第五章: 第二个女儿 The Second Girl
My mother used to tell me, “I chose to have you because I wanted something to love and something that would love me unconditionally in return.” I was a product of her search for belonging. She never felt like she belonged anywhere. She didn’t belong to her mother, didn’t belong to her father, didn’t belong with her siblings. She grew up with nothing and wanted something to call her own.
我母亲曾对我说：“我选择生下你，是因为我想要去爱某样东西，并且它也会无条件地爱我。”我是她追求归属感的产物。她从来没觉得自己属于哪个地方，她不属于她的母亲，不属于她的父亲，也不属于她的兄弟姐妹。没有什么东西陪伴她成长，她想要一样属于她自己的东西。
My grandparents’ marriage was an unhappy one. They met and married in Sophiatown, but one year later the army came in and drove them out. The government seized their home and bulldozed the whole area to build a fancy, new white suburb, Triomf. Triumph. Along with tens of thousands of other black people, my grandparents were forcibly relocated to Soweto, to a neighborhood called the Meadowlands. They divorced not long after that, and my grandmother moved to Orlando with my mom, my aunt, and my uncle.
我外祖父母的婚姻并不美满。他们在索菲亚相识并结婚，但一年之后军队就把他们赶了出来。政府掠夺了他们的家，把整块地方推平，重新建起了一座高级、崭新的白人社区迪莫福，意为胜利。和成千上万的黑人一起，我的外祖父母被迫迁居到索韦托，住在一个叫作美多莱的街区。不久之后，他们就离婚了。我的外婆带着我妈、我姨妈和我舅舅，搬去了奥兰多。
My mom was the problem child, a tomboy, stubborn, defiant. My gran had no idea how to raise her. Whatever love they had was lost in the constant fighting that went on between them. But my mom adored her father, the charming, charismatic Temperance. She went gallivanting with him on his manic misadventures. She’d tag along when he’d go drinking in the shebeens. All she wanted in life was to please him and be with him. She was always being swatted away by his girlfriends, who didn’t like having a reminder of his first marriage hanging around, but that only made her want to be with him all the more.
我妈是个问题少女，假小子一个，执拗又叛逆。我外婆拿她一点儿办法都没有。她们之间的亲情，在持续不断的对抗中被消磨殆尽了。但我妈妈特别喜欢她父亲，那位迷人、魅力非凡的泰普雷斯。在他一切没有意义的玩乐里，她都紧随不舍。他去小酒馆喝酒，她也跟着。她只想讨他欢心，和他在一起。泰普雷斯身边的不同女友经常把我妈赶跑，她们不喜欢看到他第一任婚姻的拖油瓶总在眼前晃来晃去，但这只会让我妈更想和她父亲在一起。
When my mother was nine years old, she told my gran that she didn’t want to live with her anymore. She wanted to live with her father. “If that’s what you want,” Gran said, “then go.” Temperance came to pick my mom up, and she happily bounded up into his car, ready to go and be with the man she loved. But instead of taking her to live with him in the Meadowlands, without even telling her why, he packed her off and sent her to live with his sister in the Xhosa homeland, Transkei — he didn’t want her, either. My mom was the middle child. Her sister was the eldest and firstborn. Her brother was the only son, bearer of the family name. They both stayed in Soweto, were both raised and cared for by their parents. But my mom was unwanted. She was the second girl. The only place she would have less value would be China.
我母亲九岁的时候，和我外婆说，她不想和她再住一起了，想和父亲去住。“如果那是你想要的，就去吧。”外婆说。泰普雷斯过来接我母亲，她高高兴兴地跳上车，准备和她深爱的父亲一起生活。但是，他并没有把她带回美多莱，也没解释为什么，就把她打包送到了他姐姐住的地方——科萨族的黑人家园特兰斯凯——他也不想要她。我妈妈在家里排行中间。她的姐姐是老大，家里第一个孩子。她的弟弟是唯一的儿子，是家里的命根子。他们都住在索韦托，由父母精心照料。但是我母亲排行老二，没人想要她。唯一一个她更没用处的地方应该就是中国了。
My mother didn’t see her family again for twelve years. She lived in a hut with fourteen cousins — fourteen children from fourteen different mothers and fathers. All the husbands and uncles had gone off to the cities to find work, and the children who weren’t wanted, or whom no one could afford to feed, had been sent back to the homeland to live on this aunt’s farm.
接下来的12年里，我妈妈再也没见过她的家人。她和14个兄弟姐妹住在一个棚屋里。这14个孩子分别来自14个不同的家庭，有14对不同的父母。所有的父亲或叔叔舅舅们都到城里去打工了，所以那些没人要或者养不起的孩子，就被送到这个黑人家园，住到了姨妈的农场里。
The homelands were, ostensibly, the original homes of South Africa’s tribes, sovereign and semi-sovereign “nations” where black people would be “free.” Of course, this was a lie. For starters, despite the fact that black people made up over 80 percent of South Africa’s population, the territory allocated for the homelands was about 13 percent of the country’s land. There was no running water, no electricity. People lived in huts.
从表面上看，黑人家园就是南非部落的原址，它们是主权或半主权的“国家”，在这里的黑人都是“自由的”。当然了，这是个谎言。首先，黑人人口占了整个南非人口的80%之多，但黑人家园的领土只占整个国家领土的13%。那里没有自来水，没有电，人们住在棚屋里。
Where South Africa’s white countryside was lush and irrigated and green, the black lands were overpopulated and overgrazed, the soil depleted and eroding. Other than the menial wages sent home from the cities, families scraped by with little beyond subsistence-level farming. My mother’s aunt hadn’t taken her in out of charity. She was there to work. “I was one of the cows,” my mother would later say, “one of the oxen.” She and her cousins were up at half past four, plowing fields and herding animals before the sun baked the soil as hard as cement and made it too hot to be anywhere but in the shade.
