蘇煒 海南農場下放讀書記

The first novel I really fell in love with I rescued from being used as toilet paper.

我真正喜歡上的第一本小說差點用作了廁紙，是被我搶救回來的。

When I was a teenager, growing up during China’s Cultural Revolution, our reading list was extremely limited. We weren’t allowed to read anything that was “feudalist,” “capitalist” or “revisionist.” That meant all classical Chinese poetry and fiction; all Western literature; all writing from our treacherous rival, the Soviet Union. Nobody told us specifically what we could read. But the ingenious thing about Chairman Mao’s commandments was that when you subtracted all the books that were objectionable — backward, bourgeois, tainted by religious thought, adulterated by wrongheaded Soviet ideas — that cut out pretty much the entire literary legacy of the human race.

我十幾歲的時候，中國正值“文化大革命”，我們能讀到的東西非常有限。任何“封建主義”、“資本主義”和“修正主義”的東西都不能讀，這就意味着所有中國古典詩詞和小說、西方文學，以及來自鬧翻的對手——蘇聯的文學作品都不能碰。沒有人告訴我們能讀什麼。但是毛主席的戒律的高明之處就在於，剔除所有不受歡迎的內容——落後的、小資的、涉及宗教思想的、摻有錯誤蘇聯思想的——人類的整個文學遺產幾乎一點不剩了。

I was 15 and had just started to read in earnest when I arrived on Xipei Rubber Plantation in southern China, on the island of Hainan. Like most well-off city kids, I was coming to the countryside to be “re-educated” through agricultural labor. I came voluntarily; with my entire family either scattered or behind bars for political reasons, there wasn’t much left for me in my hometown, Guangzhou. My luggage consisted of two wooden crates containing my father’s collection of Chinese classics, which I’d rescued after my house was ransacked. I couldn’t read them, though — not because they were forbidden, but because the form of Chinese in which they were written was too antiquated for me to understand.

那年我15歲，來到海南島的西培橡膠農場，剛剛開始喜歡上讀書。和大多數家境良好的城市孩子一樣，我來到農村幹農活，接受“再教育”。我是自願前來的，因爲政治原因，我的家人不是分散各地，就是進了監獄。家鄉廣州已經沒有什麼值得留戀。我的行李裏有兩個木質板條箱，裏面裝着父親收集的中國古典文學，是我家被抄家時搶救下來的。不過我還沒法去讀它們，不是因爲它們是禁書，而是因爲它們是用文言文寫的，我還看不懂。

I was a bookish kid with almost no books to read. When my work squad took breaks from watering rubber saplings, I hid in the shade of the rubber trees, out of the pounding tropical heat, and leafed through my dad’s old books. Shrimpy, bespectacled, the youngest kid in the unit — and worst of all, the child of counterrevolutionaries — I was immediately singled out for punishment by the older city boys, those who would have been in high school if the schools hadn’t been closed down. They pried open my boxes, stole my stuff, put water in my kerosene lamp so the oil would explode when I tried to light it, keeping me from reading at night.

我是一個愛讀書的孩子，但卻無書可讀。每當我們的勞動小組完成了灌溉橡膠樹苗的工作，可以休息片刻的時候，我就躲進橡膠樹蔭，遠離熱帶的酷暑，翻看父親的舊書。我是單位裏年齡最小的孩子，戴着眼鏡，佝僂着身子——最糟的是，還出身於反革命家庭——就這樣，我很快被那些城裏來的大男孩們拎出來欺侮，如果當時學校沒有關門，他們本應在上高中的。他們撬開我的箱子，偷走我的東西，往我的煤油燈裏倒水，在我點燈的時候，煤油就會爆炸，這樣我就在夜裏沒法看書了。

Then, one morning, as I was preparing to go to work, I saw a thick wad of paper nailed to a door with a heavy metal spike. It was a novel by Liu Qing, and it was called “To Build a New Life.”

