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陳查理：老牌英雄
LePreChaun
於2010-08-12 20:50:23翻譯 | 已有1463人瀏覽 | 有0人評論
對於很多亞裔美國人來說，陳查理是個令人討厭的老牌人物，湯姆大叔的另一版本。厄爾·德爾·比格斯的六部偵探小說和1926年到1949年47部好萊塢電影，更不用提70年代漢納-巴貝拉動畫片係列（Hanna-Barbera cartoon series）的共同主角——是一個身材矮胖，斜眼而又神秘莫測，喜歡說念經一般的簽餅英語，“與驢為友，早晚挨踢”。
Tags:紐約時報 | 陳查理
Charlie Chan: A Stereotype and a Hero
By CHARLES McGRATH
陳查理：老牌英雄
By 查爾斯·麥格拉斯（Charles McGrath）
Published: August 10, 2010
發表於2010年8月10日
To many Asian-Americans, Charlie Chan is an offensive stereotype, another sort of Uncle Tom. Chan, the hero of six detective novels by Earl Derr Biggers and 47 Hollywood movies between 1926 and 1949, not to mention a 1970s Hanna-Barbera cartoon series, is pudgy, slant-eyed and inscrutable, and he speaks in singsong fortune-cookie English, saying things like, “If befriend donkey, expect to be kicked.” The California-born author and playwright Frank Chin, who has written essays denouncing Chan, would like to see him disappear altogether.
對於很多亞裔美國人來說，陳查理是個令人討厭的老牌人物，湯姆大叔的另一版本。陳查理——厄爾·德爾·比格斯的六部偵探小說和1926年到1949年47部好萊塢電影，更不用提70年代漢納-巴貝拉動畫片係列（Hanna-Barbera cartoon series）的共同主角——是一個身材矮胖，斜眼而又神秘莫測，喜歡說念經一般的簽餅英語，像“與驢為友，早晚挨踢”。加利福尼亞出生的作家和劇作家趙建秀（Frank Chin）,曾經發表文章譴責陳查理，要求他徹底消失。
But Yunte Huang, who was born and grew up in China, can’t get enough of Chan and has written a book about his obsession: “Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History.” The book, which comes out from Norton next week, is part memoir, part history, part cultural-studies essay and part grab bag of odd and little-known details.
但是生長在中國的黃雲特，卻非常喜歡陳查理並且寫書表達對他的沉迷：“陳查理：榮譽偵探不為人知的故事和他與美國曆史的幽會。”這本下周將來自諾頓選集的書，既是一本回憶錄，也是一段曆史，既是文化研究隨筆，也是一本古怪和不為人知細節的雜燴。
Biggers, who overlapped at Harvard with T. S. Eliot but did not exactly share his literary taste, said he got the idea for Chan while sitting in the New York Public Library in 1924 and reading about a real-life Honolulu detective named Chang Apana. Mr. Huang suggests that Biggers may have misremembered the details, but there is no doubt that Apana was the model for Chan, and Mr. Huang gives a full account of a life that was in many ways more interesting than the fictional version: born in Hawaii to Chinese parents, Apana moved to China and then back to Hawaii, where despite being virtually illiterate, he rose in the detective ranks of the Honolulu police. He wore a cowboy hat, carried a bullwhip and was said to leap from rooftop to rooftop like a human fly.