南非白人区的乡村苍翠繁茂、水源丰富、草木葱茏。而黑人区的乡村则是人口密集之地，土地由于过度放牧而变得贫瘠不堪。除了依赖从城里寄回来的那点儿工资，一般家庭都是靠着农场的土地，有啥吃啥，勉强糊口。我母亲的姨妈接纳了她可不是为了做慈善，她得在那里干活。我母亲后来说：“我就是里面的一头母牛，也是一头公牛。”她和兄弟们早晨4点半就要起床，犁地、放牧，因为再晚一点儿，太阳就会把土地烤成硬邦邦的水泥地，酷热曝晒之下，除了树荫里，哪儿也不能待。
But my mother was blessed that her village was one of the places where a mission school had contrived to stay open in spite of the government’s Bantu education policies. There she had a white pastor who taught her English. She didn’t have food or shoes or even a pair of underwear, but she had English. She could read and write. When she was old enough she stopped working on the farm and got a job at a factory in a nearby town. She worked on a sewing machine making school uniforms. Her pay at the end of each day was a plate of food. She used to say it was the best food she’d ever eaten, because it was something she had earned on her own. She wasn’t a burden to anyone and didn’t owe anything to anyone.
但是我妈妈还算幸运的，尽管政府实施了班图教育政策，这个村子里有一所教会学校还在坚持开门。她在那里遇到了一位白人牧师，教她学英语。尽管她没有吃的，没有鞋，连一套内衣都没有，但她学会了英语。她可以读，可以写。长大一点儿后，她就离开了农场，去隔壁镇的工厂找了份工作。工作是坐在缝纫机前缝校服，每天的报酬是一盘食物。她经常说，那是她吃过最好吃的东西，因为那是她自己挣来的。她自己照顾自己，不再是任何人的负担，也不欠别人任何。
For dinner there might be one chicken to feed fourteen children. My mom would have to fight with the bigger kids to get a handful of meat or a sip of the gravy or even a bone from which to suck out some marrow. And that’s when there was food for dinner at all. When there wasn’t, she’d steal food from the pigs. She’d steal food from the dogs. The farmers would put out scraps for the animals, and she’d jump for it. She was hungry; let the animals fend for themselves. There were times when she literally ate dirt. She would go down to the river, take the clay from the riverbank, and mix it with the water to make a grayish kind of milk. She’d drink that to feel full.
晚饭里可能会有一只鸡，14个孩子分着吃。我妈妈得和比她大的孩子打架，才能抢到一块肉、一勺汤，或者一块骨头让她可以吸点儿骨髓，这还是有晚餐的情况。如果没有，她就去偷猪食或者狗食。农民会给家里的牲畜倒一点儿残羹剩饭，我妈就去抢来吃。她太饿了，让动物们自己解决温饱问题吧。有几次，她甚至吃了土。她到河边去，从岸上挖了些泥巴，用水稀释了，做成了一碗灰不溜秋的“牛奶”，然后全喝了，感觉吃饱了。
So many black families spend all of their time trying to fix the problems of the past. That is the curse of being black and poor, and it is a curse that follows you from generation to generation. My mother calls it “the black tax.” Because the generations who came before you have been pillaged, rather than being free to use your skills and education to move forward, you lose everything just trying to bring everyone behind you back up to zero. Working for the family in Soweto, my mom had no more freedom than she’d had in Transkei, so she ran away. She ran all the way down to the train station and jumped on a train and disappeared into the city, determined to sleep in public restrooms and rely on the kindness of prostitutes until she could make her own way in the world.
有太多的黑人家庭穷极一生在填补过去的缺口。这是身为黑人以及贫穷的诅咒，这也是一代代人无法逃离的梦魇。我母亲将其称为“黑人债”。因为你的长辈们已经被剥夺殆尽，你不能把这些钱用在自己身上，让自己进步，你只能把你挣来的钱给他们，把他们拉回生活的起点。在索韦托的家里，我妈妈获得的自由并不比在特兰斯凯的时候多，所以她又逃离了。她径直跑到火车站，跳上一列车，消失在了城市中。她下定决心，哪怕要睡在公共厕所，哪怕要依赖好心妓女们的善意帮助，她也要自己闯出一片天。
When my mom turned twenty-one, her aunt fell ill and that family could no longer keep her in Transkei. My mom wrote to my gran, asking her to send the price of a train ticket, about thirty rand, to bring her home. Back in Soweto, my mom enrolled in the secretarial course that allowed her to grab hold of the bottom rung of the white-collar world. She worked and worked and worked but, living under my grandmother’s roof, she wasn’t allowed to keep her own wages. As a secretary, my mom was bringing home more money than anyone else, and my grandmother insisted it all go to the family. The family needed a radio, an oven, a refrigerator, and it was now my mom’s job to provide it.
