I was majoring in sociology, pulling good grades. I started dating a football player who was smart and spontaneous, who liked to have fun. Suzanne and I were now rooming with another friend, Angela Kennedy, a wiry, fast-talking kid from Washington, D. C. Angela had a quick, wacky wit and made a game of making us laugh. Despite being an urban black girl, she dressed like a preppy out of central casting, wearing saddle shoes and pink sweaters and somehow managing to pull off the look.
我学的专业是社会学,成绩优良。我开始和一个橄榄球运动员约会,他聪明,做事常常心血来潮,喜欢玩。苏珊娜和我也多了一个室友,她叫安吉拉·肯尼迪,来自华盛顿特区。她瘦小结实,说话语速很快。安吉拉思维敏捷,风趣幽默,常常逗得我们俩哈哈大笑。尽管是来自城市的黑人女孩,但她打扮得像是电影里预科学校的学生,穿绅士鞋 [1]、粉色毛衣,而且看起来居然很协调。【注:[1]绅士鞋(Saddle shoes),又名鞍部牛津鞋,其脚面上有一块马鞍形的不同于鞋子整体颜色的皮子作装饰,并因此得名。】
Home gradually began to feel more distant, almost like a place in my imagination. While I was in college, I kept up with a few of my high school friends, most especially Santita, who'd landed at Howard University in Washington, D. C. I went to visit her there over a long weekend and we laughed and had deep conversations, same as we always had. Howard's campus was urban --"Girl, you're still in the hood!" I teased, after a giant rat charged past us outside her dorm -- and its student population, twice the size of Princeton's, was almost entirely black. I envied Santita for the fact she was not isolated by her race -- she didn't have to feel that everyday drain of being in a deep minority -- but still, I was content returning to the emerald lawns and vaulted stone archways of Princeton, even if few people there could relate to my background.
家在我的感觉中越来越远,几乎像是想象中的一个地方。在大学期间,我跟高中的几个朋友一直保持着联系,特别是桑蒂塔,她后来去了华盛顿特区的霍华德大学。我找了个周末去那里看她,我们像以前一样,在一起大笑,深入地聊天。霍华德大学的校园在市区,学生数量是普林斯顿大学的两倍,几乎全是黑人。“女孩,你还在老家!”我逗她,就在前一刻,一只硕大的老鼠从我们身边跑出了她的宿舍。我羡慕桑蒂塔,她不会被自己人孤立,她不需要每天承受作为少数派的压力,但是,我还是乐于回到有着翠绿草坪和石头拱门的普林斯顿大学,即使那里没多少人了解我的背景。
For me, the South Side was something entirely different from what got shown on TV. It was home. And home was our apartment on Euclid Avenue, with its fading carpet and low ceilings, my dad kicked back in the bucket of his easy chair. It was our tiny yard with Robbie's blooming flowers and the stone bench where, what seemed like eons ago, I'd kissed that boy Ronnell. Home was my past, connected by gossamer threads to where I was now.
我认识的南城和电视新闻里的南城大相径庭。它是我的家,是欧几里得大道上的那套公寓,有低矮的天花板、已经褪色的地毯,父亲坐在舒服的躺椅上;它是那个小小的庭院,里面盛放着萝比种植的鲜花,还有那张石凳,我曾坐在那里和一个叫罗内尔的男孩接吻,这仿佛已过了几亿年。家是我的过去,一些细微的线将它和我的现在连接起来。
I was from one world but now lived fully in another, one in which people fretted about their LSAT scores and their squash games. It was a tension that never quite went away. At school, when anyone asked where I was from, I answered, "Chicago." And to make clear that I wasn't one of the kids who came from well-heeled northern suburbs like Evanston or Winnetka and staked some false claim on Chicago, I would add, with a touch of pride or maybe defiance, "the South Side." I knew that if those words conjured anything at all, it was probably stereotyped images of a black ghetto, given that gang battles and violence in housing projects were what most often showed up in the news. But again, I was trying, if only half consciously, to represent the alternative. I belonged at Princeton, as much as anybody. And I came from the South Side of Chicago. It felt important to say out loud.
