陈查理：老牌英雄 zt

陈查理：老牌英雄
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于2010-08-12 20:50:23翻译 | 已有1463人浏览 | 有0人评论

对于很多亚裔美国人来说，陈查理是个令人讨厌的老牌人物，汤姆大叔的另一版本。厄尔·德尔·比格斯的六部侦探小说和1926年到1949年47部好莱坞电影，更不用提70年代汉纳-巴贝拉动画片系列（Hanna-Barbera cartoon series）的共同主角——是一个身材矮胖，斜眼而又神秘莫测，喜欢说念经一般的签饼英语，“与驴为友，早晚挨踢”。
Tags:纽约时报 | 陈查理

Charlie Chan: A Stereotype and a Hero

By CHARLES McGRATH

陈查理：老牌英雄

By 查尔斯·麦格拉斯（Charles McGrath）

Published: August 10, 2010

发表于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.

对于很多亚裔美国人来说，陈查理是个令人讨厌的老牌人物，汤姆大叔的另一版本。陈查理——厄尔·德尔·比格斯的六部侦探小说和1926年到1949年47部好莱坞电影，更不用提70年代汉纳-巴贝拉动画片系列（Hanna-Barbera cartoon series）的共同主角——是一个身材矮胖，斜眼而又神秘莫测，喜欢说念经一般的签饼英语，像“与驴为友，早晚挨踢”。加利福尼亚出生的作家和剧作家赵建秀（Frank Chin）,曾经发表文章谴责陈查理，要求他彻底消失。

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.

但是生长在中国的黄云特，却非常喜欢陈查理并且写书表达对他的沉迷：“陈查理：荣誉侦探不为人知的故事和他与美国历史的幽会。”这本下周将来自诺顿选集的书，既是一本回忆录，也是一段历史，既是文化研究随笔，也是一本古怪和不为人知细节的杂烩。

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.

比格斯与哈佛大学的T·S·埃利奥特（T.S.Elliot）有共同兴趣，但是并不拥有相同的文学喜好。比格斯说，他的陈查理的灵感来自于1924年坐在纽约公立图书馆中读到的真人真事，火奴鲁鲁侦探张阿斑（Chang Apana）。黄先生认为比格斯可能是记错了一些细节，但是无疑阿斑正是陈的原型，并且给出了完整真实的描述，很多程度上竟然比小说版更加令人着迷：父母是中国人，出生在夏威夷，阿斑曾经搬家去了中国，回到夏威夷后，尽管实际上大字不识一个，但是却成为了知名的火奴鲁鲁警员侦探。他带着牛仔帽，手执牛鞭，据说可以像超人一样飞檐走壁。

对于他印象和记忆最深的演员，黄先生给出了与陈查理电影历史相同完整的描述：一个名叫华纳·奥兰的瑞典人，在第一部有声电影《爵士歌手》中饰演一个犹太人，之后因为有着近似的亚洲人面部特征，开始专门饰演东方恶棍。（最初的陈查理饰演者是日本人George Kuwa。）奥兰非常能喝酒，黄先生写到，他在小睡片刻后会悄然进入陈查理的角色：放慢语速，脸上带着相宜的陈氏风格的微笑。1938年，奥兰因酗酒早亡，而被名为西尼·托勒美国演员代替，电影制片人鼓励他玩相同的把戏。

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“陈查理”故事正是黄先生自己的。“我是命中注定，”在上周唐人街的午餐上，他大笑着说。80年代后期，他曾是北京大学的学生，在1989中国政治风波之后，他决定离开中国。他手上有一本美国大学入学指南，“阿拉巴马以A开头，”他指出。“我非常想离开中国，阿拉巴马大学是我想去的第一所学校。”他补充说当他到达那里时，“塔斯卡卢萨是另一个世界，”他继续道：“街上没人。一切都慢慢吞吞，如此干净和空荡。”

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.”

当他厌倦南部，黄先生说，他决定去布法罗攻读英语文学博士学位。他离开后，在“陈查理”书中写到，“像一只吃着残羹剩餐的鱼，看不见美国泥泞的水塘白昼的光亮。”

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.

但是为什么选择布法罗？“布法罗以B开头，”他咧嘴笑着说。他曾经在那里做过送报员，却又欣然地放弃了餐馆生意。“研究生院真的很容易让人想起餐馆的工作，”他说。

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.

在一笔房产买卖中他买下了一些比格斯的小说，并立刻被深深吸引。他开始租借能找到的所有的陈查理电影。

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.”

黄先生今年41岁，离异，是一个女儿的父亲，他讲着一口近乎完美的地道英语。他学习英语，他说，靠的是与家人一起收听美国之音和去图斯卡卢萨的教堂。“星期天早上我拿着圣经站在街角，”他解释说，“人们停下来问我要去那个教堂，‘去你要去的那个’我会说，我用这种方式看到过很多教堂。”

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.”

在布法罗之后他在麻省剑桥的哈佛大学教授了4年文学，之后再加州大学圣巴巴拉分校任教，第二年他得到了康奈尔大学的奖学金。“我好像立刻和C打头较上了劲，”他说，“并且我真的摆脱不了，陈查理——那正是两个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.

他沉迷于陈查理几年的时间，他说，同时正在写一本名为“一个黄种阿拉巴马人”的回忆录，直到一个朋友鼓励他放下这本书，而是开始写侦探小说。正是那些名言警句，签饼上的谚语，吸引了他，之后他因陈查理是美国人恐惧的缩影和美国人对中国的幻想产生兴趣，这是一种象征，他在书中写道，象征着他的入籍国家文化的 “种族主义传统和创造性天才”。

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.”

在晚饭时他说：“我看着中国戏剧长大，你们对它也有着夸张的想法，生长在那样的文学文化中非常又有利于我理解文化腹语和交叉的全部概念，看到陈如何完成一种黄种脸庞的表演非常有趣。“他说在30年代的中国，陈查理电影非常出名，这些电影被看做是对抗傅满洲电影的邪恶形象的手段，但是这种态度已经发生了改变。不久之前他和一个中国出版商讨论翻译“陈查理”并且在中国出版的可能性。出版商礼貌的倾听后说道，“实际上目前我们对傅满洲更感兴趣。”

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