我妈妈21岁的时候，姨妈病了，她没法再待在特兰斯凯。我妈写信给我外婆，问外婆能否给她寄一张火车票的钱，大概30兰特，她想回家了。回到索韦托后，我妈妈报名了秘书课程，这令她抓住了白领世界的尾巴。她努力工作，但是，和我外婆住在同一屋檐下，她挣来的钱完全不能留作己用。作为秘书，我妈妈挣的钱比家里任何人都多，但是我外婆坚持要她上交所有的工资贴补家用。家里不论是需要一台收音机，一个烤箱，还是一个冰箱，都需要我妈来买。
My mom told me these things so that I’d never take for granted how we got to where we were, but none of it ever came from a place of self-pity. “Learn from your past and be better because of your past,” she would say, “but don’t cry about your past. Life is full of pain. Let the pain sharpen you, but don’t hold on to it. Don’t be bitter.” And she never was. The deprivations of her youth, the betrayals of her parents, she never complained about any of it.
由于我妈妈跟我讲的这些过往，我从来不觉得现在的生活是理所当然的，不过她从来不会自怨自艾。她常说：“了解你的过去，才能变成更好的人。但是不要总为过去悲泣。生活是充满痛苦的，让这些痛苦将你变得更强，不要执着于它。不要怨天尤人。”她从来不会怨天尤人。哪怕她没有经历过正常的童年，还遭受了父母的背叛，她都没有抱怨过一句。
Just as she let the past go, she was determined not to repeat it: my childhood would bear no resemblance to hers. She started with my name. The names Xhosa families give their children always have a meaning, and that meaning has a way of becoming self-fulfilling. You have my cousin, Mlungisi. “The Fixer.” That’s who he is. Whenever I got into trouble he was the one trying to help me fix it. He was always the good kid, doing chores, helping around the house. You have my uncle, the unplanned pregnancy, Velile. “He Who Popped Out of Nowhere.” And that’s all he’s done his whole life, disappear and reappear. He’ll go off on a drinking binge and then pop back up out of nowhere a week later.
她走出了过去的阴影，并决心不会再重复过去：我的童年绝不能像她的一样，从取名开始。科萨家庭给自己小孩取的名字总要带有点儿什么含义，而且这个含义总能在他后面的人生中有所体现。譬如我的表哥穆隆格斯的名字意为“修补的人”。他真的就是这样的人。每当我遇到麻烦，他总会过来帮我摆平事情。他是一贯的好孩子，会做家务，处理家事。而我的舅舅维莱尔，他是意外怀孕生下的孩子，名字的意思是“不知从哪儿冒出来的人”。而这基本就是他一生的写照，他总是动不动就消失，然后又突然出现。他可以跑去喝酒狂欢，人就不见了，然后一个星期后不知道从哪儿又冒出来。
My mother never sat me down and told me the whole story of her life in Transkei. She’d give me little bursts, random details, stories of having to keep her wits about her to avoid getting raped by strange men in the village. She’d tell me these things and I’d be like, Lady, clearly you do not know what kind of stories to be telling a ten-year-old.
我妈妈从来没有坐下和我好好讲过她在特兰斯凯的故事。她只是偶尔爆一两句料，随便讲一点儿细节，譬如怎么在村庄中保持警惕，不被陌生男人强奸这种事。每当她跟我讲起这些，我就想，女士，你可能不知道十岁的小孩适合听什么样的故事。
Then you have my mother, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah. “She Who Gives Back.” That’s what she does. She gives and gives and gives. She did it even as a girl in Soweto. Playing in the streets she would find toddlers, three- and four-year-olds, running around unsupervised all day long. Their fathers were gone and their mothers were drunks. My mom, who was only six or seven herself, used to round up the abandoned kids and form a troop and take them around to the shebeens. They’d collect empties from the men who were passed out and take the bottles to where you could turn them in for a deposit. Then my mom would take that money, buy food in the spaza shops, and feed the kids. She was a child taking care of children.
我妈妈的名字叫帕特莉莎·努拜伊赛罗·诺亚，意思是“奉献的人”。这也是她一直在做的事。她总是在奉献，奉献，奉献。当她还是个住在索韦托的小女孩时，就已经是这样了。她在街上玩的时候，经常碰到三四岁大没人管的小孩满街乱跑，这种孩子的父亲应该是不在身边，而母亲则一直酗酒。我母亲只有六七岁大，但她会把这样的小孩全都聚到一起，带着他们一起到小酒馆去。他们会从那些醉倒的大人身边捡空酒瓶，带去可以换瓶子的地方，拿到找回的零钱。然后她会带着这些钱，到小卖铺买吃的，给这些小孩吃。她是一个会照顾小孩的小孩。
When it was time to pick my name, she chose Trevor, a name with no meaning whatsoever in South Africa, no precedent in my family. It’s not even a Biblical name. It’s just a name. My mother wanted her child beholden to no fate. She wanted me to be free to go anywhere, do anything, be anyone.
到了该给我取名字的时候，她挑了“特雷弗”，这个名字在南非没有任何意义，在家族中没人叫过，甚至都不是从《圣经》上来的。这就是个名字而已。我妈妈希望她的孩子不要被命运束缚。她希望我可以自由地去任何地方，做任何事，成为任何人。
She gave me the tools to do it as well. She taught me English as my first language. She read to me constantly. The first book I learned to read was the book. The Bible. Church was where we got most of our other books, too. My mom would bring home boxes that white people had donated — picture books, chapter books, any book she could get her hands on. Then she signed up for a subscription program where we got books in the mail. It was a series of how-to books. How to Be a Good Friend. How to Be Honest. She bought a set of encyclopedias, too; it was fifteen years old and way out of date, but I would sit and pore through those.
