首先謝謝海先生。很理解海先生的良苦用心。你是我活到老，學到老的楷模。 感謝你提供的高級英語教材。
覺得“斷章取義”很難真正客觀地評價一部作品。因為除了語言，用詞以外，情節，組織等也是一部好作品的重要部分。但還是貼上一段，也許可以窺見一斑半點。
This is excerpt from Yiyun Li’s novel “The Vagrants” – 這一天顧老師的女兒要以反革命罪被處決。
The day started before sunrise, on March 21, 1979, when Teacher Gu woke up and found his wife sobbing quietly into her blanket. A day of equality it was, or so it had occurred to Teacher Gu many times when he had pondered the date, the spring equinox, and again the thought came to him: Their daughter’s life would end on this day, when neither the sun nor its shadow reigned. A day later the sun would come closer to her and to the others on this side of the world, imperceptible perhaps to dull human eyes at first, but birds and worms and trees and rivers would sense the change in the air, and they would make it their responsibility to manifest the changing of seasons. How many miles of river melting and how many trees of blossoms blooming would it take for the season to be called spring? But such naming must mean little to the rivers and flowers, when they repeat their rhythms with faithfulness and indifference. The date set for his daughter to die was as arbitrary as her crime, determined by the court, of being an unrepentant counterrevolutionary; only the unwise would look for significance in a random date. Teacher Gu willed his body to stay still and hoped his wife would soon realize that he was awake.
She continued to cry. After a moment, he got out of bed and turned on the only light in the bedroom, an aging 10-watt bulb. A red plastic clothesline ran from one end of the bedroom to the other; the laundry his wife had hung up the night before was damp and cold, and the clothesline sagged from the weight. The fire had died in the small stove in a corner of the room. Teacher Gu thought of adding coal to the stove himself, and then decided against it. His wife, on any other day, would be the one to revive the fire. He would leave the stove for her to tend.
From the clothesline he retrieved a handkerchief, white, with printed red Chinese characters–a slogan demanding absolute loyalty to the Communist Party from every citizen–and laid it on her pillow. “Everybody dies,” he said.
Mrs. Gu pressed the handkerchief to her eyes. Soon the wet stains expanded, turning the slogan crimson.
“Think of today as the day we pay everything off,” Teacher Gu said. “The whole debt.”
“What debt? What do we owe?” his wife demanded, and he winced at the unfamiliar shrillness in her voice. “What are we owed?”
He had no intention of arguing with her, nor had he answers to her questions. He quietly dressed and moved to the front room, leaving the bedroom door ajar.
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