比格斯與哈佛大學的T·S·埃利奧特（T.S.Elliot）有共同興趣，但是並不擁有相同的文學喜好。比格斯說，他的陳查理的靈感來自於1924年坐在紐約公立圖書館中讀到的真人真事，火奴魯魯偵探張阿斑（Chang Apana）。黃先生認為比格斯可能是記錯了一些細節，但是無疑阿斑正是陳的原型，並且給出了完整真實的描述，很多程度上竟然比小說版更加令人著迷：父母是中國人，出生在夏威夷，阿斑曾經搬家去了中國，回到夏威夷後，盡管實際上大字不識一個，但是卻成為了知名的火奴魯魯警員偵探。他帶著牛仔帽，手執牛鞭，據說可以像超人一樣飛簷走壁。
對於他印象和記憶最深的演員，黃先生給出了與陳查理電影曆史相同完整的描述：一個名叫華納·奧蘭的瑞典人，在第一部有聲電影《爵士歌手》中飾演一個猶太人，之後因為有著近似的亞洲人麵部特征，開始專門飾演東方惡棍。（最初的陳查理飾演者是日本人George Kuwa。）奧蘭非常能喝酒，黃先生寫到，他在小睡片刻後會悄然進入陳查理的角色：放慢語速，臉上帶著相宜的陳氏風格的微笑。1938年，奧蘭因酗酒早亡，而被名為西尼·托勒美國演員代替，電影製片人鼓勵他玩相同的把戲。
But the most interesting story in “Charlie Chan” is Mr. Huang’s own. “I have an alphabetic destiny,” he said, laughing, over lunch in Chinatown last week. In the late 1980s he had been a student at Beijing University and, after the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, where he would have been on the day tanks opened fire if his parents hadn’t lured him home on a false pretense, he determined to leave China. He got hold of a guidebook to American colleges, and “Alabama starts with A,” he pointed out. “I was pretty desperate to get out of the country and the University of Alabama was the first school I looked up.” He added that when he got there, “Tuscaloosa was another planet,” and went on: “Nobody walked in the street. Everything was so slow, so clean and so empty.”
但是最有趣的“陳查理”故事正是黃先生自己的。“我是命中注定，”在上周唐人街的午餐上，他大笑著說。80年代後期，他曾是北京大學的學生，在1989中國政治風波之後，他決定離開中國。他手上有一本美國大學入學指南，“阿拉巴馬以A開頭，”他指出。“我非常想離開中國，阿拉巴馬大學是我想去的第一所學校。”他補充說當他到達那裏時，“塔斯卡盧薩是另一個世界，”他繼續道：“街上沒人。一切都慢慢吞吞，如此幹淨和空蕩。”
When he got sick of the South, Mr. Huang said, he decided to go to Buffalo for a Ph.D. in English literature. He felt, he writes in “Charlie Chan,” “like a bottom-feeding fish, one that cannot see the light of day in the muddy pond of America.”
當他厭倦南部，黃先生說，他決定去布法羅攻讀英語文學博士學位。他離開後，在“陳查理”書中寫到，“像一隻吃著殘羹剩餐的魚，看不見美國泥濘的水塘白晝的光亮。”
But why Buffalo? “Buffalo begins with B,” he said, grinning. He worked as a delivery boy there, but happily gave up the restaurant business. “Graduate school is really easy compared to restaurant work,” he pointed out.
但是為什麽選擇布法羅？“布法羅以B開頭，”他咧嘴笑著說。他曾經在那裏做過送報員，卻又欣然地放棄了餐館生意。“研究生院真的很容易讓人想起餐館的工作，”他說。
At an estate sale he bought a couple of Biggers’s novels and was immediately hooked. He began renting all the Chan movies he could find.
在一筆房產買賣中他買下了一些比格斯的小說，並立刻被深深吸引。他開始租借能找到的所有的陳查理電影。
Mr. Huang, who is 41, divorced and the father of a young daughter, speaks nearly perfect, idiomatic English. He learned the language, he said, from listening to Voice of America broadcasts with his family and also from going to church in Tuscaloosa. “On Sunday morning I’d stand on the corner carrying a Bible,” he explained, “and people would stop and ask what church I was going to. ‘Yours,’ I’d say. I saw a lot of churches that way.”
黃先生今年41歲，離異，是一個女兒的父親，他講著一口近乎完美的地道英語。他學習英語，他說，靠的是與家人一起收聽美國之音和去圖斯卡盧薩的教堂。“星期天早上我拿著聖經站在街角，”他解釋說，“人們停下來問我要去那個教堂，‘去你要去的那個’我會說，我用這種方式看到過很多教堂。”
After Buffalo he spent four years teaching literature at Harvard, in Cambridge, Mass., before taking a job at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and next year he has a fellowship at Cornell. “I’m kind of stuck in the C’s right now,” he said, “and I can’t really move on. “Charlie Chan — that’s a double C.”