她也给了我能自由生活的本事。她让英文成为我的母语。她常常给我读书。我读的第一本书，就是那本书——《圣经》。我们其他的书，也基本都是从教堂得到的。我妈妈常常带着白人捐赠的盒子回家，里面装满了图画书、故事书，任何她能找到的书。她还报名参加了一个订阅会，我们经常能收到邮寄过来的书。通常都是那种指南书籍。譬如，如何成为好伙伴，如何变得诚实。她也买了一整套的百科全书。不过是十五年前的版本，早就过时了，但我能一直坐在那儿，仔细钻研。
My books were my prized possessions. I had a bookshelf where I put them, and I was so proud of it. I loved my books and kept them in pristine condition. I read them over and over, but I did not bend the pages or the spines. I treasured every single one. As I grew older I started buying my own books. I loved fantasy, loved to get lost in worlds that didn’t exist. I remember there was some book about white boys who solved mysteries or some shit. I had no time for that. Give me Roald Dahl. James and the Giant Peach, The BFG, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. That was my fix.
我的书就是我的珍宝。我把它们摆在书架上，特别骄傲。我很爱惜我的书，要让它们保持崭新完好的样子。尽管我反复阅读，但我从来不会折书角，或弄弯书脊。每本书我都很珍惜。等长大一些后，我开始自己挑书来买。我喜欢幻想故事，喜欢沉浸于那些不存在的世界里。我记得有些书是讲白人小孩解谜还是什么鬼的，我可没时间读那些。我要读罗尔德·达尔，飞天巨桃历险记，好心眼儿巨人，查理的巧克力工厂，亨利休格的奇妙故事。这才是我的主攻方向。
She wasn’t comfortable with that. “No, no. No false idols, my friend.”
她对此并不买账。“不不不，朋友，那是假偶像。”
I had to fight to convince my mom to get the Narnia books for me. She didn’t like them.
为了一套纳尼亚传奇，我得跟我妈软磨硬泡。她不喜欢那套书。
“This lion,” she said, “he is a false God — a false idol! You remember what happened when Moses came down from the mountain after he got the tablets…”
她说：“那个狮子，是假神——假偶像！你记得摩西拿到法板下山之后发生了什么吧…”
“Yes, Mom,” I explained, “but the lion is a Christ figure. Technically, he is Jesus. It’s a story to explain Jesus.”
“是的，妈妈。”我试图解释，“但是那头狮子是基督的形象。准确地说，它就是耶稣。这是一个阐释耶稣的故事。”
If my mother had one goal, it was to free my mind. My mother spoke to me like an adult, which was unusual. In South Africa, kids play with kids and adults talk to adults. The adults supervise you, but they don’t get down on your level and talk to you. My mom did. All the time. I was like her best friend. She was always telling me stories, giving me lessons, Bible lessons especially. She was big into Psalms. I had to read Psalms every day. She would quiz me on it. “What does the passage mean? What does it mean to you? How do you apply it to your life?” That was every day of my life. My mom did what school didn’t. She taught me how to think.
如果说我妈对我的教育只有一个目标，那就是解放我的思想。我妈妈跟我说话就像和其他大人说话一样，这并不寻常。在南非，小孩和小孩玩，大人和大人聊天。大人会监督你，但是他们不会压低身段来和你对话。但我妈妈会。一直以来，我都是她最好的朋友。她总是在给我讲故事，给我上课，尤其是《圣经》课。她特别喜欢旧约中的诗篇，我以前每天都要读那些诗篇。她还会考我：“这一段是什么意思？对你意味着什么？你要怎么在生活中运用这层含义？”这就是我的日常。我妈妈教了我学校不会教的东西——她教会了我如何去思考。
Eventually I wore her down. That was a big win.
最后她还是给我买了。这是一次大大的胜利。
The end of apartheid was a gradual thing. It wasn’t like the Berlin Wall where one day it just came down. Apartheid’s walls cracked and crumbled over many years. Concessions were made here and there, some laws were repealed, others simply weren’t enforced. There came a point, in the months before Mandela’s release, when we could live less furtively. It was then that my mother decided we needed to move. She felt we had grown as much as we could hiding in our tiny flat in town.
种族隔离的终结是循序渐进的，并不像柏林墙那样在一天之内倒塌。种族隔离的墙是悄悄地产生裂隙，经年累月后才最终破碎。逐渐地，各个领域都或多或少地出现一些让步，有些法条被废了，有些就干脆不实施了。在曼德拉被释放的几个月之前，到了一个临界点，让我和我妈觉得，我们似乎可以不用那么辛苦地躲藏了。那是我妈决定要搬家的时刻。她感觉我们已经在镇上的小公寓里躲了够久。
Eden Park was a colored neighborhood adjacent to several black townships on the East Rand. Half-colored and half-black, she figured, like us. We’d be camouflaged there. It didn’t work out that way; we never fit in at all. But that was her thinking when we made the move. Plus it was a chance to buy a home — our own home. Eden Park was one of those “suburbs” that are actually out on the edge of civilization, the kind of place where property developers have said, “Hey, poor people. You can live the good life, too. Here’s a house. In the middle of nowhere. But look, you have a yard!” For some reason the streets in Eden Park were named after cars: Jaguar Street. Ferrari Street. Honda Street. I don’t know if that was a coincidence or not, but it’s funny because colored people in South Africa are known for loving fancy cars. It was like living in a white neighborhood with all the streets named after varietals of fine wine.
