好英语网“你吃了吗？”：走进中餐馆，走近华人在全球扎根的故事
HAVE YOU EATEN YET?: Stories From Chinese Restaurants Around the World, by Cheuk Kwan
《吃了吗？来自世界各地中餐馆的故事》作者：关卓中
“Have you eaten yet?,” a familiar Chinese greeting, might be the title of this book, but for the author and director Cheuk Kwan — and for almost every restaurateur he interviews in his tour of Chinese restaurants across 15 countries and five continents — food is only the entry point. Because “running a Chinese restaurant is the easiest path for new Chinese immigrants to integrate into the host society,” Kwan writes in his memoir-cum-travelogue, “there’s no better way to tell the story of the Chinese diaspora than through the stories of Chinese restaurant owners.”
“吃了吗？”这句常见的中文问候语是本书标题，但对于作者兼导演关卓中——以及他在五大洲15个国家的中餐馆之旅中采访过的几乎每一位餐馆老板——来说，食物只是切入点。因为“经营中餐馆是华人新移民融入东道国社会的最便捷途径，”关卓中在他这本回忆录暨游记中写道，“讲述华侨故事的最佳方式，就是聆听中餐馆老板的故事。”
Kwan, who was born in Hong Kong, spent his formative years in Singapore and Japan, and now resides in Canada, begins his journey in the vast, flat plains of Saskatchewan. There, we meet Noisy Jim, the retired proprietor of a Chinese café who was born in the same coastal province where Kwan’s grandfather grew up. Noisy Jim arrived in Vancouver at the age of 12 as a “paper son” at the height of Canada’s Chinese Exclusion Act. To gain Jim entry, his father obtained the identity papers of a dead Canadian resident named Chow Jim Kook, whose name Jim would keep for the rest of his life. For years, he toiled in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant until he was called back to China to marry the woman his family had chosen for his bride. The couple returned to Canada to open their own Chinese café in a remote prairie town, raised seven children and served egg rolls and chop suey: food that was neither Canadian nor, according to Jim, “what Chinese people eat.”
关卓中出生于香港，在新加坡和日本长大，现居加拿大。他在萨斯喀彻温省的广阔平原上开始他的旅程。在那里，我们会认识诺伊西·金，他是一家中餐吧的退休老板，出生在关卓中祖父长大的那个沿海省份。在加拿大实施《排华法案》那个当口，12岁时诺伊西·金作为“纸生仔”来到温哥华。为了让他入境，他的父亲拿到了已故加拿大居民周金国（音）的身份证件，诺伊西·金终生保留了这个名字。多年来，他一直在一家中餐馆的厨房辛苦劳作，直到他被叫回中国迎娶家人为他挑选的新娘。这对夫妇回到加拿大，在一个偏远的草原小镇开了自己的中餐吧，抚养了七个孩子，买蛋卷和杂碎：都不是加拿大菜，而诺伊西·金说，也不是“中国人会吃的”。
The arc of Jim’s life bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Maurice Soong, a “Chinese Trinidadian entrepreneur” who helped at his father’s general store in San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago, before running a Chinese restaurant there with his new wife, who was dispatched to him from his home village of Lung Kong, near Hong Kong.
诺伊西·金的人生轨迹与“特立尼达华人企业家”莫里斯·宋有惊人的相似之处。莫里斯·宋在他父亲位于特立尼达和多巴哥圣费尔南多市的杂货店当过帮手，后来与在香港附近的老家龙岗村送来的新婚妻子一起开了家中餐馆。
From the Arctic to Africa to the Amazon, perseverance, economic pragmatism and resourcefulness bind the lives of Chinese immigrant restaurateurs all over the world and inspire their disparate menus. Forged in the same powerful spirit of adaptive endurance, chop suey is not all that different from the soupe chinoise (wonton soup) served in Madagascar or Peru’s lomo saltado (stir-fried beef) in their marriage of local ingredients with Chinese cooking techniques.
从北极到非洲再到亚马孙，坚韧不拔、经济务实和足智多谋将世界各地的华人移民餐馆老板的人生联系在一起，并启发他们创造各色各样的菜式。在同样强大的适应忍耐精神的磨练下，杂碎与马达加斯加的云吞或秘鲁的炒牛肉并没有太大不同，都是当地食材与中国烹饪技巧的结合。
At its best, Kwan’s book reveals the ways in which diasporic Chinese restaurants are like test kitchens experimenting in opportunities for a better life, however nebulous that pursuit might be. As in the case of Jim and Maurice, many who embark on the expatriate journey are children with little say in the matter; and often the adults are reduced to children by the uncertainties and unease of displacement. Between economic deprivation and racial discrimination, many of Kwan’s subjects recount the ways the lives they sought in migration often materialized as fraught compromises. “We always thought we were sojourning here,” a restaurateur in South Africa tells him. “The place actually belonged to the whites; we were just encroaching on their space. It was never meant for us to claim.”
