was taught by her parents—"Be modest, be humble, be simple, her mother told her. "Never complain or make excuses," her father instructed. "If something seems unfair at school, just prove yourself by working twice as hard and being twice as good."

In the book, Chua portrays her distaste for corporate law, which she practiced before going into academe. "My entire three years at the firm, I always felt like I was play-acting, ridiculous in my suit," she writes. This malaise extended even earlier, to her time as a student. "I didn't care about the rights of criminals the way others did, and I froze whenever a professor called on me. I also wasn't naturally skeptical and questioning; I just wanted to write down everything the professor said and memorize it."

At the AASA gathering at Yale, Chua made the connection between her upbringing and her adult dissatisfaction. "My parents didn't sit around talking about politics and philosophy at the dinner table," she told the students.

Even after she had escaped from corporate law and made it onto a law faculty, "I was kind of lost. I just didn't feel the passion." Eventually, she made a name for herself as the author of popular books about foreign policy and became an award-winning teacher. But it's plain that she was no better prepared for legal scholarship than she had been for corporate law. "It took me a long, long time," she said. "And I went through lots and lots of rejection." She recalled her extended search for an academic post, in which she was "Just not able to do a good interview, just not able to present myself well."

In other words, Battle Hymn provides all the material needed to refute the very cultural polemic for which it was made to stand. Chua's Chinese education had gotten her through an elite schooling, but it left her unprepared for the real world. She does not hide any of this. She had set out, she explained, to write a memoir that was "defiantly self-incriminating"—and the result was a messy jumble of conflicting impulses, part provocation, part self-critique, Western readers rode roughshod over this paradox and made of Chua a kind of Asian minstrel figure. But more than anything else, Battle Hymn is a very American project—one no traditional Chinese person would think to undertake. "Even if you hate the book," Chua pointed out, "the one thing it is not is meek."

The loudest duck gets shot is a Chinese proverb. "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down" is a Japanese one. Chua had told her story and been hammered down. Yet here she was, fresh from her hammering, completely unbowed.

There is something salutary in that proud defiance. And though the debate she sparked about Asian American life has been of questionable value, we will need more people with the same kind of defiance, willing to push themselves into the spotlight and to make some noise, to make mistakes, to become entrepreneurs, to stop doggedly pursuing official paper emblems attesting to their worthiness, to stop thinking those scraps of paper will secure anyone's happiness, and to dare to be interesting.

参考译文——纸老虎

纸老虎

卫斯理·杨

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。

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。

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。

对于以上各种成见,我总在两种想法间摇摆不定:一方面,仅仅因为相貌特征就将我或者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。

我来概括一下我对典型亚洲价值观的感受:去他的孝道,去他的好好学习天天向上,去他的非常春藤盟校不读,去他的尊重权威,去他的谦逊努力,去他的和谐关系,去他的为未来牺牲,去他的虔诚努力的中产阶级奴性。

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髙。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。

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?

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。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?

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。”

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。

毛,圆脸,戴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,为一名史岱文森髙中一年级白人学生辅导功课。

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: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%。

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。在法拉盛以及贝赛徳,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。”

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亨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。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。

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。

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生班中,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中的占比只有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,而它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。

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一哈佛努力。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。

“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……”

毛开始研究起史岱文森高中内部受种族影响的社会等级制度。史岱文森学生报今年做了一项校内调査,过半受调査者都声称他们的朋友和自己来自同一民族。他尤其关注大多数白人团体,这些人似乎可以在应付繁忙学业的同时,仍然坚持着活跃的社交活动。“大多数高中生电影的狗血情节是漂亮的啦啦队长跟了四肢发达、头脑简单的肌肉男,而书呆子则被晾在一卑,寂寞地独自打发时日,”他说,“但在将来的某一天,这个书呆子将会统治世界,而肌肉男却只能在洗车场工作。”

“但是在史岱文森,情况完全不同:如果你看一下尖子生队伍,那些男生女生绝不仅仅是相貌出众、八面玲珑,他们获得优异的成绩,是校园剧的明星,并且在学生会选举拔得头筹。所有这些荣誉都集聚在顶端,就好像在为进入上流社会进行训练。这让我们这些中国孩子很受震动。你会觉得努力学习很必要,但光这样是不够的。”