我过去生活的世界和现在截然不同,在现在的世界里,人们苦恼的是LSAT [2]的分数和壁球比赛。两个世界之间的矛盾一直都在。在学校,当有人问我是哪里人时,我回答说:“芝加哥。”为了明确我不是来自富人聚集的北部郊区,比如埃文斯顿和温内特卡,我会加一句“是南城”,语气里带着一丝骄傲或者说挑衅。我不知道这几个字对别人来说意味着什么,想必多半是黑人贫民区的典型形象,因为电视里经常播的新闻就是那里的住宅区发生了帮派斗争和暴力事件。但是,我有意无意地想树立另外一种来自芝加哥南城居民的形象。我属于普林斯顿,和其他人一样;同时,我来自芝加哥南城。我感觉大声说出这一点很重要。【注:[2] LSAT,法学院入学考试,Law School Admission Test的缩写。该考试为美国法学院申请入学的参考条件之一。】
We did have one blood relative in Princeton, Dandy's younger sister, whom we knew as Aunt Sis. She was a simple, bright woman who lived in a simple, bright house on the edge of town. I don't know what brought Aunt Sis to Princeton originally, but she'd been there for a long time, doing domestic work for local families and never losing her Georgetown accent, which sits between a Low Country drawl and a Gullah lilt. Like Dandy, Aunt Sis had been raised in Georgetown, which I remembered from a couple of summer visits we'd made with my parents when I was a kid. I remembered the thick heat of the place and the heavy green drape of Spanish moss on the live oaks, the cypress trees rising from the swamps and the old men fishing on the muddy creeks. There were insects in Georgetown, alarming numbers of them, buzzing and whirring in the evening air like little helicopters.
我们在普林斯顿有一家亲戚,是祖父的妹妹,我们叫她西丝姑婆。她是一个淳朴而聪明的女人,住在镇子边缘一栋简朴而明亮的房子里。我不知道西丝姑婆是怎么来到普林斯顿的,但是她在这里已经住了很长时间。她是做家政服务的,说话仍然带有乔治敦港口音。它的语调介于低地方言的拖沓腔调和古勒语 [3]的轻快语调之间。和祖父一样,西丝姑婆也在乔治敦港长大,我记得小时候曾跟着父母在夏天去过那里几次。那里的天气非常炎热,槲树上爬满了绿色的寄生藤,沼泽地里长出了柏树,老人在浑浊的小溪里钓鱼。乔治敦港还有很多昆虫,多得吓人,在傍晚的空中嗡嗡地叫,呼呼地飞,像小小的直升机。【注:[3]古勒语(Gullah),居住在美国南卡罗来纳州沿海地区的黑人所使用的一种语言,为英语与多种西非语言的结合。】
We stayed with my great-uncle Thomas during our visits, another sibling of Dandy's. He was a genial high school principal who'd take me over to his school and let me sit at his desk, who graciously bought me a tub of peanut butter when I turned my nose up at the enormous breakfasts of bacon, biscuits, and yellow grits that Aunt Dot, his wife, served every morning. I both loved and hated being in the South, for the simple reason that it was so different from what I knew. On the roads outside town, we'd drive past the gateways to what were once slave plantations, though they were enough of a fact of life that nobody ever bothered to remark on them. Down a lonely dirt road deep in the woods, we ate venison in a falling-down country shack belonging to some more distant cousins. One of them took Craig out back and showed him how to shoot a gun. Late at night, back at Uncle Thomas's house, both of us had a hard time sleeping, given the deep silence, which was punctuated only by cicadas throbbing in the trees.
我们住在叔祖父托马斯的家里,他是祖父的弟弟,在一所高中当校长。他和蔼可亲,曾经带我去过他的学校,让我坐在他的办公桌前。叔祖母多特每天早晨都为我们准备丰盛的早餐,有培根、饼干和黄色的玉米粥,但我不爱吃,托马斯便贴心地给我买了一小桶花生酱。我对南方又爱又恨,因为它跟我熟悉的一切大不相同。在镇子外的道路上,我们开车会经过一些大门,那里通往曾经的奴隶种植园。它们是当地生活的一部分,没有人费心对其进行任何评论。在树林深处一条偏僻的土路上,我们在一个破旧的乡下小屋里吃鹿肉,小屋的主人是我们的远亲。其中一位还带克雷格出去,教他怎么打枪。晚上,我们回到托马斯家里,躺在床上难以入睡,因为这里太安静了,间或能听到树上传来几声蝉鸣。
The hum of those insects and the twisting limbs of the live oaks stayed with us long after we'd gone north again, beating in us almost like a second heart. Even as a kid, I understood innately that the South was knit into me, part of my heritage that was meaningful enough for my father to make return visits to see his people there. It was powerful enough that Dandy wanted to move back to Georgetown, even though as a young man he'd needed to escape it. When he did return, it wasn't to some idyllic little river cottage with a white fence and tidy backyard but rather (as I saw when Craig and I made a trip to visit) a bland, cookie-cutter home near a teeming strip mall.