後來的一天早晨，我正要去幹活，看到有扇門上用一支粗大的釘子釘着厚厚一摞紙。那是柳青的小說，名叫《創業史》。

The older boys liked to steal books from the shuttered plantation library and pin them to their doors, so they could tear off pages to use as bathroom tissue when they went to the latrine. Plucking up my courage, I knocked on the door:

年紀大的男孩們喜歡從當時已經關門的農場圖書館偷書，把它們釘在自己的門上，上廁所時就撕下幾張來當廁紙。我鼓起勇氣敲響了那扇門。

“Can I have that?” I asked.

“這個能給我嗎？”

“Only if you find something else I can wipe myself with,” the boy replied.

“那你給我找點別的東西擦屁股，”那個男孩回答。

The leader of my work squad was a man named Hong Dejiang, one of the better-educated of the local laborers. With an elementary-school education, he could read at a basic level. Hong saw that I was hardworking and liked books. I asked him if he had any paper I could trade. After carefully removing all the pictures of Mao from a copy of Red Flag magazine — we’d have gotten in trouble if we were found using the chairman’s image as toilet paper — Hong tore up the remaining pages and gave them to me so I could swap them for the book.

我的勞動小組的組長叫洪德江（音譯），是受過較好教育的本地人之一。他上過小學，有最基本的閱讀能力。他知道我幹活賣力，又喜歡書。我就問他有沒有什麼紙可以讓我拿去交換。洪找來一本《紅旗》雜誌，小心翼翼地把上面所有毛主席像都撕扯下來——在那個時候，如果有人發現你用毛主席像當廁紙就會有麻煩——把剩下的紙頁給了我，讓我去換那本書。

After that, Hong let me move my desk into his own quarters — a single room less than 10 feet square, occupied mostly by the bed on which his family slept — and lent me his own small kerosene lamp. Every evening after supper, after bathing by the well, I’d go quietly to his room and read for an hour or two. Then, when the whole family had fallen asleep and my eyes had started to smart from reading by dim lamplight, I’d slip outside, closing the door gently behind me.

後來，洪讓我把我的桌子搬進他的房間，那是個不到10平方英尺的單間，他全家人都睡在上面的那張牀佔了大部分空間。他還把自己的小煤油燈借給我。每天吃完晚飯，在井邊洗完澡，我都會悄悄到他的房間裏去讀一兩小時的書。等到他全家人進入夢鄉，我的眼睛也開始因爲在昏暗的燈光下閱讀而痠痛時，我就會悄悄走出去，輕輕關上房門。

My real education began in that room. After reading three or four other books that I saved from a similar fate, I moved on to the copies of Balzac and Turgenev that some of the city kids were circulating secretly among themselves. We all knew who the other would-be intellectuals were. To avoid getting caught, people would tear the covers off books. I first read 19th-century classics like “Eugénie Grandet” or “Le Père Goriot” in these faceless editions. Before long I was tackling tougher material: Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” and Cao Xueqin’s “Dream of the Red Chamber,” which my dad had kept in a locked drawer at home and whose three volumes I’d paged through yearningly as I was just learning to read.

我真正的教育就是在這個房間裏開始的。讀過三四本遭受類似命運、被我救下來的書之後，我便開始閱讀一些城裏孩子們私下流傳的巴爾扎克和屠格涅夫的書。我們這些自詡有知識的人彼此都互相認識。當時人們會把書的封面撕下來，以防被抓到。我第一次讀到《歐也妮·葛朗臺》(Eugénie Grandet)、《高老頭》(Le Père Goriot)等19世紀的經典作品，都是這種沒有封面的書。不久後我又開始讀更難的書籍：托爾斯泰的《安娜·卡列尼娜》、曹雪芹的《紅樓夢》，在家裏的時候，父親把《紅樓夢》藏在一個鎖着的抽屜裏，如今我如飢似渴地閱讀着這部三卷本的鉅著，就好像剛剛學會讀書一樣。

I lent my father’s books around the countryside, trading them for other ones I wanted to read. Ten years later, when I came back from Hainan to go to university, my father picked me up on the pier. One of the first sentences out of his mouth was, “Did you bring back my books?” I did. I brought back the entire set.

在農村，我把父親的書借出去換回自己想讀的書。十年後，我從海南迴到家鄉上大學，父親來到碼頭接我。一見我就說：“我的書你帶回來了嗎？”我帶回來了，整套書我都帶回來了。