伊登公园位于东兰德，紧邻几个黑人小镇，是一片有色人种社区。在这里住着一半的黑人，一半的有色人种，她想，那不正和我们俩一样。我们可以在里面好好地伪装起来。但现实并没有那么理想，后来我们完全融不进当地的社区。但是当初决定搬家的时候，她是这么盘算的。而且，那是一个买房子的机会——我们自己的房子。伊登公园是一个“郊区”，虽然离城市边缘地带还有很远的距离。对于这种地方，地产开发商的说辞通常是：“嘿，穷人们，你们也可以过上很好的生活哦。看这个房子，虽然哪哪儿都不挨着，但是，你有个花园！”不知什么缘故，伊登公园的路都是用车名来命名的：捷豹街，法拉利街，本田街。我也不清楚是不是巧合，但是南非的有色人种确实是以钟情豪车而出名。这就好像一个白人街区把所有的路用不同的葡萄酒命名一样。
The country was open now. Where would we go? Soweto came with its burdens. My mother still wanted to get out from the shadow of her family. My mother also couldn’t walk with me through Soweto without people saying, “There goes that prostitute with a white man’s child.” In a black area she would always be seen as that. So, since my mom didn’t want to move to a black area and couldn’t afford to move to a white area, she decided to move to a colored area.
现在国家开放了。我们应该去哪里呢？去索韦托的话还是会有牵累，我妈妈还是想摆脱家庭的阴影。而且，现在如果我妈牵着我走在索韦托的街道上，依然会有人在旁边指指点点：“看那个妓女带着她和白人生的小孩。”在黑人区她依然会被这样看待。既然我妈不想搬去黑人区，也没钱搬到白人区，她决定搬到有色人种区去。
There was no stepfather in the picture yet, no baby brother crying in the night. It was me and her, alone. There was this sense of the two of us embarking on a grand adventure. She’d say things to me like, “It’s you and me against the world.” I understood even from an early age that we weren’t just mother and son. We were a team.
那时家里还没有继父的存在，晚上也没有小弟弟的哭声。只有我和妈妈，两个人。就好像我们两个人在经历一场盛大的冒险。她曾对我说：“这是你和你在对抗整个世界。”我从很小的时候就明白，我和她不仅仅是母亲与儿子的关系。我们是一个团队。
I remember moving out there in flashbacks, snippets, driving to a place I’d never seen, seeing people I’d never seen. It was flat, not many trees, the same dusty red-clay dirt and grass as Soweto but with proper houses and paved roads and a sense of suburbia to it. Ours was a tiny house at the bend in the road right off Toyota Street. It was modest and cramped inside, but walking in I thought, Wow. We are really living. It was crazy to have my own room. I didn’t like it. My whole life I’d slept in a room with my mom or on the floor with my cousins. I was used to having other human beings right next to me, so I slept in my mom’s bed most nights.
我还能记起搬家过程中的一些细节片段，我们开车来到一片我从没来过的地方，见到一群我从没见过的人。那是一个平坦的地方，没有多少树，地上有着和索韦托一样的红色泥土和草，但是那里有更体面的房子，铺好的路面，还有一种郊区的气息。从丰田路右转进来就是我们的小房子。房子装修很简陋，有点儿狭窄，但是走进去的那一刻，我想，哇哦，我们真正开始生活了。我拥有了自己的房间，这太疯狂了。我一点儿也不喜欢。在此之前，我都是和我妈妈以及表兄弟睡在同一个房间的地板上。我习惯了身边有其他人的存在，所以搬过去后，大多数时候我还是和我妈睡在一起。
It was when we moved to Eden Park that we finally got a car, the beat-up, tangerine Volkswagen my mother bought secondhand for next to nothing. One out of five times it wouldn’t start. There was no AC. Anytime I made the mistake of turning on the fan the vent would fart bits of leaves and dust all over me. Whenever it broke down we’d catch minibuses, or sometimes we’d hitchhike. She’d make me hide in the bushes because she knew men would stop for a woman but not a woman with a child. She’d stand by the road, the driver would pull over, she’d open the door and then whistle, and I’d come running up to the car. I would watch their faces drop as they realized they weren’t picking up an attractive single woman but an attractive single woman with a fat little kid.
搬去伊登公园后，我们终于有了车，就是那辆破旧的橙色大众甲壳虫，我妈买的二手车，没花多少钱。那车平均五次就有一次发动不起来。没有空调。每次我不小心开了风扇，通风口能把枯叶碎屑和灰尘喷我一身。每当它坏掉，我们就得去搭小巴，或者搭顺风车。我妈会让我蹲在路边的树丛里，因为她知道男人们会为一个单身女人停下车，而对带小孩的女人就不见得了。她站在路边，司机靠边停下，她打开车门，吹个口哨，我就冲过来。我能看到那些司机的脸立刻拉了下来，他们迅速意识到自己并非接上了一位很有魅力的单身女子，而是接上了一个很有魅力的单身女子带着一个大胖小子。
But as shitty as our car was, it was a car. It was freedom. We weren’t black people stuck in the townships, waiting for public transport. We were black people who were out in the world. We were black people who could wake up and say, “Where do we choose to go today?” On the commute to work and school, there was a long stretch of the road into town that was completely deserted. That’s where Mom would let me drive. On the highway. I was six. She’d put me on her lap and let me steer and work the indicators while she worked the pedals and the stick shift. After a few months of that, she taught me how to work the stick. She was still working the clutch, but I’d climb onto her lap and take the stick, and she’d call out the gears as we drove. There was this one part of the road that ran deep into a valley and then back up the other side. We’d get up a head of speed, and we’d stick it into neutral and let go of the brake and the clutch, and, woo-hoo!, we’d race down the hill and then, zoom!, we’d shoot up the other side. We were flying.
