(单词翻译:单击)
中英文本
In Reflections on Exile, Edward Said writes: "Exile is irremediably secular and unbearably historical … like death but without death's ultimate mercy, it has torn millions of people from the nourishment of tradition, family, and geography." I had not been forced to be in exile, but in the US, I too was torn from the nourishment of tradition, family and geography. To make up for this, I desperately longed to fill in the gaps of my knowledge about Asia.
在《流亡的反思》中,爱德华·赛义德写道:“流亡是不可挽回的世俗和无法忍受的历史……就像死亡,但没有死亡的终极仁慈,它撕裂了数百万人的传统、家庭和地理的滋养
I loved hearing stories about China. Whenever I learned about Chinese history in school, I would go home and ask my parents. "No, that's not how it was, this is how it was," they would say. In contrast to what my textbooks said, my parents shared happy stories of the Cultural Revolution – of friends made on the farms, about the brilliance and charisma of my oldest aunt who had a posse of young admirers, about how the Chinese Communist party rewarded my nainaiyeye with medals and pensions for their military service. During my summer vacations, my cousins joked that my yeye paid for my dinners with his wallet from the CCP. And whenever I went back to Hefei, it was to a family that told me this was where I came from, where I would always be welcome and would always have a place.
我喜欢听有关中国的故事
In December 2018, a year and a half before my grandparents passed away, I went to China to collect my family's oral histories. Like many children of immigrants, I had an uneasy feeling of being born out of formlessness, occupying an invisible space in a country that never filled in where exactly I was supposed to fit. I wanted to articulate my family's past, make sense of where we had come from, where I had come from. This was a duty I felt all the more responsible for because of my role in the family as the "writer".
2018年12月,也就是我祖父母去世的前一年半,我去中国收集了我的家族口述史
But for a long time I delayed making the trip – because it would be time-consuming, because it would be emotionally exhausting, because my Chinese was not good enough, because I did not know the right questions to ask. Yet my grandparents were getting older and older, and China changed more rapidly by the day. Finally, I knew I couldn't keep putting it off. I bought my ticket and went.
但在很长一段时间里,我推迟了这一行程计划——因为它会很耗时,因为它会让我精疲力竭,因为我的中文不够好,因为我不知道该问什么问题
词语解释
1.make up for 弥补
To make up for the mediocrity, zealous parents send their kids to the expensive cram schools.
为了弥补平庸,积极的父母把孩子送到昂贵的补习班
2.time-consuming 耗时的
The complaints procedure is clumsy and time-consuming.
申诉程序复杂耗时
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