在我们回到北方后很久,那些嗡嗡作响的昆虫叫声和盘根错节的槲树还一直留在我们的心里,就像是我们的第二颗心脏在跳动。小时候,我的内心便感觉到南方已经融入了我的血脉,是我继承的遗产,它对于父亲很重要,所以他经常回来看望这里的亲人。它对祖父的意义更是非同一般,所以他最终还是要搬回乔治敦港居住,尽管年轻的时候他迫切地要从那里逃离。祖父搬回来后,没有住在某个田园牧歌式的有白色栅栏和整洁后院的河畔小别墅里,而是住在一座单调乏味、千篇一律的房子里(我和克雷格曾经去过)。它挨着一条热闹的商业街。
The South wasn't paradise, but it meant something to us. There was a push and pull to our history, a deep familiarity that sat atop a deeper and uglier legacy. Many of the people I knew in Chicago -- the kids I'd gone to Bryn Mawr with, many of my friends at Whitney Young -- knew something similar, though it was not explicitly discussed. Kids simply went "down south" every summer -- shipped out sometimes for the whole season to run around with their second cousins back in Georgia, or Louisiana, or Mississippi. It seems likely that they'd had grandparents or other relatives who'd joined the Great Migration north, just as Dandy had from South Carolina, and Southside's mother had from Alabama. Somewhere in the background was another more-than-decent likelihood -- that they, like me, were descended from slaves.
南方不是天堂,对我们却有特殊的意义。先辈在南方的经历深深吸引着我们,它有一种深沉的熟悉感,建立在更深沉也更丑陋的历史遗产之上。我在芝加哥认识的很多人、在布林茅尔的同学、在惠特尼·扬的许多朋友,也都有相似的感受,虽然我们并未明确地讨论过。孩子们在每个夏天都会“下南方”,有时整个季节都会和他们在佐治亚州、路易斯安那州或密西西比州的堂亲表亲们一起度过。可能他们的(外)祖父母或其他亲戚也是随着“大迁徙” [4]的浪潮来到北方的,就像我的祖父是从南卡罗来纳州迁来的,而外祖父的母亲是从亚拉巴马州迁来的。在我们的背景中可能有另外一个沉重的事实,那就是,他们和我一样,都是奴隶的后代。【注:[4]大迁徙,1916年至1970年,约六百万非洲裔美国人从美国南方郊区迁徙至美国东北部、中西部和西部地区。】
Once or twice a year, Aunt Sis invited me and Craig to dinner at her house on the other side of Princeton. She piled our plates with succulent fatty ribs and steaming collard greens and passed around a basket with neatly cut squares of corn bread, which we slathered with butter. She refilled our glasses with impossibly sweet tea and urged us to go for seconds and then thirds. As I remember it, we never discussed anything of significance with Aunt Sis. It was an hour or so of polite, go-nowhere small talk, accompanied by a hot, hearty South Carolina meal, which we shoveled in appreciatively, tired as we were of dining-hall food. I saw Aunt Sis simply as a mild-mannered, accommodating older lady, but she was giving us a gift we were still too young to recognize, filling us up with the past -- ours, hers, our father's and grandfather's -- without once needing to comment on it. We just ate, helped clean the dishes, and then walked our full bellies back to campus, thankful for the exercise.
每年有那么一两次,西丝姑婆会邀请我和克雷格到她位于普林斯顿另一边的家里吃晚饭。她将我们的盘子盛满汁多味美的排骨和热气腾腾的甘蓝,还有一篮子切得方方正正的玉米面包,我们吃的时候会涂上厚厚一层黄油。饮料是一种极甜的茶,姑婆会热情地让我们接连续杯。在我的记忆中,我们和西丝姑婆没有讨论过什么重要的事情。我们吃着南卡罗来纳式的丰盛的热饭热菜,跟姑婆礼貌而又随意地聊一个小时左右。我们吃腻了学校食堂的饭菜,在这里心怀感激地大快朵颐。我当时只是把西丝姑婆看作一个温文尔雅、热情周到的长辈,然而她送给了我们一份珍贵的礼物,只是当时我们还太年轻没有意识到。她跟我们讲家里过去的事—我们的故事,她自己的故事,我们父亲的故事,还有祖父的故事。我们不需要做任何评论。我们只管吃饭,帮忙洗碗,然后带着鼓鼓的肚子心满意足地回到校园。
The same was true for many of my friends at Princeton, but I was also coming to understand that there were other versions of being black in America. I was meeting kids from East Coast cities whose roots were Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican. Czerny's relatives came from Haiti. One of my good friends, David Maynard, had been born into a wealthy Bahamian family. And there was Suzanne, with her Nigerian birth certificate and her collection of beloved aunties in Jamaica. We were all different, our lineages half buried or maybe just half forgotten. We didn't talk about our ancestry. Why would we? We were young, focused only on the future -- though of course we knew nothing of what lay ahead.