就算我们的车再破，那也是辆车，是自由的象征。我们不再是困于黑人小镇，需要等公交车才能出行的黑人家庭了，我们是闯荡世界的黑人一家。我们是醒来后可以说“我们今天要去哪里”的黑人一家。在我妈的工作地点和我的学校之间，有一长段路完全荒无人烟。那时候我妈就会让我来开车。在高速路上。那时我才六岁。她把我放在她腿上，让我掌控方向盘和指示灯，而她负责踩踏板和换档。这样开了几个月后，她又教了我怎么换档。她依然控制着离合，但我则会爬到她腿上，握住档，在开车过程中，她会告诉我要换几档。我们中途会经过一段路，那路会向下降到山谷深处，然后又从另一端升起来。这时候我们会先加速，然后换空档，松开刹车与离合，呜呼！俯冲下山，而后，急速上升！我们就已经喷射到路的另一头了。我们是飞过来的。
When the car did work, we had the windows down, sputtering along and baking in the heat. For my entire life the dial on that car’s radio stayed on one station. It was called Radio Pulpit, and as the name suggests it was nothing but preaching and praise. I wasn’t allowed to touch that dial. Anytime the radio wasn’t getting reception, my mom would pop in a cassette of Jimmy Swaggart sermons. (When we finally found out about the scandal? Oh, man. That was rough.)
而当车子可以发动的时候，我们会把车窗摇下来，一路灌着风，在酷热烘烤中前行。一直以来，那辆车的收音机都只停在一个台上。那个台叫“讲道台”，名字就暗示了这个台只播讲道音频和赞美诗。我妈不允许我换台。如果收音机收不到讯号，她就会塞进一盘吉米·斯瓦加特的传道磁带。（后来我们才知道那个丑闻[3]。天，那可不好受。）
Food, or the access to food, was always the measure of how good or bad things were going in our lives. My mom would always say, “My job is to feed your body, feed your spirit, and feed your mind.” That’s exactly what she did, and the way she found money for food and books was to spend absolutely nothing on anything else. Her frugality was the stuff of legend. Our car was a tin can on wheels, and we lived in the middle of nowhere. We had threadbare furniture, busted old sofas with holes worn through the fabric. Our TV was a tiny black-and-white with a bunny aerial on top. We changed the channels using a pair of pliers because the buttons didn’t work. Most of the time you had to squint to see what was going on.
食物，或者获得食物的途径，总能体现出我们生活得好还是不好。我妈妈总是说：“我的任务就是喂饱你的身体，喂饱你的精神，喂饱你的思想。”这正是她所做的，她会用所有的钱来买食物和书，几乎完全不会花钱在别的地方。她的节俭堪称传奇。我们的车几乎就是长着轮子的罐头皮，我们住在远离城镇的地方，我们的家具都极其陈腐，旧沙发上满是破洞。我们有一个小小的黑白电视机，顶上带天线的那种。我们得用钳子换台，因为电视按钮都失灵了。大多数时候，你得眯着眼睛才能看清电视里在演什么。
If we weren’t at school or work or church, we were out exploring. My mom’s attitude was “I chose you, kid. I brought you into this world, and I’m going to give you everything I never had.” She poured herself into me. She would find places for us to go where we didn’t have to spend money. We must have gone to every park in Johannesburg. My mom would sit under a tree and read the Bible, and I’d run and play and play and play. On Sunday afternoons after church, we’d go for drives out in the country. My mom would find places with beautiful views for us to sit and have a picnic. There was none of the fanfare of a picnic basket or plates or anything like that, only baloney and brown bread and margarine sandwiches wrapped up in butcher paper. To this day, baloney and brown bread and margarine will instantly take me back. You can come with all the Michelin stars in the world, just give me baloney and brown bread and margarine and I’m in heaven.
如果不用上学、工作或去教会的话，我们就会出去探索世界。我妈妈的态度一直是：“我选择了你，孩子，我把你带到这个世界上，我要把我没有经历过的东西都给你。”她全身心地给予了我一切。她会找那种可以带我去玩又不用花钱的地方。我们走遍了约翰内斯堡的每一个公园。我妈妈会坐在树下，读《圣经》，我则会到处跑到处玩。礼拜天下午离开教堂后，我们会开车去乡村郊游。我妈妈会找到那种风景好的地方停下车，我们在那里野餐。我们从来没有野餐篮或野餐盘那样高级的东西，只有用厚纸包着的熏肠棕面包黄油三明治。直到今天，熏肠棕面包黄油还能立刻把我带回当时的场景。你可以把全世界所有的米其林餐厅摆在我面前，但只需要给我熏肠棕面包黄油，我就能飘飘欲仙。
“Look at the logo. There are four stripes instead of three.”
“看这个标，这里有四条杠，真的只有三条。”
We always wore secondhand clothes, from Goodwill stores or that were giveaways from white people at church. All the other kids at school got brands, Nike and Adidas. I never got brands. One time I asked my mom for Adidas sneakers. She came home with some knockoff brand, Abidas.
我们穿的衣服都是二手的，来自亲善商店或者教会里白人的捐赠。学校里的其他小孩都会穿名牌，比如耐克或阿迪达斯。我从来没穿过带牌子的衣服。有一次我想让我妈给我买一双阿迪达斯的运动鞋，我妈给我带回一双假冒的，阿比达斯。
“Mom, these are fake,” I said.
“妈，这是假的。”我说。
“Lucky you,” she said. “You got one extra.”
“走运啦你，”她说，“你比别人多一条杠。”
“I don’t see the difference.”