毛渐渐看清了一个事实,那就是在公认的等级背后,还有另外一个等级,可以解释为什么别人能得到他从未得到过的那些东西一“一个高中生美少女”醒目地位列其中,而这个神秘的等级将会决定他的生活。“你会意识到自己在有些事情上确实懂得不多,比如追求女生,或仅仅按照特定路数行动。但这些事情对于某些人来说很自然,他们在郊区上学,父母都已融入当地文化。”我要求他举个具体的例子,于是他提起曾在圣诞节后去自己白人女友家造访的经历。“她们全家人围坐在一起做菜,玩拼字游戏。”这一幕平常的美国郊区人家生活场景久久萦绕在毛的脑际:至少,就是在这里,所有“关于社会规范和礼仪”的那些只可意会无法言传的知识被代代相传。而这些东西没有哪个补习班会教给你。

在收到毛的邮件之前,我自己就曾觉得,我最多不过是被亚裔疏离感的最后余烬灼伤一点点而已。的确,如果考虑到亚洲艺术家和时装设计师以及等等此类你能在纽约找到的成功亚裔人士令人难以置信的受追捧程度,似乎这种感觉注定将逐渐消失殆尽。然而这种疏离感现在却出现在一个比我小十几岁的纽约人身上。或许说有一部分亚裔美国人已经没有了疏离感,这确实可能是真的,可是在很大一部分亚裔身上,疏离感仍然存在并鲜活如昔。

在我们见面几周后,毛介绍我认识了他同样来自史岱文森的好友丹尼尔·朱。朱去年从威廉姆斯学院毕业,在那里他的诗作曾获得过一项创意写作奖,贏得了18000美元的奖金。他花了一部分奖金到中国旅行,但现在已经回到美国,和父母一起住在布鲁克林唐人街。

朱还记得他在威廉姆斯学院的第一个学期的情景,低年级的辅导员会时不时地找他谈话,问他感觉还好吧,有没有一些不如意的事情。他说:“我正努力地适应这个地方,我没有特别开心,但我也没有感到沮丧郁闷。”但他的那些白人朋友也会对他说相同的话:“他们会说,‘丹,有时很难知道你在想什么。’”

朱长着一张讨人喜欢的脸,但是用矜持来概括他的举止性格是没错的。他说话时语调温和,脸部动作很少。他把自己的这些特质都归因于家庭环境。他说:“在中国家庭中成长的孩子,用不着说话,你只需闭上嘴按照父母吩咐的去做就可以了。”

在史岱文森高中读书期间,他课余时间只在一个由亚洲人组成的圈子里玩,这个圈子的朋友是按照乘哪条地铁线来分类的。但是当他到威廉姆斯以后,朱慢慢意识到一些奇怪的事:这些新英格兰的白人走在一起会互相微笑,态度友善。“当你处在这样的环境中,你会感受到每个人都是友好的。”

他决定自己也应该多微笑。他说:“这是我必须主动学习的事情,就像当你做交易的时候,你把钱递过去——然后微笑一下。”他说自己已经有些进步,但是还有很多要改善的地方。他说:“我试着彻底摆脱18年来中国式的教育。威廉姆斯的这4年对此有帮助,但也仅仅止步于此。”

他告诉我说:“我认为我想做的就是可以很擅长一些事情,这样社交的缺乏就不会影响到我。”朱是一个出生在美国的聪明、勤奋、资质无可挑剔的年轻人。他相信自己有能力赢得这个世界的尊重。但是他不太相信自己骨子里能感觉到在威廉姆斯学院碰到的人们的那种自在。他说:“这种感觉离我有好几代远。”

研究人员谈到了一些人提到的所谓“竹子天花板”——美国企管中的不同种族占据各自的位置的结构如同金字塔,界限分明,很难打破,大部分亚洲人处于底端,极少数处于中间管理层,事实上还没有人进入更高的领导层。

在白领工作场所亚裔美籍人不能成为领导的原因并不是我们这个时代的热门社会话题之谱。但是太多精英学校的亚裔美籍毕业生发现他们渐渐明白靠本领就搞定的法则在从学校毕业后就戛然而止了,这已经成为在亚裔美籍人的生活中苦涩暗流的一部分。如果每个常春藤联盟班级上15%到20%的学生是亚洲人,假设常春藤联盟是各行各业的领袖的摇篮,那么理所当然,亚洲人在领导层就应该占到相应的比例。

