By Xiao Hua Yang
钱佳楠 《29 Letters》一书的作者，这本书探索了中美文化的差异。

 

Last March, shortly after Shanghai was locked down in an effort to stop an Omicron outbreak, a family friend died in a hospital. It wasn’t the virus that killed him. It was the lockdown. He had been admitted because of a chronic disease unrelated to Covid, but the hospital was thrown into chaos when the city was closed and several nurses tested positive for the virus. One night, the man, the husband of my mother’s best friend, developed a fever. The staff members apparently noticed too late, and within days he was dead. His wife, locked down at home, never got to say goodbye.
今年3月，在上海为阻止奥密克戎病毒暴发而封城后不久，我家的一位朋友在医院去世。杀死他的不是病毒，而是封城。他因一种与武汉肺炎无关的慢性病住院，但当城市关闭，几名护士的病毒检测呈阳性后，医院陷入了混乱。一天晚上，这个男人——我母亲最好朋友的丈夫——发烧了。医护人员发现时显然已经太晚，几天后他就去世了。他的妻子被封在家里，未能送他最后一程。

To console her friend, my mother invoked Chinese society’s fetish for pain: We are taught that pain and suffering are inevitable and that we must stoically endure them rather than identify the source of the pain and eliminate it. “Stay positive and move on,” my mother told her. “Your husband wouldn’t want to see you crying every day.”
为了安慰好友，母亲援引了中国社会对痛苦的迷恋：我们受到的教导是，痛苦和折磨不可避免，我们必须坚强地忍受，而不是找出痛苦的根源，并且消除它。“乐观点，向前看，”母亲告诉她。“你老公也不希望看到你天天都在哭。”

I seethed at this. Although raised in China, I have lived in the United States for several years. My Americanized side felt that this woman shouldn’t just let it go, that someone must be held to account.
我对此感到愤怒。虽然在中国长大，但我已经在美国生活了几年。我美国化的那一面认为，这个女人不应该就这么算了，必须有人为此负责。

It was thoughts like these — impatience with the self-defeating acceptance of the pain that life doles out — that helped incite remarkable demonstrations last month against the Chinese government’s now-abandoned “zero Covid” policy. Those brave citizens who took to the streets were rejecting not only the smothering pandemic restrictions they had endured but also our ingrained idolization of pain and sacrifice.
正是这样的想法——对自欺欺人地接受生活给予的痛苦失去了耐心——帮助引发了上个月引人注目的示威活动，反对中国政府现已放弃的“清零”政策。这些勇敢的公民走上街头，不仅拒绝了被迫忍受的令人窒息的疫情限制，也拒绝我们对痛苦与牺牲根深蒂固的崇拜。

As I was growing up in Shanghai, my mother didn’t allow ibuprofen in our home; it would make me less tolerant of pain and thus weaker. When we suffered menstrual pain in school, my female friends and I never visited the infirmary. If we did, the doctor, a woman my mother’s age, would scold us for our lack of fortitude.
小时候在上海，母亲不允许布洛芬出现在家里；它会让我对痛苦的忍耐力下降，从而变得脆弱。在学校遭受痛经时，我和我的女性朋友们从不去医务室。如果去了，和我母亲年龄相仿的女医生会因为我们缺乏毅力而责备我们。

America, where I came in 2016 to study, couldn’t be more different. I routinely leave medical appointments in the United States with pain medication. But a lifetime of Chinese cultural indoctrination is hard to shake. I have severe pain from sciatica, but reflexively tell myself to stay strong and hold on until my next doctor’s appointment, to just live with it.
2016年我来到美国留学，这里的情况完全不同。这里的医生经常给我开止痛药。但是毕生的中国文化灌输是很难动摇的。我患有严重的坐骨神经痛，但我条件反射地告诉自己要坚强，坚持到下一次医生预约，要习惯它。