在布法羅之後他在麻省劍橋的哈佛大學教授了4年文學，之後再加州大學聖巴巴拉分校任教，第二年他得到了康奈爾大學的獎學金。“我好像立刻和C打頭較上了勁，”他說，“並且我真的擺脫不了，陳查理——那正是兩個C。”
Chan was an obsession he pursued for years, he said, while trying to write a memoir called “The Yellow Alabaman” until a friend encouraged him to put that book aside and write instead about the detective. It was the aphorisms, the fortune-cookie sayings, that first attracted him, and then he became interested in the way Chan is a projection of American fears and American imaginings about China — an embodiment, as he writes in the book, of “both the racist heritage and the creative genius” of his adopted nation’s culture.
他沉迷於陳查理幾年的時間，他說，同時正在寫一本名為“一個黃種阿拉巴馬人”的回憶錄，直到一個朋友鼓勵他放下這本書，而是開始寫偵探小說。正是那些名言警句，簽餅上的諺語，吸引了他，之後他因陳查理是美國人恐懼的縮影和美國人對中國的幻想產生興趣，這是一種象征，他在書中寫道，象征著他的入籍國家文化的 “種族主義傳統和創造性天才”。
Over lunch he said: “I grew up watching Chinese opera, where you have some of that same exaggeration, and growing up in that literary culture was very useful for understanding cultural ventriloquism and the whole idea of crossing over. It was fascinating to see how Chan was a sort of ‘yellowface’ performance.” He added that in the 30s the Charlie Chan movies were immensely popular in China, of all places, where they were seen as an antidote to the sinister caricature of the Fu Manchu films, but that attitudes had changed. Not long ago he was discussing with a Chinese publisher the possibility of translating “Charlie Chan” himself and bringing it out in China. The publisher listened politely and said, “Right now we’re actually more interested in Fu Manchu.”
在晚飯時他說：“我看著中國戲劇長大，你們對它也有著誇張的想法，生長在那樣的文學文化中非常又有利於我理解文化腹語和交叉的全部概念，看到陳如何完成一種黃種臉龐的表演非常有趣。“他說在30年代的中國，陳查理電影非常出名，這些電影被看做是對抗傅滿洲電影的邪惡形象的手段，但是這種態度已經發生了改變。不久之前他和一個中國出版商討論翻譯“陳查理”並且在中國出版的可能性。出版商禮貌的傾聽後說道，“實際上目前我們對傅滿洲更感興趣。”
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LePreChaun
於2010-08-12 20:50:23翻譯 | 已有1463人瀏覽 | 有0人評論
對於很多亞裔美國人來說，陳查理是個令人討厭的老牌人物，湯姆大叔的另一版本。厄爾·德爾·比格斯的六部偵探小說和1926年到1949年47部好萊塢電影，更不用提70年代漢納-巴貝拉動畫片係列（Hanna-Barbera cartoon series）的共同主角——是一個身材矮胖，斜眼而又神秘莫測，喜歡說念經一般的簽餅英語，“與驢為友，早晚挨踢”。
Tags:紐約時報 | 陳查理
Charlie Chan: A Stereotype and a Hero
By CHARLES McGRATH
陳查理：老牌英雄
By 查爾斯·麥格拉斯（Charles McGrath）
Published: August 10, 2010
發表於2010年8月10日
To many Asian-Americans, Charlie Chan is an offensive stereotype, another sort of Uncle Tom. Chan, the hero of six detective novels by Earl Derr Biggers and 47 Hollywood movies between 1926 and 1949, not to mention a 1970s Hanna-Barbera cartoon series, is pudgy, slant-eyed and inscrutable, and he speaks in singsong fortune-cookie English, saying things like, “If befriend donkey, expect to be kicked.” The California-born author and playwright Frank Chin, who has written essays denouncing Chan, would like to see him disappear altogether.
對於很多亞裔美國人來說，陳查理是個令人討厭的老牌人物，湯姆大叔的另一版本。陳查理——厄爾·德爾·比格斯的六部偵探小說和1926年到1949年47部好萊塢電影，更不用提70年代漢納-巴貝拉動畫片係列（Hanna-Barbera cartoon series）的共同主角——是一個身材矮胖，斜眼而又神秘莫測，喜歡說念經一般的簽餅英語，像“與驢為友，早晚挨踢”。加利福尼亞出生的作家和劇作家趙建秀（Frank Chin）,曾經發表文章譴責陳查理，要求他徹底消失。
But Yunte Huang, who was born and grew up in China, can’t get enough of Chan and has written a book about his obsession: “Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History.” The book, which comes out from Norton next week, is part memoir, part history, part cultural-studies essay and part grab bag of odd and little-known details.