我在普林斯顿的很多朋友也都有着相似的背景,但是,我慢慢了解到,在美国的整个黑人群体都有着各种各样的背景。我认识的一些来自东海岸的同学,他们的祖先大多来自波多黎各、古巴和多米尼加。泽妮的亲戚来自海地。我的一个好朋友大卫·梅纳德出生在一个富裕的巴哈马家庭。还有苏珊娜,她的出生地是尼日利亚,还有许多她挚爱的亲戚是牙买加人。我们彼此背景各异,我们的世系或是被半掩埋,或已被半遗忘。我们不会互相讨论我们的祖先。为什么要讨论呢?我们是年轻人,目光只盯着未来,虽然我们对前方等待我们的事情还一无所知。
Here's a memory, which like most memories is imperfect and subjective -- collected long ago like a beach pebble and slipped into the pocket of my mind. It's from sophomore year of college and involves Kevin, my football-player boyfriend.
还有一件往事,像大多数回忆一样,我记得不那么清晰,可能还有主观加工的成分,它就像很久之前在沙滩上捡到的一块鹅卵石,滑入了我记忆的口袋。那是我上大二的时候,我和男朋友凯文在一起,他是学校橄榄球队的队员。
Kevin is from Ohio and a near-impossible combination of tall, sweet, and rugged. He's a safety for the Tigers, fast on his feet and fearless with his tackles, and at the same time pursuing premed studies. He's two years ahead of me at school, in the same class as my brother, and soon to graduate. He's got a cute, slight gap in his smile and makes me feel special. We're both busy and have different sets of friends, but we like being together. We get pizza and go out for brunch on weekends. Kevin enjoys every meal, in part because of the need to maintain his weight for football and because, beyond that, he has a hard time sitting still. He's restless, always restless, and impulsive in ways I find charming.
凯文来自俄亥俄州,他身材高挑、性格温和、体魄强健,堪称完美。他是学校老虎队的中卫球员,奔跑速度快,擒抱摔倒时无所畏惧。他同时还在修医学预科课程。他比我高两级,跟我哥哥同班,很快就要毕业。他笑起来嘴巴微微张开,我觉得很可爱很特别。我们两个都很忙,朋友圈子也不同,但是我们喜欢在一起。我们在周末会去吃比萨,或者出去吃早午餐。凯文每顿饭都吃得很香,一方面因为他需要为打橄榄球保持体重,另一方面是因为他很难坐着不动。他总是非常活跃,而且常常心血来潮,不过我觉得他很可爱。
"Let's go driving," Kevin says one day. Maybe he says it over the phone or it's possible we're already together when he gets the idea. Either way, we're soon in his car -- a little red compact -- driving across campus toward a remote, undeveloped corner of Princeton's property, turning down an almost-hidden dirt road. It's spring in New Jersey, a warm clear day with open sky all around us.
“咱们去兜风吧。”一天,凯文说。我记不清他是在电话里说的,还是我俩在一起时他突然冒出这个主意的。不管怎样,我们很快就上了他的车,那是一辆红色的小汽车。我们驾车穿越校园,经过学校一个偏僻的未开发的角落,驶上一条近乎隐蔽的土路。当时,新泽西正值春天,天气温暖晴朗,我们头上是一片开阔的天空。
"Come on," he says, motioning for me to follow.
“来呀。”他示意我跟他一起下去。
"What are we doing?"
“我们要做什么?”
He looks at me as if it should be obvious. "We're going to run through this field."
他看着我,好像事情不言自明。“我们要在这块田野上奔跑啊。”
And we do. We run through that field. We dash from one end to the other, waving our arms like little kids, puncturing the silence with cheerful shouts. We plow through the dry grass and leap over the flowers. Maybe it wasn't obvious to me initially, but now it is. We're supposed to run through this field! Of course we are!
是的,我们要在这块田野上奔跑。我们从田野的一边跑到另一边,像孩子一样挥舞着双臂,不时快乐地呼喊,打破了这里的沉寂。我们费力地穿过高高的枯草,跳过那些野花。也许开始我不太明白,但后来明白了。我们要在这块田野上奔跑!这还用说吗?
Are we talking? Holding hands? I don't recall, but the feeling is easy and light, and after a minute Kevin hits the brakes, rolling us to a stop. He's halted alongside a wide field, its high grass stunted and straw-like after the winter but shot through with tiny early-blooming wildflowers. He's getting out of the car.