Chinese history helped shape this mentality. My grandparents’ generation endured great hardship — the bloody Japanese occupation of the 1930s and ’40s and the Chinese civil war that ended with Communist victory in 1949. Turmoil and famine under Mao Zedong followed. His Cultural Revolution threw schools into disarray or shut them entirely, disrupting my parents’ education. Millions of other young people were sent from cities to poor rural areas, where they remained for years, overworked and often malnourished. The government never took adequate responsibility.
中国历史塑造了这种心态。我的祖父母辈经历了巨大的苦难——上世纪三四十年代血腥的日本占领，以及1949年以共产党胜利告终的中国内战。随后是毛泽东领导下的动荡和饥荒。他发动的文化大革命使学校陷入混乱或完全关闭，扰乱了我父母的教育。还有数以百万计的年轻人从城市被送到贫穷的农村地区，他们在那里待了好几年，过度劳累，往往营养不良。政府从未承担它应负的责任。

My parents learned to simply embrace the pain and disappointment as a part of life and plod on. They accepted the reproductive tyranny of the one-child policy. Undereducated, they had few options apart from factory work but lost even those jobs in the 2000s after economic reforms caused state-owned factories to shed workers by the millions. They struggled to get by and to put me through school, but they were expected to endure it with noble grace.
父母学会了把痛苦和失望当成生活的一部分，然后负重前行。他们接受了独生子女政策的生育暴政。他们受教育程度低，除了在工厂工作，几乎没有其他选择，但在2000年代，由于经济改革导致国有工厂解雇了数以百万计的工人，他们连这样的工作也失去了。他们勉强度日，供我上完学，但他们被期望以高尚的风度来忍受这一切。

In my parents’ eyes, my generation has had it relatively easy. No forced labor or hunger for us. Our pain was seen as more bearable compared with theirs, so we were pushed to embrace it even more. But it was pain nonetheless. As students, we spent almost every waking hour on our daily schoolwork or additional study for the all-important college entrance exams that dictate one’s educational path and, essentially, your destiny in life. My parents would egg me on with a Chinese idiom perhaps best translated as “no pain, no gain.”[color]
在父母看来，我们这一代人过得相对轻松。没有强迫劳动和饥饿。与他们的痛苦相比，我们的痛苦被认为更容易忍受，所以我们被迫更加接受它。但无论如何，这是痛苦。作为学生，我们几乎把醒着的每一个小时都花在做功课上，或者为至关重要的高考补课。这些考试决定了一个人的教育道路，基本上也决定了你的人生命运。我的父母会用一个中国成语来鼓励我，也许最好的翻译是“no pain, no gain”。

Even those who get into a top university and land a coveted job in China’s tech sector often fall into the 996 rut — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week of high-pressure work — that has been blamed for deaths from excessive overtime and even suicide. Falter and there are millions ready to take your place. Uneducated migrant workers fare far worse, toiling away in factories for long hours at low pay.
即使是那些进入顶尖大学并在中国科技行业找到令人羡慕工作的人，也经常陷入“996”的困境——每周六天，从早上九点到晚上九点的高压工作——导致了过劳死甚至自杀。稍有犹豫，就会有数百万人准备取代你的位置。至于没有受过教育的民工，他们的境况还要糟糕得多，他们在工厂里长时间辛苦工作，工资却很低。

My generation grew up assuming that such hardship was relatively common worldwide. But access to the internet and international travel showed us that is not always true. Many young Chinese now see hypercompetition in education and work as a pointless hamster wheel, even a tool of control and repression. Last year the term “tangping,” or “lying flat,” went viral on Chinese social media. It was China’s version of the Great Resignation that began in the United States around the same time. Young people were quitting the rat race with all of its pain and stress. The government began censoring the term.
我们这一代人在成长过程中一直认为，这样的困难在世界范围内是相对普遍的。但互联网和出国旅行告诉我们，这并不总是事实。许多中国年轻人现在将教育和工作中的超级竞争视为毫无意义的仓鼠轮，甚至是控制和压制的工具。去年，“躺平”一词在中国社交媒体上走红。“大辞职”(Great Resignation)大约在同一时期开始于美国，“躺平”是它的中国版。年轻人正在摆脱激烈的竞争和所有的痛苦和压力。政府开始对这个词进行审查。