但是生長在中國的黃雲特，卻非常喜歡陳查理並且寫書表達對他的沉迷：“陳查理：榮譽偵探不為人知的故事和他與美國曆史的幽會。”這本下周將來自諾頓選集的書，既是一本回憶錄，也是一段曆史，既是文化研究隨筆，也是一本古怪和不為人知細節的雜燴。
Biggers, who overlapped at Harvard with T. S. Eliot but did not exactly share his literary taste, said he got the idea for Chan while sitting in the New York Public Library in 1924 and reading about a real-life Honolulu detective named Chang Apana. Mr. Huang suggests that Biggers may have misremembered the details, but there is no doubt that Apana was the model for Chan, and Mr. Huang gives a full account of a life that was in many ways more interesting than the fictional version: born in Hawaii to Chinese parents, Apana moved to China and then back to Hawaii, where despite being virtually illiterate, he rose in the detective ranks of the Honolulu police. He wore a cowboy hat, carried a bullwhip and was said to leap from rooftop to rooftop like a human fly.
比格斯與哈佛大學的T·S·埃利奧特（T.S.Elliot）有共同興趣，但是並不擁有相同的文學喜好。比格斯說，他的陳查理的靈感來自於1924年坐在紐約公立圖書館中讀到的真人真事，火奴魯魯偵探張阿斑（Chang Apana）。黃先生認為比格斯可能是記錯了一些細節，但是無疑阿斑正是陳的原型，並且給出了完整真實的描述，很多程度上竟然比小說版更加令人著迷：父母是中國人，出生在夏威夷，阿斑曾經搬家去了中國，回到夏威夷後，盡管實際上大字不識一個，但是卻成為了知名的火奴魯魯警員偵探。他帶著牛仔帽，手執牛鞭，據說可以像超人一樣飛簷走壁。
對於他印象和記憶最深的演員，黃先生給出了與陳查理電影曆史相同完整的描述：一個名叫華納·奧蘭的瑞典人，在第一部有聲電影《爵士歌手》中飾演一個猶太人，之後因為有著近似的亞洲人麵部特征，開始專門飾演東方惡棍。（最初的陳查理飾演者是日本人George Kuwa。）奧蘭非常能喝酒，黃先生寫到，他在小睡片刻後會悄然進入陳查理的角色：放慢語速，臉上帶著相宜的陳氏風格的微笑。1938年，奧蘭因酗酒早亡，而被名為西尼·托勒美國演員代替，電影製片人鼓勵他玩相同的把戲。
But the most interesting story in “Charlie Chan” is Mr. Huang’s own. “I have an alphabetic destiny,” he said, laughing, over lunch in Chinatown last week. In the late 1980s he had been a student at Beijing University and, after the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, where he would have been on the day tanks opened fire if his parents hadn’t lured him home on a false pretense, he determined to leave China. He got hold of a guidebook to American colleges, and “Alabama starts with A,” he pointed out. “I was pretty desperate to get out of the country and the University of Alabama was the first school I looked up.” He added that when he got there, “Tuscaloosa was another planet,” and went on: “Nobody walked in the street. Everything was so slow, so clean and so empty.”
但是最有趣的“陳查理”故事正是黃先生自己的。“我是命中注定，”在上周唐人街的午餐上，他大笑著說。80年代後期，他曾是北京大學的學生，在1989中國政治風波之後，他決定離開中國。他手上有一本美國大學入學指南，“阿拉巴馬以A開頭，”他指出。“我非常想離開中國，阿拉巴馬大學是我想去的第一所學校。”他補充說當他到達那裏時，“塔斯卡盧薩是另一個世界，”他繼續道：“街上沒人。一切都慢慢吞吞，如此幹淨和空蕩。”
When he got sick of the South, Mr. Huang said, he decided to go to Buffalo for a Ph.D. in English literature. He felt, he writes in “Charlie Chan,” “like a bottom-feeding fish, one that cannot see the light of day in the muddy pond of America.”