“我看不出有什么差别啊。”
We got by with next to nothing, but we always had church and we always had books and we always had food. Mind you, it wasn’t necessarily good food. Meat was a luxury. When things were going well we’d have chicken. My mom was an expert at cracking open a chicken bone and getting out every last bit of marrow inside. We didn’t eat chickens. We obliterated them. Our family was an archaeologist’s nightmare. We left no bones behind. When we were done with a chicken there was nothing left but the head. Sometimes the only meat we had was a packaged meat you could buy at the butcher called “sawdust.” It was literally the dust of the meat, the bits that fell off the cuts being packaged for the shop, the bits of fat and whatever’s left. They’d sweep it up and put it into bags. It was meant for dogs, but my mom bought it for us. There were many months where that was all we ate.
虽然我们其他什么都没有，但我们一直有教会，有书，有食物。说明一下，并不一定是特别好的食物。肉对我们来说是奢侈品。如果我们最近过得不错，我们会吃鸡。我妈妈会把鸡骨头敲碎，把里面的骨髓吸得干干净净。我们不是在“吃”鸡，我们是在彻底消灭一只鸡。我们家是考古学家的噩梦，因为我们一丁点儿骨头都不会剩。如果我们说一只鸡吃完了，通常只会剩下鸡头。有时候我们仅有的肉是从屠夫那边买的“肉屑”。真的就是在切肉的时候掉下来的那些碎屑，带点脂肪，有的没的，店家会把这些碎屑扫到一处，装进袋子里卖。这一般是给狗吃的，但我妈会买回家来吃。有很长时间，我们只有肉屑吃。
As modestly as we lived at home, I never felt poor because our lives were so rich with experience. We were always out doing something, going somewhere. My mom used to take me on drives through fancy white neighborhoods. We’d go look at people’s houses, look at their mansions. We’d look at their walls, mostly, because that’s all we could see from the road. We’d look at a wall that ran from one end of the block to the other and go, “Wow. That’s only one house. All of that is for one family.” Sometimes we’d pull over and go up to the wall, and she’d put me up on her shoulders like I was a little periscope. I would look into the yards and describe everything I was seeing. “It’s a big white house! They have two dogs! There’s a lemon tree! They have a swimming pool! And a tennis court!”
尽管我们在家过得很节俭，但我从来不觉得我们穷，因为我们的生活实在是丰富多彩。我们总是在外面干这干那，去某个地方玩。我妈妈还经常开车带我去高级白人社区转悠。我们去看人们的房子，看他们的豪宅。主要看的是他们的墙，因为我们在路上也只能看到墙。我们会看着一堵墙从街区的这头一直延伸到那头：“哇哦，这只是一栋房子。那么大一片地方只是给一家人住的。”有时候我们会靠边停车，走到墙边，她把我举在肩上，我就像一个小小的人形潜望镜，越过墙看里面的庭院，描述我看到的一切。“有个大白房子！他们有两只狗！有棵柠檬树！他们有游泳池！还有个网球场！”
The butcher sold bones, too. We called them “soup bones,” but they were actually labeled “dog bones” in the store; people would cook them for their dogs as a treat. Whenever times were really tough we’d fall back on dog bones. My mom would boil them for soup. We’d suck the marrow out of them. Sucking marrow out of bones is a skill poor people learn early. I’ll never forget the first time I went to a fancy restaurant as a grown man and someone told me, “You have to try the bone marrow. It’s such a delicacy. It’s divine.” They ordered it, the waiter brought it out, and I was like, “Dog bones, motherfucker!” I was not impressed.
屠夫也会卖骨头。我们管那个叫“汤骨”，但其实店里打的标签是“狗骨头”，人们买这个回家给狗当奖赏吃。如果那段日子真的很穷，我们就会依赖狗骨头。我妈妈会用它们炖汤。我们把骨髓都吸出来吃掉，吸骨髓是穷人从小就掌握的技能。我还记得我长大后第一次去一家高级餐厅，有人跟我说：“你得尝尝这里的骨髓。特别好吃，简直神了。”他们点了，侍者端了上来，我的反应是：“狗骨头。去你妈的！”我一点儿也不觉得这玩意儿好吃。
My mom raised me as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what I could do. When I look back I realize she raised me like a white kid — not white culturally, but in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered.
我妈妈抚养我的方式，就好像没有任何限制，没哪里我不能去，没什么我不能做。当我回头想想，她养我的感觉，就好像我是一个白人孩子——不是让我学白人文化，而是让我相信，世界是我的，我可以为自己发声，我的想法和决定都是重要的。
My mother took me places black people never went. She refused to be bound by ridiculous ideas of what black people couldn’t or shouldn’t do. She’d take me to the ice rink to go skating. Johannesburg used to have this epic drive-in movie theater, Top Star Drive-In, on top of a massive mine dump outside the city. She’d take me to movies there; we’d get snacks, hang the speaker on our car window. Top Star had a 360-degree view of the city, the suburbs, Soweto. Up there I could see for miles in every direction. I felt like I was on top of the world.
我妈妈会带我去其他黑人永远不会去的地方。她不会被那些可笑的固化思维限制，比如黑人能干什么，不能干什么之类的。她曾带我去冰场溜冰。约翰内斯堡还有一个汽车影院叫“顶星汽车影院”，位于城外一处矿山废石堆上，我妈妈会带我去那看电影。我们带上零食，把喇叭挂在车窗上。从顶星影院的位置，可以360度观赏整个城市的风景，城区，郊区，索韦托，一览无余。站在那里往任何一个方向眺望，我的视野都可以延伸好几英里。我感觉自己身处世界之巅。
We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited. Growing up in Soweto, our dream was to put another room on our house. Maybe have a driveway. Maybe, someday, a cast-iron gate at the end of the driveway. Because that is all we knew. But the highest rung of what’s possible is far beyond the world you can see. My mother showed me what was possible. The thing that always amazed me about her life was that no one showed her. No one chose her. She did it on her own. She found her way through sheer force of will.