但是数字却显示的是另一番景象。最新的一份调査研究显示,亚裔美籍人数大约占美国人口的5%,但是仅有0.3%是公司主管,不到1%的人是公司董事会成员,大约2%任职大学校长。财富500强排行榜上只有9位亚裔美籍CEO。在那种亚裔美国人举足轻重的特定领域,这种分布也是呈现相似的不对称性。硅谷里三分之一的软件工程师是亚洲人,而在旧金山湾区最大的25家公司内,亚洲人只占到董事会成员的6%,公司高级职员的10%。某网站上的评论中有这样一条是对这种形势的简练概括:“如果你是东亚人,你需要进人一所一流大学以便谋到高薪的职位。即使你谋到高薪职位,那些来自中等州立大学但出身高贵的白人职员在等级上也肯定会超过你,仅仅就因为他是白人。”

“竹天花板”防不胜防的一面在于,它似乎并不是由公然的种族歧视引起的。通过调査财富500强企业中的亚太裔美国雇员发现,80%的人声称美国公司并未将他们视为亚洲人,而是视为独立的个体。然而只有51%的人承认亚裔在美国公司内担任要职。

这些数字之间的差异更有可能是由无意识的偏见所导致的。比如,没有人敢断定身材高大的人天生就比别人更擅长做领导。然而事实是,虽然身髙超过1米83的男性在美国男性人口中只占15%,但他们在美国公司首席执行官中却占了58%。同样,没有人会说亚裔不适合做领导。然而,在最近发表的一项心理学实验中,假设对同一个员工,相较于使用亚洲名字,当他使用白人名字时,受访者总是认定他更具有领导潜质。

可能问题的根源在于亚裔在成长过程中所接受的传统教育。要想成为领导,你必须要有追随者。评价员工时,首先是依据他们完成指定工作的好坏来评判的。但是作为领导,则要求不同的技能组合。“让你获得今天地位的技能未必会帮你达到下一个层次,”多元化顾问简·玄说。她撰写了《打破“竹天花板”》一书。要想成为一名领导,需要发挥个人的创造力,需要思考一个机构可以如何改进,也需要编织人际网络,进行自我提升以及坚持己见。要说任何一个亚裔人士都不大可能具备创造力或冒险精神,那是种族主义。但是要说在教育上向来注重死记硬背和注重分数这样的一个群体不大可能造就许多乐于挑战权威或打破传统行事方式的人,那却是一种简易的文化评论。

有志于担任领导的亚裔必须意识到“价值观、行为和看法之间的关系”。他举了个例子,谈到亚裔在开会时从不畅所欲言。“那么,假设我和你一起去参加一个会议,我注意到你什么也不说。于是我扪心自问,嗯,我想知道你为什么不发言。也许是因为你不知道我们在谈什么。那是一个不发言的好理由。或者,也许是因为你甚至对谈论的话题不感兴趣。或者,也许你不屑于这样的话题。因为你从不在会上发言,于是我就会想,你要么是个哑巴,对此漠不关心,要么太傲慢。但事实也许是,因为在你成长的过程中,有人教导你领导说话的时候你应该怎么做?倾听。”

你该如何拋开18年的中式教育呢?

蔡美儿在结束了漫长疲惫的巡回售书活动之后回到了耶鲁大学,途中一名电视台的记者在采访她一开始就引用了一些将其称之为怪物的网络评论家的言论。那个时候,她已经练就了在公众批评的舆论下仍能进行自我展示的特殊能力。她在亚裔美国学生联合会的年会上宣称:“我认为中国的父母并没有什么特别之处,我觉得要成为一个好父母有很多途径。”

她对学生们说的话,以及书中所记录的对话,确实很多都集中体现了她的为母之道。但同样有趣的是她父母当初对她的教育方法。蔡美儿本身就是中国强力式教育的产物。《虎妈战歌》中涵盖了很多父母对她的谆谆教诲——她的母亲告诉她:“要谦虚,要低调,要朴素。”她的父亲教导她:“决不能抱怨,也决不要找借口。”“如果学校里发生什么看似不公平的事,你就得加倍努力,变得更加优秀,以此证明自己。”

在书中,蔡美儿描写了她对进入学院之前一直在执业的公司法的厌恶之情,她在书中写道:“在公司的整整三年中,我总觉得自己像是在演戏,穿着西装的我显得那么滑稽。”这种叛逆甚至在她早年上学的时候就已经发生。“我不像其他人那样关心犯罪分子的权利,当教授点到我名的时候我直接无视他。当然我也不会有任何疑问,也不会去质问什么;我只是想把教授所讲的一切都记下来并背下来。”

在耶鲁的全美学校管理者联合会上,蔡将她的成长经历与成年后的不悦联系起来。她告诉学生:“我的父母不会在餐桌上谈论政治和哲学。”