當他厭倦南部，黃先生說，他決定去布法羅攻讀英語文學博士學位。他離開後，在“陳查理”書中寫到，“像一隻吃著殘羹剩餐的魚，看不見美國泥濘的水塘白晝的光亮。”
But why Buffalo? “Buffalo begins with B,” he said, grinning. He worked as a delivery boy there, but happily gave up the restaurant business. “Graduate school is really easy compared to restaurant work,” he pointed out.
但是為什麽選擇布法羅？“布法羅以B開頭，”他咧嘴笑著說。他曾經在那裏做過送報員，卻又欣然地放棄了餐館生意。“研究生院真的很容易讓人想起餐館的工作，”他說。
At an estate sale he bought a couple of Biggers’s novels and was immediately hooked. He began renting all the Chan movies he could find.
在一筆房產買賣中他買下了一些比格斯的小說，並立刻被深深吸引。他開始租借能找到的所有的陳查理電影。
Mr. Huang, who is 41, divorced and the father of a young daughter, speaks nearly perfect, idiomatic English. He learned the language, he said, from listening to Voice of America broadcasts with his family and also from going to church in Tuscaloosa. “On Sunday morning I’d stand on the corner carrying a Bible,” he explained, “and people would stop and ask what church I was going to. ‘Yours,’ I’d say. I saw a lot of churches that way.”
黃先生今年41歲，離異，是一個女兒的父親，他講著一口近乎完美的地道英語。他學習英語，他說，靠的是與家人一起收聽美國之音和去圖斯卡盧薩的教堂。“星期天早上我拿著聖經站在街角，”他解釋說，“人們停下來問我要去那個教堂，‘去你要去的那個’我會說，我用這種方式看到過很多教堂。”
After Buffalo he spent four years teaching literature at Harvard, in Cambridge, Mass., before taking a job at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and next year he has a fellowship at Cornell. “I’m kind of stuck in the C’s right now,” he said, “and I can’t really move on. “Charlie Chan — that’s a double C.”
在布法羅之後他在麻省劍橋的哈佛大學教授了4年文學，之後再加州大學聖巴巴拉分校任教，第二年他得到了康奈爾大學的獎學金。“我好像立刻和C打頭較上了勁，”他說，“並且我真的擺脫不了，陳查理——那正是兩個C。”
Chan was an obsession he pursued for years, he said, while trying to write a memoir called “The Yellow Alabaman” until a friend encouraged him to put that book aside and write instead about the detective. It was the aphorisms, the fortune-cookie sayings, that first attracted him, and then he became interested in the way Chan is a projection of American fears and American imaginings about China — an embodiment, as he writes in the book, of “both the racist heritage and the creative genius” of his adopted nation’s culture.
他沉迷於陳查理幾年的時間，他說，同時正在寫一本名為“一個黃種阿拉巴馬人”的回憶錄，直到一個朋友鼓勵他放下這本書，而是開始寫偵探小說。正是那些名言警句，簽餅上的諺語，吸引了他，之後他因陳查理是美國人恐懼的縮影和美國人對中國的幻想產生興趣，這是一種象征，他在書中寫道，象征著他的入籍國家文化的 “種族主義傳統和創造性天才”。
Over lunch he said: “I grew up watching Chinese opera, where you have some of that same exaggeration, and growing up in that literary culture was very useful for understanding cultural ventriloquism and the whole idea of crossing over. It was fascinating to see how Chan was a sort of ‘yellowface’ performance.” He added that in the 30s the Charlie Chan movies were immensely popular in China, of all places, where they were seen as an antidote to the sinister caricature of the Fu Manchu films, but that attitudes had changed. Not long ago he was discussing with a Chinese publisher the possibility of translating “Charlie Chan” himself and bringing it out in China. The publisher listened politely and said, “Right now we’re actually more interested in Fu Manchu.”
在晚飯時他說：“我看著中國戲劇長大，你們對它也有著誇張的想法，生長在那樣的文學文化中非常又有利於我理解文化腹語和交叉的全部概念，看到陳如何完成一種黃種臉龐的表演非常有趣。“他說在30年代的中國，陳查理電影非常出名，這些電影被看做是對抗傅滿洲電影的邪惡形象的手段，但是這種態度已經發生了改變。不久之前他和一個中國出版商討論翻譯“陳查理”並且在中國出版的可能性。出版商禮貌的傾聽後說道，“實際上目前我們對傅滿洲更感興趣。”
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