生於江蘇長在美國 我的身世之謎

The following essay was submitted by Maya Xia Ludtke, currently a first-year student at Wellesley College. She has not decided her major, but she is leaning toward environmental studies. Maya was born in Jiangsu Province and was adopted from China when she was an infant. She grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She graduated in 2014 from Cambridge Rindge & Latin School.

本文是來自Maya Xia Ludtke的投稿。她目前就讀於韋斯利學院一年級，尚未決定專業，但傾向於選擇環境研究。Maya生於江蘇，在嬰兒時期被從中國領養，在馬薩諸塞州劍橋長大，2014年畢業於劍橋林吉與拉丁學校。

The first nine months of my life are a mystery.

我生命中的最初九個月是一個謎。

A tiny jade bracelet and a photograph of an inexplicably circular face on top of a torn red sweater make up my memory album. A few stapled pages of ambiguous papers constitute my birth record. I do know that I was found in Xia Xi, a farming town of flowers and trees. Though I was nervous about shattering the stable but fragile image I had created in my mind about those nine months, this past August I went to Xia Xi and began to crack through that tableau and experience what my life could have been.

一隻小玉鐲和一張穿着破舊紅色毛衣的圓臉女孩的照片就是我全部的記憶。幾張釘好的模糊紙張是我的出生記錄。我知道我是在中國花木之城夏溪被找到的。那九個月在我腦海中已存留着永久但又脆弱的影像。雖然我對破壞這些印象感到緊張，但在過去的這個八月裏，我回到夏溪，走進和感受我本應經歷的一切。

There, I met the girls I could have grown up with, and with them visited the places where I would have spent each day. I was overwhelmed by simultaneous feelings of deep connection and unbridgeable distance. As we struggled to narrow the chasms created by language and culture, I found familiarity in their faces and the trees enveloping us.

這那裏，我遇到了本會與我一同成長的女孩們，和她們一起去那些我本應每天都去的地方。我同時感受着親密深切的聯繫和無法逾越的距離，這讓我不知所措。在嘗試縮小語言文化帶來的差異的同時，我在她們的面孔上看到親密，在環繞着我們的叢叢樹木之中感受熟悉。

“So, what are you?” the girls asked me. “ You look Chinese on the outside but you are American on the inside.” At first, I detested this description. If the substance of my being is not Chinese, I might as well be white. Once content with describing myself as “Chinese American,” now I was hit with its vagueness. Where do I belong between being Chinese and becoming American? In some ways my new friends were right; our many fragmented conversations during the three weeks we were together affirmed the differences in how our minds had developed to perceive the world.

“那麼，你是什麼人？”這些女孩問我。“你外表看上去像中國人，但是內心是美國人。”最初，我厭惡這種說法。如果我的外表不是中國人，我本該是個白人。曾一度滿足以“美籍華人”自居的我，如今卻被這模糊的說法傷害了。中國人？美國人？我在這兩者之間到底屬於哪個？在某種程度上，我的新朋友們是對的。我們一起相處的三個星期裏曾有過很多零散的對話，這些交談證實我們看待世界的方式是如此不同。

“You are so lucky, you have no discipline, easy school, and freedom,” the Xia Xi girls would say with certainty and envy. “All we get to do is study.”

“你可真幸運。你不需要遵守什麼規矩，學業輕鬆，還自由，”夏溪的女孩們會如此篤定而又嫉妒地說。“我們呢，只能學習，沒別的。”

I felt guilty about my “luck” and the truth in their words. Still, their idealistic views about America and the ease of my life perplexed me. They had quickly dismissed my out-of-school activities and community service as lacking real learning. Yet, soon I realized how their understanding of “smart” contrasts with mine. Being smart is the high ranking a teacher gives them; studying is their only way of getting there. These tight borders command their childhood.

我對我的“幸運”和她們言語中的事實感到內疚。但她們對美國和我安逸生活的理想化看法讓我很困惑。她們對我的校外活動和社區服務不屑一顧，不把那看做是真正的學習。然而，我很快意識到她們對“聰明”的理解與我截然不同。老師給她們的高名次意味着聰明；而學習是唯一的途徑。這些嚴格的界線控制着她們的童年。

I permeated those borders as we talked about growing up, gender roles, equality, and relationships. No one before me had given them the space to talk about such topics. As a girl born in Xia Xi and living in America, I was the most foreign person the girls had ever met. They had never come in contact with anyone who looked different than they do. When I told them about the many friends I have who look different than I do, they were astonished. Being with them gave me deeper appreciation for the diversity that my life in America gives me.

在我們對成長、性別角色、平等和人際關係的討論中，我慢慢跨越了這些界線。在我之前從未有人給予她們討論這些話題的空間。生於夏溪、長在美國的我是這些女孩們遇到過的最不同的人。她們從沒有和看起來不同於她們的人接觸過。當我告訴她們，我的很多朋友看起來比我還要不同時，她們震驚了。與她們的相處讓我更加欣賞美國生活賦予我的多樣性。

For those I met in Xia Xi, family is blood and ancestry. “You do not know your real parents?” strangers would ask me soon after we met, sympathetic and eager to help me find mine. “When is your birthday? What orphanage were you from?” To me, their words “real mother” sit heavy in my mind. Even if I’d spoken their dialect fluently, I am not sure I could have explained. I have a real mother, who raised me and loves me. My biological family might not be whom I romanticized them to be and finding such strangers would not instantly conjure love. Instead, it was in the welcoming care that countless strangers showed me - in placing watermelon slices in both of my hands, pulling a comb through my hair, and attempting to cool me in 110-degree heat - that I found home in Xia Xi, and that was enough.

對我在夏溪碰到的人來說，家庭是血脈也是祖先。“你不知道你真正的父母是誰？”陌生人剛碰到我時總這樣問，充滿同情，還熱心幫助我尋找我的父母。“你哪天出生？你是從哪個孤兒院出來的？”於我而言，她們口中的“親生母親”在我腦海中縈繞不去。即使我可以流利地說他們的方言，我也不確定我能夠解釋清楚。我有一個真正的媽媽，她撫養我長大並且愛我。我的生身家人也許並不是我理想中的那樣，找到這樣的“陌生人”也無法立刻擁有愛。反而，愛是我在家鄉夏溪中碰到的無數陌生人給我的熱情關懷：把切好的西瓜塞到我的雙手，爲我梳頭髮，在110華氏度的高溫中試着讓我涼快些。有這些愛就夠了。