我们当时聊天了吗?拉手了吗?我不记得了,但那天的感觉是悠闲轻快的,过了一会儿,凯文踩下刹车,我们慢慢停了下来。车停在一片广阔的田野旁。经过了一个寒冬,高高的草不再生长,像干稻草一样,中间夹杂着一些小小的早开的野花。凯文下了车。
Plopping ourselves back in the car, Kevin and I are panting and giddy, loaded up on the silliness of what we've just done.
最后我们回到车里,扑通一下坐到座位上,因为刚才做的傻事,凯文和我都气喘吁吁,兴奋得有些头晕。
And that's it. It's a small moment, insignificant in the end. It's still with me for no reason but the silliness, for how it unpinned me just briefly from the more serious agenda that guided my every day. Because while I was a social student who continued to lounge through communal mealtimes and had no problem trying to own the dance floor at Third World Center parties, I was still privately and at all times focused on the agenda. Beneath my laid-back college-kid demeanor, I lived like a half-closeted CEO, quietly but unswervingly focused on achievement, bent on checking every box. My to-do list lived in my head and went with me everywhere. I assessed my goals, analyzed my outcomes, counted my wins. If there was a challenge to vault, I'd vault it. One proving ground only opened onto the next. Such is the life of a girl who can't stop wondering, Am I good enough? and is still trying to show herself the answer.
整件事就是这样。这是一个微不足道、没什么意义的瞬间。我今天依然记得,不为别的,就为我们当时的傻气,因为它让我从每天要做的严肃的事情里短暂地抽身。虽然我是个喜欢社交的学生,会和大家一起吃饭聊天,在第三世界中心的舞池里也会尽情跳舞,但私下里我一直是一个受目标驱动的人。在悠闲放松的外表下,我这个大学生的生活状态就像是坐在办公室里的公司首席执行官。我默默地、坚定不移地达成一个个目标,下决心在每一个框里都打上“√”。待办事项清单一直存在于我的脑子里,随时随地跟着我。我评估我的目标,分析我的成绩,计算我取得胜利的次数。如果前方有一个挑战要迎接,我一定会迎头而上。证明自己一次之后还有下一次。这就是一个女孩的生活,她总在不停地问自己:“我是否足够优秀?”并不断地给出自己的答案。
Yes, that's right. He'd set his sights on trying out for the Cleveland Browns -- not as a player, but rather as a contender for the role of a wide-eyed, gape-mouthed faux animal named Chomps. It was what he wanted. It was a dream -- another field to run through, because why the heck not? That summer, Kevin even came up to Chicago from his family's home outside Cleveland, purportedly to visit me but also, as he announced shortly after arriving, because Chicago was the kind of city where an aspiring mascot could find the right kind of furry-animal suit for his upcoming audition. We spent a whole afternoon driving around to shops and looking at costumes together, evaluating whether they were roomy enough to do handsprings in. I don't remember whether Kevin actually found the perfect animal suit that day. I'm not sure whether he landed the mascot job in the end, though he did ultimately become a doctor, evidently a very good one, and married another Princeton classmate of ours.
是的,你没听错。他的目标是参加克利夫兰布朗橄榄球队的选拔,不是球员选拔,而是要竞争扮演球队那个大眼睛的微笑动物玩偶冲普斯。那是他渴望做的事,是他的一个梦,就像要去另一块田野上奔跑。为什么不呢?那年夏天,凯文还从他位于克利夫兰郊区的家来到芝加哥,说是来看我,但是很快他又说,因为芝加哥这样的城市比较容易找到合适的毛绒玩偶服装,帮他赢得即将到来的吉祥物选拔赛。我们花了一整个下午,一起在各个商店里寻找服装,讨论衣服是否够宽松,方便翻筋斗。我不记得凯文那天是否找到了完美的毛绒玩偶服装,我也不确定他最后是否得到了扮演球队吉祥物的工作。不过他最后还是成了一名医生,而且是很好的医生,并和我们的一位普林斯顿校友结了婚。
Kevin, meanwhile, was someone who swerved -- who even relished the swerve. He and Craig graduated from Princeton at the end of my sophomore year. Craig would end up moving to Manchester, England, to play basketball professionally. Kevin, I'd thought, was headed to medical school, but then he swerved, deciding to put off schooling and instead pursue a sideline interest in becoming a sports mascot.
相反,凯文是那种会开小差的人,他喜欢时不时改变方向。在我大二结束时,他和克雷格从普林斯顿大学毕业。克雷格要去英国曼彻斯特,开始打职业篮球比赛。我原以为凯文会直接上医学院,但是他突然转向,决定推迟学业,去争取扮演一个球队的吉祥物。
But that was me. And as I've said, I was a box checker -- marching to the resolute beat of effort/result, effort/result -- a devoted follower of the established path, if only because nobody in my family (aside from Craig) had ever set foot on the path before. I wasn't particularly imaginative in how I thought about the future, which is another way of saying I was already thinking about law school.
