"I'm not going to be much help," murmured Zhang Fang, my interpreter. "I don't understand the Cantonese language, and most of these people don't either."
翻译张芳小声对我说：“没什么可译的，我不懂粤语，在座的许多人也不懂。”
I thought I knew what to watch for, but the only characters I recognized were the three witches. Otherwise the small group spent most of an hour running in circles, leaping, and threatening to beat each other with long sticks. The lighting was heavy on shadows, with frequent flashes. Language wasn't a problem, as the actors mainly snarled and shrieked. Then they turned their backs to the audience and a few shouted something in Cantonese. The lights went out, and for a moment the only sound in the darkness was the whirring of an expensive camera on auto-rewind.
我本以为自己知道看些什么，可我能辨认的角色只有三个女巫。一个小时的演出中的大半时间里，这些人都围成圈，跑来跳去，用长棍子相互威胁。灯光在演员身后留下了浓重的影子，闪电频频。没有语言问题，因为演员主要是在狂呼尖叫。之后，他们背向观众，几个人用粤语叫喊。灯光熄灭，有一阵子，黑暗中唯一的声音就是一部价格昂贵的照相机自动倒卷时发出的声音。
This is China? It could have been a college campus anywhere in the West. Until recently such a performance was unthinkable. It strained imagination that this could be the same country where a generation ago the three most desired luxury items were wristwatches, bicycles, and sewing machines.
这是中国？在西方任何一所大学都可能看到类似的情形。在西方，直到最近人们才开始接受这样的表演。难以想象，在同一个国家，前一代人们梦寐以求的三大奢侈品曾是手表、自行车和缝纫机。
Early on I realized that I was going to need some type of compass to guide me through the wilds of global culture. So when I was in Los Angeles, I sought out Alvin Toffler, whose book Future Shock was published in 1970. In the nearly three decades since, he has developed and refined a number of interesting ideas, explained in The Third Wave, written with his wife, Heidi.
开始时，我就意识到穿越全球文化荒原会需要某种指南。因此还在洛杉矶时，我找到《未来的冲击》的作者阿尔文·托夫勒。此书出版于1970年。此后30多年中，他不断完善了更多有趣的思想。他与夫人海蒂合著的《第三次浪潮》一书详细地解释了这些想法。