我们常和人说，你要追随你的梦想，但是你的梦想只能是在你能想象的范围内，而且这取决于你来自哪里，所以你的想象是会受限制的。在索韦托长大，我们的梦想就是在房子里多加个房间，也许门口再加个车道。也许有一天，在车道的尽头，还能再加一道铁门。因为那是我们所熟悉的世界。但是世界的可能性远远超出了你所能看见的部分。我妈妈让我看到了世界的可能性。让我惊讶的是，从来没人告诉过她这些。没人选择她。她自己做到了这一切。她仅凭借强大的意志力，找到了自己的路。
Perhaps even more amazing is the fact that my mother started her little project, me, at a time when she could not have known that apartheid would end. There was no reason to think it would end; it had seen generations come and go. I was nearly six when Mandela was released, ten before democracy finally came, yet she was preparing me to live a life of freedom long before we knew freedom would exist. A hard life in the township or a trip to the colored orphanage were the far more likely options on the table. But we never lived that way. We only moved forward and we always moved fast, and by the time the law and everyone else came around we were already miles down the road, flying across the freeway in a bright-orange, piece-of-shit Volkswagen with the windows down and Jimmy Swaggart praising Jesus at the top of his lungs.
也许更令人惊讶的是，我妈妈在完全不知道种族隔离将要终结的情况下，就启动了她的小计划——我。在那时，没人能想到种族隔离会终结，一代代的人都是这么过来的。在我快六岁的时候，曼德拉被释放。十岁的时候，南非迎来了民主。但是她在完全不知道自由何时会到来的情况下，就让我过上了自由的生活。摆在桌面上的选择其实不多，无非是要么在镇上过苦日子，要么把我送到有色人种孤儿院，但我们从来没有那样生活过。我们只是往前走，快快地走，等到法律和所有人找上门时，我们已经远在好几公里之外，坐着那台亮橙色的狗屎一样的甲壳虫车飞翔在高速路上，窗户大开着，磁带里的吉米·斯瓦加特正在声嘶力竭地赞美耶稣。
People thought my mom was crazy. Ice rinks and drive-ins and suburbs, these things were izinto zabelungu — the things of white people. So many black people had internalized the logic of apartheid and made it their own. Why teach a black child white things? Neighbors and relatives used to pester my mom. “Why do all this? Why show him the world when he’s never going to leave the ghetto?”
人们会觉得我妈疯了。冰场，汽车影院，郊游野餐，这些都是白人的活动。大多数黑人的头脑里已经植入了种族隔离的逻辑，形成了根深蒂固的思维模式。为什么要教黑人小孩做白人的事？邻居们和亲戚们常常来烦我妈，问她：“为什么要做这些事啊？他一辈子都没法离开贫民窟的，为什么要给他看外面的世界？”
Apartheid, for all its power, had fatal flaws baked in, starting with the fact that it never made any sense. Racism is not logical. Consider this: Chinese people were classified as black in South Africa. I don’t mean they were running around acting black. They were still Chinese. But, unlike Indians, there weren’t enough Chinese people to warrant devising a whole separate classification. Apartheid, despite its intricacies and precision, didn’t know what to do with them, so the government said, “Eh, we’ll just call ’em black. It’s simpler that way.”
尽管种族隔离制度很强势，但它在本质上有着致命的缺陷。首先，它完全没道理。种族主义没有逻辑。试想一下：在南非，中国人被归类为黑人，并不是说他们的行为举止上类似黑人，他们就是中国人，但是和印度人不同，在南非的中国人数量不多，不足以形成一个确定的分类。尽管种族隔离是非常复杂且力求精确的制度，依然不知道怎么归类中国人，直到政府说：“呃，我们就叫他们黑人。这样简单多了。”
“Hey, get off that bench, you Chinaman!”
“嘿，从那椅子上起开，中国人！”
Interestingly, at the same time, Japanese people were labeled as white. The reason for this was that the South African government wanted to establish good relations with the Japanese in order to import their fancy cars and electronics. So Japanese people were given honorary white status while Chinese people stayed black. I always like to imagine being a South African policeman who likely couldn’t tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese but whose job was to make sure that people of the wrong color weren’t doing the wrong thing. If he saw an Asian person sitting on a whites-only bench, what would he say?
有趣的是，与此同时，日本人却被归为白人。原因是南非政府希望和日本保持良好的关系，以便于进口他们的汽车和电子产品。所以日本人获得了白人的荣耀身份，而中国人还是黑人。我总是会想，一个南非的警察应该是分辨不出中国人和日本人的差别，但他们的工作又是要确保肤色不正确的人不要做不正确的事。如果他看到一个亚裔人坐在只有白人能坐的长椅上，他会说什么？
“Because,” she would say, “even if he never leaves the ghetto, he will know that the ghetto is not the world. If that is all I accomplish, I’ve done enough.”
“那是因为，”我母亲会说，“哪怕他一辈子都离不开贫民窟，他也能知道，贫民窟不是整个世界。哪怕我只能让他明白这个道理，那也够了。”
“Oh, I apologize, sir. I didn’t mean to be racist. Have a lovely afternoon.”
“哦，非常抱歉，先生。我不是故意要种族歧视。祝您下午愉快。”
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“Excuse me. I’m Japanese.”
“不好意思，我是日本人。”
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