但这就是我。就像我说过的,我是一个习惯于打“√”的人,我的行进节奏就是付出努力,得到回报,再付出努力,再得到回报。如果我家里没有人(除了克雷格)曾经走过这条路,我会坚定地沿着固定的道路走。我在对未来的考虑上没有太多想象力,换句话说,我当时已经在考虑法学院了。
Life on Euclid Avenue had taught me -- maybe forced me -- to be hard-edged and practical about both time and money. The biggest swerve I'd ever made was a decision to spend the first part of the summer after sophomore year working for basically nothing as a camp counselor in New York's Hudson Valley, looking after urban kids who were having their first experiences in the woods. I'd loved the job but came out of it more or less broke, more dependent on my parents financially than I wanted to be. Though they never once complained, I'd feel guilty about it for years to come.
在欧几里得大道的生活教会我,或许也是迫使我,在时间和金钱上要客观理智,讲求实际。我最大的一次“不务正业”就是在大二结束后的那个暑假,决定用前一半儿假期去纽约哈德逊河谷做一名营地辅导员,照看第一次到森林探险的城市孩子。我喜欢那份工作,但它几乎没有任何报酬,所以工作结束后,我已经身无分文,被迫开口向父母要钱。尽管他们从未有过怨言,但是之后好几年我都为此感到愧疚。
At the time -- and unfairly, I think now -- I judged him for the swerve. I had no capacity to understand why someone would take an expensive Princeton education and not immediately convert it into the kind of leg up in the world that such a degree was meant to yield. Why, when you could be in medical school, would you be a dog who does handsprings?
在当时,甚至是现在,我都因为他的开小差而对他颇有微词,我知道这样对他不公平。但我就是不理解,为什么一个人接受了普林斯顿大学昂贵的教育,不立即把它转化成在世上进阶的资本,这不正是这个学位的价值所在吗?为什么当你可以进医学院时,却愿意去扮演一只翻筋斗的狗?
This was the same summer, too, when people I loved started to die. Robbie, my great-aunt, my rigid taskmaster of a piano teacher, passed away in June, bequeathing her house on Euclid to my parents, allowing them to become home owners for the first time. Southside died a month later after having suffered with advanced lung cancer, his long-held view that doctors were untrustworthy having kept him from any sort of timely intervention. After Southside's funeral, my mother's enormous family piled into his snug little home, along with a smattering of friends and neighbors. I felt the warm tug of the past and the melancholy of absence -- all of it a little jarring, accustomed as I was to the hermetic and youthful world of college. It was something deeper than what I normally felt at school, the slow shift of generational gears. My kid cousins were full grown; my aunts had grown old. There were new babies and new spouses. A jazz album roared from the home-built stereo shelves in the dining room, and we dined on a potluck brought by loved ones -- baked ham, Jell-O molds, and casseroles. But Southside himself was gone. It was painful, but time pushed us all forward.
也是在那个夏天,我的亲人开始有人离世。先是姑婆萝比—我那位严苛的钢琴老师,她在6月去世,把她的房子遗赠给了我的父母,他们第一次成了房屋业主。一个月后,我的外祖父去世了,他是肺癌晚期,因为长久以来对医生的不信任,他没有接受任何及时的治疗。外祖父的葬礼过后,母亲那边的大家庭的成员还有外祖父的几个朋友和邻居,一起聚在了外祖父那间舒适的小屋子里。温暖的往事涌上心头,我感到一种失去的悲伤。对习惯了大学里的与世隔绝和生机勃勃的我来说,这些都让人感觉不舒服。那是一种比我在学校里能感知到的东西更深沉的情感,代际关系在慢慢发生变化。我小时候的表亲和堂亲都已长大成人,我的上一辈已然变老。新人在喜结连理,新的孩子在出生。在外祖父家的餐厅,音响设备依然都在他亲手打造的橱柜里,大声播放着爵士乐唱片,我们吃着亲人们带来的百味餐。其中有烤培根、果冻粉和炖菜。只是,房间里已没有了外祖父。每个人都很难过,但是时间推着我们一路向前。
Each spring, corporate recruiters descended on the Princeton campus, aiming themselves at the graduating seniors. You'd see a classmate who normally dressed in ratty jeans and an untucked shirt crossing campus in a pin-striped suit and understand that he or she was destined for a Manhattan skyscraper. It happened quickly, this vocational sorting -- the bankers, lawyers, doctors, and executives of tomorrow hastily migrating toward their next launchpad, whether it was graduate school or a cushy Fortune 500 training-program job. I'm certain there were others among us who followed their hearts into education, the arts, and nonprofit work or who went off on Peace Corps missions or to serve in the military, but I knew very few of them. I was busy climbing my ladder, which was sturdy and practical and aimed straight up.
