A Word Warrior: Maxine Hong Kingston

文字勇士:汤婷婷

Kingston was born in Stockton, California 1940, she was the 3rd of eight children to a Chinese immigrant parents, and the first to be born in America. Her American name, Maxine, was after a blonde who was always lucky in gambling. Ting Ting, her Chinese name, comes from a Chinese poem about self-reliance.

汤婷婷于1940年出生于加利福尼亚斯托克顿的一个中国移民家庭，家中有8个孩子，她排行第三， 是家里第一个在美国出生的孩子。她的英文名玛克辛取自一个赌运奇佳的金发女郎，中文名婷婷则来自一首关于自强自立的中文诗。

At the early part of her school education, she kept silent and for her talking was terrible. When she was in the fourth grade and all of a sudden a poem came out of her. By the age of nine, her progress in English enabled her to write poems in her new language, and though she was a gifted story-teller, she preferred the solitary task of writing. An extremely bright student, she won eleven scholarship that allowed her to attend the University of California at Berkeley. She began as an engineering major, but soon she switched to English literature.

刚上学时，她十分沉默，不敢开口说话，后来读4 年级时，她的脑海里突然涌出一首诗。9岁时，她的英语取得了很大进步，使她可以用英语写诗了。她生来擅长 讲故事，但她更喜欢静静地写作。天资聪颖的她获得了 11项奖学金，并因此得到了去加利福尼亚伯克利分校学 习的机会。她开始攻读工程学，不久转读英国文学。

In 1976，while Kingston was teaching creative writing at a private school, she published her first book, The Woman Warrior. It details the experiences of first-generation Chinese Americans. It combines Chinese folk stories, myth, and her family’s experience as immigrants in the United States. Though considered as a memoir, it was, in fact, a novel about Chinese in the world. It won the national Book Critics Circle Award, and became a literary classic.

1976年，汤婷婷在一家私立学校教写作，当时出版 了她的第一部作品《女战士》，该书详细描述了第一代 美籍华人的经历，巧妙地将中国民间故事、神话传说以 及她的家庭漂洋过海到美国的经历揉合在一起。尽管被 视为传记，该书则是描述全球华人的作品。并赢得了国 家书籍评论奖，成为文学经典。

As well as being praised for her literary works, Kingston must also be noted for her vision of the kind of borderless world we could create if we try -now that we are all more or less world citizens, regardless of our origins. But more than that, if you substitute the word “Chinese” with “human” in Kingston’s passage, you have a question to pose the whole world. Kingston’s is a moral vision, one to guide not only writers, but all who challenge tradition, history and old-fashioned notions of identity.

汤婷婷不仅以其文学作品广受赞誉，也因对世界无 国界的展望而闻名：我们同为世界公民，不管我们是何 种血统，只要努力，就可以创造出一个无国界的世界。 不仅如此，如果你将汤婷婷作品中的“华人”全部换成“人类”，你就对整个世界提出了问题。她的作品是一种 道德洞察，不仅可以指导作家，还可以指导所有挑战传 统、挑战历史和挑战旧式身份认同观念的人。

For Kingston, writing has been central in her life. “My writing is an ongoing function, like breathing or eating,” she explains. “I have this habit of writing things down. Anything, and then some of it falls into place as in China Men and Woman Warrior.She admired the changes a storyteller can implement when she or he tells the same tale many times, and in her work, she tries to remain this freedom to change a story’s interpretation by guarding ambiguity in the static writing. Doubt is part of every story, not certainty, and that is part of what makes her writing unique.

对汤婷婷来说，写作就是她的生活中心。她解释 道：“我觉得写作对我来说就像呼吸或吃饭，是种持续不 断的技能。我习惯随时随地写作，任何东西都可以写。 其中有些随笔写进了《唐人》和《女战士》中。”她很 羡慕那些讲故事的人，在每次复述故事时总能自如地使 每次讲的故事有所不同。在她自己的作品中，也尝试保 持静态文字的模糊性，保留自由发挥的余地，令不同的 读者有不同的阐释。不确定性成为她作品的组成部分， 这也是她的作品独一无二的部分原因。