甚至在她逃离公司法,进入法学院后,她说:“我有些迷失,感觉不到那种激情。”最终,她因撰写多本关于外交政策的畅销书而成名,成为一名获奖的老师。然而显而易见的是,和当初准备公司法一样,她没有做好充分的准备去获得法律奖学金。她说:“我花了很长一段时间,经历了无数次的拒绝。”她回忆起不断寻找一个与所学专业对口的岗位,当时“就是无法做好面试,无法很好地表现自己”。

换句话说,《虎妈战歌》提供了所有必需的资料来驳斥其代表的文化争辩。蔡的中式教育让她经历了精英教育,但却让她没有准备好面对这个现实世界。她丝毫不隐藏这一点。她说道,她已着手撰写自传,自传是“自供罪状式的”,结果即杂乱无序而矛盾的冲动,或挑衅,或自我批评。西方读者无视这个悖论,把蔡当作亚裔的丑角。《虎妈战歌》是纯粹的美国项目——任何一个中国人都不会想去做的项目。蔡美儿指出:“即便你讨厌本书,本书不变的一点即不顺从。”

“枪打出头鸟”是一句中国谚语,“锤敲露头钉”是日本谚语。蔡美儿说出了她自己的故事,并遭到世人抨击。尽管她刚受完打击,却从不屈服。

在这种骄傲的反叛中有值得称道的地方。尽管她就亚裔的美国生活所引起的论战仍有值得质疑之处,我们仍然需要更多拥有同样反叛精神的人,他们愿意置自己于聚光灯下,制造一些噪声,犯错,成为企业家,不再顽固追求证明他们价值的有方凭征,不再认为那些废纸会确保人们的幸福,并且敢于成为一个有趣的人。

Key Words:

repressed      [ri'prest] 

adj. 被抑制的;被压抑的 v. 抑制;镇压;约束

devoid    [di'vɔid]  

adj. 全无的,缺乏的

resemble        [ri'zembl]

vt. 相似,类似,像

conformist     [kən'fɔ:mist]   

n. 英国国教徒;遵奉者

mania     ['meiniə] 

n. 狂热,癖好,[医]躁狂 suf. ... 狂,对

hysteria  [his'tiəriə]

n. 歇斯特里症,不正常的兴奋

impassive      [im'pæsiv]     

adj. 无感情的,冷漠的,平静的

hymn     [him]     

n. 赞美诗,圣歌 v. 唱赞美歌

drill  [dril]

n. 钻孔机,钻子,反复操练,播种机

imbalance      [im'bæləns]   

n. 不平衡,失调

discontent      [diskən'tent]  

n. 不满

alienation       [.eiljə'neiʃən]  

n. 疏远,离间,让渡,[哲]异化

domesticity    [.dəumes'tisiti]      

n. (喜欢)家庭生活,顾家

elite [ei'li:t]     

n. 精华,精锐,中坚份子

mediocre       ['mi:diəukə]   

adj. 平庸的,平凡的

proposition    [.prɔpə'ziʃən] 

n. 建议,命题,主张

domesticity    [.dəumes'tisiti]      

n. (喜欢)家庭生活,顾家

devoid    [di'vɔid]  

adj. 全无的,缺乏的

barrier    ['bæriə]  

n. 界线,屏障,栅栏,障碍物

humble   ['hʌmbl] 

adj. 卑下的,谦逊的,粗陋的

hymn     [him]     

n. 赞美诗,圣歌 v. 唱赞美歌

ridiculous       [ri'dikjuləs]    

adj. 荒谬的,可笑的

参考资料:

  1. 现代大学英语精读(第2版)第六册:U1 Paper Tigers(1)_大学教材听力 - 可可英语
  2. http://www.kekenet.com/daxue/202002/60588shtml
  3. http://www.kekenet.com/daxue/202003/60588shtml
  4. http://www.kekenet.com/daxue/202003/60588shtml
  5. http://www.kekenet.com/daxue/202003/60588shtml
  6. http://www.kekenet.com/daxue/202003/60588shtml
  7. http://www.kekenet.com/daxue/202003/60588shtml
  8. http://www.kekenet.com/daxue/202003/60588shtml
  9. http://www.kekenet.com/daxue/202003/60588shtml
  10. 现代大学英语精读(第2版)第六册:U1 Paper Tigers(10)_大学教材听力 - 可可英语
  11. 现代大学英语精读(第2版)第六册:U1 Paper Tigers(11)_大学教材听力 - 可可英语
  12. 现代大学英语精读(第2版)第六册:U1 Paper Tigers(12)_大学教材听力 - 可可英语

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Origin blog.csdn.net/hpdlzu80100/article/details/121359673