每年春天,很多公司都会进驻普林斯顿校园,目标是招聘即将毕业的大四学生。如果你看到某个同学,平时穿破洞牛仔裤,衬衫也从不塞进裤子里,某天忽然身着细条纹西装出现在校园里,你就知道他或她要去曼哈顿的摩天大楼里上班了。事情发生得很快,每个人都有了职业归属,未来的银行家、律师、医生和管理者很快地转移到了他们下一个“发射台”,或者是研究生院,或者是某个轻松安逸的《财富》杂志500强公司的管理培训生职位。我确信我们中有些人会追随自己的心,进入教育、艺术、非营利组织,参加和平队 [5],或者参军,但是这样的人极少。我自己也忙于攀登成功的阶梯,它是坚定、实际而且目标明确的。【注:[5]和平队(Peace Corps),美国政府为在发展中国家推行其外交政策而组建的组织,由具有专业技能的志愿者组成,于1961年根据肯尼迪总统的建议和国会通过的《和平队法》而建立。志愿者中有相当一部分是大学生。他们要接受10~14周的训练,特别是外语训练,然后到某个发展中国家或地区服务两年。】
If I'd stopped to think about it, I might have realized that I was burned-out by school -- by the grind of lectures, papers, and exams -- and probably would have benefited from doing something different. Instead I took the LSAT, wrote my senior thesis, and dutifully reached for the next rung, applying to the best law schools in the country. I saw myself as smart, analytical, and ambitious. I'd been raised on feisty dinner-table debates with my parents. I could argue a point down to its theoretical essence and prided myself on never rolling over in a conflict. Was this not the stuff lawyers were made of? I figured it was.
如果我当时停下来思考一下,可能会意识到在学校忙于上课、写论文、考试已经把我的能量耗尽了,也许做点其他的事情会让我更受益。但是,我参加了LSAT考试,写了毕业论文,老老实实地往上一级阶梯爬去,申请了全美国最好的法学院。我认为自己聪明、善于分析、雄心勃勃。我从小就在饭桌上和父母辩论,据理力争。在论证一个观点时,我可以深入到它的理论基础,并因从未在争论中认输而引以为豪。这不正是律师应该具备的素质吗?我认为是的。
I can admit now that I was driven not just by logic but by some reflexive wish for other people's approval, too. When I was a kid, I quietly basked in the warmth that floated my way anytime I announced to a teacher, a neighbor, or one of Robbie's church-choir friends that I wanted to be a pediatrician. My, isn't that impressive? their expressions would say, and I reveled in it. Years later, it was really no different. Professors, relatives, random people I met, asked what was next for me, and when I mentioned I was bound for law school -- Harvard Law School, as it turned out -- the affirmation was overwhelming. I was applauded just for getting in, even if the truth was I'd somehow squeaked in off the wait list. But I was in. People looked at me as if already I'd made my mark on the world.
现在我可以承认,我不光是受上述逻辑驱动,也是希望获得别人的肯定。小时候,每当我跟老师、邻居或者萝比在教堂合唱团的朋友说“我将来要做一名儿科医生”时,他们的表情都好像在说:“天哪,可真不得了!”这种肯定让我扬扬得意。多年后,事情并无多少不同。教授、亲戚还有我遇到的某些人问我下一步的计划时,我都提到我要去法学院,而且是哈佛法学院。此时得到的那种肯定是让人无法抗拒的。我只是被录取,就得到了掌声,尽管事实上我是在候补名单上勉强被录取的。但是,我被录取了。人们看我的眼神就好像我已经扬名世界了。
This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path -- the my-isn't-that-impressive path -- and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people's high regard can feel too costly. Maybe you spend three years in Massachusetts, studying constitutional law and discussing the relative merits of exclusionary vertical agreements in antitrust cases. For some, this might be truly interesting, but for you it is not. Maybe during those three years you make friends you'll love and respect forever, people who seem genuinely called to the bloodless intricacies of the law, but you yourself are not called. Your passion stays low, yet under no circumstance will you underperform. You live, as you always have, by the code of effort/result, and with it you keep achieving until you think you know the answers to all the questions -- including the most important one. Am I good enough? Yes, in fact I am.
