(单词翻译:单击)
Even if you’re unfamiliar with this tradition of stories about race transformation, you’ll suspect what’s coming.
即使你不熟悉这种关于种族转变的传统故事，你也会怀疑接下来发生什么。
Distinguishing between those born dark and the newly transformed will become fraught. Violence will erupt.
区分那些天生黑肤的人和转变成黑肤的人会造成忧虑。暴力一触即发。
Some will come to believe that a genocidal conspiracy is to blame; some will kill themselves; some will kill others.
有些人会认为这是一场关于种族灭绝的阴谋; 有些人会自杀;有些人会杀害他人。
“Militants” will take over, emitting fear and hate like a musk.
“激进分子”将用武力接管，像麝香一样释放恐惧和仇恨。
In the end, skin color will be shown to be meaningless for identity, a mere construct.
最终，肤色将被证明是没有意义的身份，仅仅是一个建构。
Yet it will prove almost atavistically fascinating as an aesthetic surface and a conductor of feeling.
然而，肤色作为一种美感表层和情感导体，将被证明几乎是返祖式的迷人。
Tone above all distinguishes Hamid from these precursors.
首先，肤色深浅将哈米德与这些前辈区分开来。
Whereas most of these writers bend race transformation toward satire, offering us topsy-turvy and hysterical tales, Hamid is deeply earnest about his conceit.
尽管这些作家中的大多数都将种族转变转向讽刺，为我们提供颠三倒四和歇斯底里的故事，但哈米德也是真的自负。
The novel is that wan 21st-century banality, a “meditation,” and it meditates on how losing whiteness is going to make white people feel.
这部小说是一部乏味的21世纪的平庸之作，是一种“沉思”，思考了失去白肤会给白人带来怎样的感受。
Mostly sad, as it turns out.
事实证明，大多数人都会很难过。
Anders is haunted by his entrance into double consciousness, which W. E. B. Du Bois famously first described in The Atlantic as being divided between your sense of yourself and your sense of how others perceive you.
进入双重意识困扰着安德斯，杜·波伊斯在《大西洋月刊》上首次描述了双重意识，即你对自己的感觉和你对他人如何看待你的感觉之间的区分。
Anders obsesses over how white people will treat him now that they have no way “to know he was white,” and seems to sense their “contempt and fascination.”
安德斯痴迷于白人会如何对待他，因为他们没有办法“知道他是白人”，他似乎感觉到了他们的“轻蔑和迷恋”。
As for his new kind, “all these dark people around, more dark people than white people … made Anders uneasy, even though he was dark too.”
对于他的新种族身份，“周围这么多黑人，黑人比白人多……让安德斯感到不安，尽管他自己也是黑肤。”
He feels he’s been recast as a supporting character in his life; he feels “triply imprisoned, in his skin, in this house, in this town.”
他觉得自己被重新塑造成了生命中的配角;他觉得自己“被囚禁了三次，在黑色的皮囊下，在这所房子里，在这个城市里。”
He dons a hoodie and sunglasses to hide himself from strangers and family.
为了不让陌生人和家人看到他，他会穿上卫衣，戴上墨镜。
Anders feels comfortable enough to reveal his new body only to his sometime lover, a high-school friend named Oona.
安德斯感到足够舒服的时候，只向他曾经的恋人，一个叫乌娜的高中朋友透露了他的新身体的情况。
They smoke some weed and give it a spin:
他们抽了些大麻，然后晕头转向:
He started to undress, and then she did the same, warily, and they joined with a degree of caution, almost as though one was stalking the other, which of them stalking and which of them being stalked unclear, maybe both doing both, in a way, and so it was that they came to have that night’s sex.
他开始脱去衣服，然后她也小心翼翼地脱去衣服，他们小心翼翼地结合到一起，几乎就像一个人在偷偷接近另一个人，谁在偷偷接近，谁在被接近，看不清，也许在某种程度上都有，所以他们那天晚上就发生了肉体关系。
