阮碧铭/文

阮碧铭（Bich Minh Nguyen）的家人在1975年西贡沦陷前夕逃离了越南，当时她还是一个婴孩。其第一部书《偷吃菩萨的晚餐》（Stealing Buddha’s Dinner）描写了一个越南移民家庭的孩子在美国中西部成长的故事，该作品2005年荣获叶拉德笔会奖。她的长篇小说《矮个子姑娘》（Short Girls）于2009年出版。阮碧铭目前在印第安纳州西拉斐特市的普渡大学教授文学写作与亚美文学等课程。

作为一名越南裔美国人，我的童年是在密歇根州一座小城度过的，那里有着几乎清一色的白人，书籍成了我最亲密无间的朋友和同盟。由于有了书，我不必每日煞费苦心琢磨着如何在家中文化与外部文化之中左右逢源。书籍还给我教诲，引导人生之路：我孩提时代就明白，要想在这个国家生存立足并获得成功，必须尽力全面掌握语言。于是，我无所不读：杂志、麦片盒子背面的文字说明、手册说明书、尤其是图书馆藏书。作为一个比较拘泥的孩子，我想读英语文学最有助于我掌握英文。简·奥斯汀、查尔斯·狄更斯以及勃朗特三姊妹成了我一见钟情的早期“成人”作家。他们对人物的刻画、情节的把握、对话的使用、意象的应用以及行文句式等等，就是在今天也影响着我，并对我在小说和纪实作品中运用这些元素仍有帮助。他们还使我爱上了“经典作品”， 从希腊悲剧到伊迪丝·华顿到威廉·福克纳，几乎无所不包。

进入大学后，我开始广泛选修文学课，我意识到这之间有着许多文学观点，或许作为一个越南裔美国人，我也可写写自己的生活。汤亭亭的《女勇士》（副标题为“女孩在鬼怪中的成长史”）一书改变了我的世界。作家时常读书，其原因之一是，从其他文字中获得灵感，了解语言和思想的可塑性。《女勇士》为我开拓了无限视野，使我清晰地认识到个性与族裔的本质，也向我展示，我可以通过写作来发出自己的声音。从读汤亭亭开始，阅读使我豁然开朗，亚美作家和移民作家为我敞开了一个崭新而辽阔的文学世界，这些作家包括任碧莲（Gish Jen）、李昌来（Chang-rae Lee）、杰西卡·哈格多恩（Jessica Hagedorn ）、山本久惠（Hisaye Yamamoto）、巴拉蒂·慕克吉（Bharati Mukherjee）、桑德拉·希斯內罗斯 （Sandra Cisneros）、埃德维热·丹蒂卡（Edwidge Danticat）、钟芭‧拉希莉（Jhumpa Lahiri）以及朱诺·迪亚斯(Junot Díaz) 。他们的作品以及那些经典仍为我的创作带来灵感，使我耳目一新，文学可昭示今昔，使之浑为一体；文学可使不同文化互为兼容，从更高的角度来审视人类生活与文学活动。

美国国务院国际信息局 http://www.america.gov/mgck

Finding Allies in Books

By Bich Minh Nguyen

Bich Minh Nguyen was an infant when her family fled Vietnam just before the fall of Saigon in 1975. Her first book, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, about growing up in a Vietnamese household in the American Midwest, won the PEN/Jerard Award in 2005. Her book Short Girls will be published in 2009. Nguyen teaches creative nonfiction, fiction, and Asian-American literature at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

Growing up as a Vietnamese American in a small, predominantly white town in Michigan, I found my closest friends and allies in books. They provided an escape from the daily effort of trying to negotiate a culture at home with a culture outside the home. They also provided lessons and signposts: I learned early on that to get by and to get ahead in this country, I needed to attain all the language I could. So I read everything I could find: magazines, the backs of cereal boxes, instruction manuals, and, most of all, books from the library. Being a fairly literal-minded kid, I decided that reading English literature would teach me the most about the English language. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and the Brontës were among the first “grown-up” writers I read and fell in love with. Their ways of using character, plot, dialogue, imagery, and sentence structure stay with me today and influence my own shaping of these elements in fiction and nonfiction. They also led me to and made me fall in love with the “classics” — everything from Greek tragedies to Edith Wharton to William Faulkner.

It wasn’t until I started college and started taking a broad range of literature courses that I realized how many points of view existed out there — and that maybe it was even possible to write about my own experiences as a Vietnamese American. A world-changing book for me was Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, subtitled “Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts.” One reason writers read constantly is to gain possibilities from other texts, to learn from them what language and ideas can do. The Woman Warrior opened many possibilities for me; it gave me incredible insight into issues of identity and race, and it showed me that I could write from my own voice. From Kingston, I began reading what seemed to me a new and expanding world of literature by Asian-American and immigrant writers, including Gish Jen, Chang-rae Lee, Jessica Hagedorn, Hisaye Yamamoto, Bharati Mukherjee, Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Junot Díaz. These writers’ works, along with the classics, continue to provide fresh inspiration for me, and they remind me that literature can illuminate the connections between past and present and bridge cultures toward a more complicated understanding of the human and literary experiences.