也许,根本问题在于我太在意别人的看法了:它可以把你放到既定的道路上,那条“天哪,可真不得了!”的道路,让你在那里待很长时间。它可能会阻止你开小差,甚至让你根本没有开小差的想法,因为那样你就会冒着失去别人崇拜的风险,这代价对你来说太高。可能它会让你在马萨诸塞州待上三年,学习宪法,讨论反垄断案件中排他性纵向协议的相对优势。有些人可能确实对这些感兴趣,但你不是。可能在这三年中,你交到了一些你热爱和尊敬的朋友,他们似乎是受到召唤才研究那些没有温度、纷繁复杂的法律条款,但你不是。你没有太高的热情,但也绝不会表现不佳。你像一直以来那样,遵从“付出努力,得到回报”的法则,不断地取得成绩,直到你认为你弄清了所有问题的答案,包括最重要的那个问题:“我是否足够优秀?”是的,我确实很优秀。
What happens next is that the rewards get real. You reach for the next rung of the ladder, and this time it's a job with a salary in the Chicago offices of a high-end law firm called Sidley & Austin. You're back where you started, in the city where you were born, only now you go to work on the forty-seventh floor in a downtown building with a wide plaza and a sculpture out front. You used to pass by it as a South Side kid riding the bus to high school, peering mutely out the window at the people who strode like titans to their jobs. Now you're one of them. You've worked yourself out of that bus and across the plaza and onto an upward-moving elevator so silent it seems to glide. You've joined the tribe. At the age of twenty-five, you have an assistant. You make more money than your parents ever have. Your co-workers are polite, educated, and mostly white. You wear an Armani suit and sign up for a subscription wine service. You make monthly payments on your law school loans and go to step aerobics after work. Because you can, you buy yourself a Saab.
接下来,你得到了真实的回报。你又往上爬了一级阶梯,这次你得到了一份薪水很高的工作—在一家名叫盛德的高端律师事务所的芝加哥办公室。你回到了你出发的地方,回到了你出生的城市,只是这次你是去市中心一座大楼的四十七层上班。大楼有一个宽阔的广场,楼前还有一座雕塑。当年你从南城坐公交车去上高中时,常常经过这里,你曾默默地望着窗外那些像巨人一样大踏步地走在路上的上班族。而今你是他们当中的一员了。你终于从那辆公交车里下来,穿过广场,上了电梯。电梯往上走时声音很小,像是在滑行。你加入了精英群体。你才二十五岁,已经有了助理。你挣的钱比你父母这辈子挣的钱都多。你的同事都彬彬有礼,而且受过良好教育,大部分是白人。你穿着阿玛尼套装,享受着葡萄酒订制服务。你按月偿还法学院的学费贷款,下班后去做有氧健身运动。因为你已经有能力了,你还给自己买了一辆萨博汽车。
Is there anything to question? It doesn't seem that way. You're a lawyer now. You've taken everything ever given to you -- the love of your parents, the faith of your teachers, the music from Southside and Robbie, the meals from Aunt Sis, the vocabulary words drilled into you by Dandy -- and converted it to this. You've climbed the mountain. And part of your job, aside from parsing abstract intellectual property issues for big corporations, is to help cultivate the next set of young lawyers being courted by the firm. A senior partner asks if you'll mentor an incoming summer associate, and the answer is easy: Of course you will. You have yet to understand the altering force of a simple yes. You don't know that when a memo arrives to confirm the assignment, some deep and unseen fault line in your life has begun to tremble, that some hold is already starting to slip. Next to your name is another name, that of some hotshot law student who's busy climbing his own ladder. Like you, he's black and from Harvard. Other than that, you know nothing -- just the name, and it's an odd one.
有什么需要质疑的吗?似乎并没有。你已经是一名律师了。你接受了所有别人给予你的东西—父母的爱、老师的器重、外祖父和萝比教的音乐、西丝姑婆的饭菜,祖父给你灌输的词汇,然后把它们转化成当下的生活。你已经爬上了一座大山。你的工作除了为大公司分析抽象的知识产权问题外,还帮忙培训事务所下一批计划招聘的年轻律师。一位高级合伙人问你是否可以督导一名马上要来的暑期实习生,回答很简单:当然可以。你当时还不知道这个回答蕴藏着一种什么样的改变的力量。公司的内部通知下来,确认了这一安排,你不知道你人生中某个深埋的、隐形的脆弱地带开始震荡,之前受掌控的东西开始失去控制。你的名字旁边是另一个名字,那是一名备受瞩目的法学院学生,他正忙着攀爬自己的阶梯。像你一样,他是来自哈佛大学的黑人学生。除此之外,你对他一无所知—只有一个名字,而且是有点怪的名字。