关卓中的作品最精彩之处在于揭示了侨民中餐馆如何变成了某种测试厨房，他们在其中尝试着获得更好的生活，无论这种追求的结果可能多么晦暗不明。和诺伊西·金和莫里斯·宋的情况一样，许多人都是在孩童时期踏上移民之旅，不能决定自己的命运；由于流离失所带来的不确定和不安，大人往往也会变成小孩。关卓中的描写对象讲述了他们想通过移民实现的生活方式，往往在经济困难和种族歧视之下变成了苦恼的妥协。“我们一直觉得自己就是在这里暂住的，”南非的一位餐馆老板告诉他。“这个地方实际上属于白人。我们只是侵占了他们的空间。那是从来都不该属于我们的。”
Perhaps owing to his experience as a documentary filmmaker, Kwan structures his story into episodes organized by place, although the more compelling drama is in the multigenerational family evolutions through time. Building a Chinese restaurant is hard work, and it is often only the beginning of the search for a fulfilling life, lived on one’s own terms. The first-generation immigrants, like the fathers of Jim and Maurice, plot the path so the second generation might secure the resources for a sturdy if unglamorous engine of livelihood. One of the painful paradoxes of running a family restaurant is the way immigration tears the nuclear unit asunder. “It’s part of many Chinese immigrant stories,” Kwan writes: “wives left behind, children they never knew and second marriages in faraway lands.”
也许是作为纪录片导演的经验，关卓中将他的故事按地点分成几个篇章，但更引人瞩目的情节仍在于几代人的家庭随着时间的演变。开一家中餐馆非常辛苦，而且那通常只是追求自己想要的充实人生的开始。诺伊西·金和莫里斯·宋父辈那样的初代移民规划好了道路，这样第二代就能获得资源，维持稳固（或许算不得光鲜）的生计。经营家族餐厅的一个痛苦悖论在于，移民会将核心家庭彻底撕裂。“很多华人移民的故事都是如此，”关卓中写道。“被留下的妻子、他们素不相识的孩子、还有远方的二婚。”
Even when the family remains intact, fragmentation can be felt on the level of individual identity. Kwan describes the nostalgia he experienced during his peripatetic childhood, the sense of loss upon leaving a new home he’d barely gotten to know, and the pieces of himself he sees in his interviewees. Everywhere he goes, Kwan cannot help but ask those he meets the same question: As a member of the Chinese diaspora, are you defined by your nationality or ethnicity? Another way of posing the question might be: Where is your heart most at home? For Kwan, there doesn’t seem to be a single answer. “I have six homes,” he confesses: his grandfather’s ancestral village of Gau Gong, which he has never visited; Hong Kong, where he was born; Singapore and Tokyo, where he spent his adolescence; Berkeley, Calif., where he learned about his Asian American identity; and Toronto, where he found his voice.
即便家庭没有破裂，在个人身份认同的层面上仍能感受到分裂。关卓中描述了他在四处漂泊的童年中有过的乡愁，离开一个他基本还没开始熟悉的新家时的失落，以及他在采访对象身上看到的些许自我。无论走到哪里，关卓中都忍不住那同一个问题去问他遇到的人：作为一名华侨，你是被自己的民族或种族定义的吗？这个问题的另一种提法或许是：何处心安是吾乡？对关卓中来说，答案应该不只有一个。“我有六个家，”他坦白道：他从未去过的祖父的故乡高岗村；他的出生地香港；青春期时所在的新加坡和东京；让他懂得了自己亚裔美国人身份的加州伯克利；还有让他找到自己声音的多伦多。
Kwan’s book is a kind of love letter to his varied homes and a memorial to his journey through them, as refracted through the lives of far-flung strangers. “To me, a home is about finding a community where you feel you belong,” Kwan reflects toward the end. The act of writing is also one of self-possession. The desire to take ownership of his identity and assess the nature of belonging is what drives this book, even as it delineates the lives of many who have had to defer their ambition to their progeny.
关卓中的书就像他写给这么多家乡的一封情书，也是对他从这些地方一路走来的纪念，这些主旨通过远方陌生人的人生折射了出来。“在我看来，家就是让你找到归属感的地方，”关卓中在书的最后写道。写作也是一种自持。尽管书中描写了许多不得不把自我抱负留给后代完成的人的人生，但这本书的驱动力还是他对自我身份的掌控和对归属感本质的评估。
“It was never my dream to open a restaurant, but my generation had no choice,” a Hong Kong-born restaurant owner in Norway says, echoing Noisy Jim’s sentiment that he “never wanted his children to end up a ‘washy washy cooky cooky’ like him.” When Kwan remarks to Jim that his sons and daughters must be very proud of him, it’s hard not to detect the old man’s wistful pride when he responds: “They should be. I brought them up right. I gave them all an education.”
“开餐馆从来都不是我的梦想，但我们这代人别无选择，”一位在香港出生的挪威餐馆老板说，与诺伊西·金说他“永远不希望他的孩子像他一样‘洗洗涮涮’”的想法一样。当关卓中告诉诺伊西·金，他的儿女一定为他感到骄傲时，他的回应难掩这位老人所渴望的自豪：“他们理应如此。是我把他们养大。是我让他们都得到了教育。”
HAVE YOU EATEN YET?: Stories From Chinese Restaurants Around the World | By Cheuk Kwan | 260 pp. | Pegasus | $27.95
《吃了吗？来自世界各地中餐馆的故事》｜作者：关卓中｜260页｜Pegasus出版社｜27.95美元