The pandemic was the last straw. When Shanghai was locked down this year, many, including me, believed the government’s claims that it wouldn’t last long. It dragged on for two agonizing months, showing that even if you were willing to submit to society and work extremely hard, there was always more pain being thrust upon you.
疫情是最后一根稻草。今年上海封城时，包括我在内的许多人都相信政府的说法，认为封城不会持续太久。然而它拖了痛苦的两个月之久，表明即使你愿意服从社会，极其努力地工作，总是有更多的痛苦强加在你身上。

For decades, a tacit social contract was in force in China. The people would be allowed to improve their economic lives. In return, the Communist Party would exercise total political control. We gave up our voices, rights and dignity. Government intrusion into our lives did not begin with the Covid-tracking software introduced during the pandemic; it began in the early 1980s when nearly all new mothers were required to have IUDs inserted into their bodies. Censorship did not begin with blocking negative news during Covid lockdowns; it began decades ago when the Chinese Communist Party extinguished any semblance of a free press.
几十年来，中国一直存在一份默认的社会契约。人民的经济生活可以得到改善。作为回报，共产党将行使完全的政治控制。我们放弃了自己的声音、权利和尊严。政府对我们生活的干涉并不是从疫情期间推出的武汉肺炎追踪软件开始；而是始于1980年代初，当时几乎所有的新妈妈都被要求在体内植入宫内节育器。审查也并非始于武汉肺炎封锁期间屏蔽负面新闻；它始于几十年前，中国共产党消灭了任何形式的新闻自由。

Young people in China today are less willing to accept endless suffering. They want a happy life and to define “happy” on their own terms.
如今的中国年轻人不太愿意接受无尽的苦难。他们想要幸福的生活，并以自己的方式定义“幸福”。

Yet I disagree with portrayals of last month’s street demonstrations as indicating that the Communist Party faces new political threats. The government responded to the protests by quickly abandoning an approach to Covid marked by traumatic lockdowns and harsh restrictions. But a vast majority of China’s people had meekly accepted those hardships for nearly three years, and many will simply look back on the pandemic as yet another example of the pain that we must heroically endure.
但我不同意把上个月的街头示威描述为共产党面临新的政治威胁。政府对抗议活动的回应是，迅速放弃了以封锁和严格限制为标志的武汉肺炎应对措施。但近三年来，绝大多数中国人民忍气吞声地接受了这些苦难，许多人在回首疫情时，只会认为这是我们必须英勇承受的又一次痛苦。

This acceptance of pain — deeply rooted in our culture — won’t change overnight. But our capacity for forbearance should not mean having to endure tyranny and injustice.
这种对痛苦的接受深深植根于我们的文化，它不会在一夜之间改变。但我们的忍耐能力不应意味着必须忍受暴政和不公。

标红字体均为楼主更改，与原文作者无关。

从2020年年初武汉肺炎大爆发开始，我在草榴社区逐渐活跃，至今已经快3年了。三年来，我秉承着“让不会翻墙的人看看墙外的消息”这一原则，从最开始的全网搜索武汉肺炎消息，到中期不断转载外媒简中新闻网的文章，又到现在订阅纽约时报，华盛顿邮报，华尔街日报，外交事务，经济学人等付费和免费报纸杂志，这一路的探索一直是在大家的鼓励下进行的。在这里，津味杂谈及其小号：无能小学生向支持我的榴友们表示由衷的感谢！

2022年是中国人民自武汉肺炎爆发以来最难过的一年——从年初的能封就封能检就检，到年底的应阳尽阳应死尽死，中国人民的生死如同儿戏一般被玩弄在股掌之间。我不晓得你们和你们周边有多少人被这一年的铁拳打醒，也不晓得你们和你们周边有多少人在这一年付出润的行动。但无论你们的自身条件如何，请记住：付出必有收获。

2023年未到，我先装个逼，这一年我要尽量努力做到：
每周一更新经济学人的最新文章，
每周同步更新外媒关于中国的重要报道。

在2022年的最后一天，展望2023，津味杂谈首先祝愿草榴社区日日红火，各位版主身体健康！其次，祝愿觉醒的榴友们应润尽润，如果实在不能润，也要保重身体，已阳的早日康复，未阳的永不感染！最后，祝愿草榴社区的职业五毛们身体健康，他们的家人们应阳尽阳——为2023复工复产做好准备；应死尽死——为2023减轻养老金压力做出贡献。

2023，我们再会！