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| 2011/01/04 00:47:40瀏覽680｜回應2｜推薦14 | |
| 很久沒發表德州大哥的文章了，其實他常寫故事給我和普希金看。今天是假期最後一天，老婆昨日已飛回加州為生計奔忙，我又開始孤枕獨眠，所以便想起欠朋友的債。數一數手邊積了至少四篇大哥的故事，這還不包括不適合對外張揚的： A Cameo Sketch: 一篇抒情散文，從天干地支思想起個人的滄海桑田。 A Season Tender: 回憶高中情懷，詳述一段令人窒息的公車愛情。 All the King's Other Men - Part 2 權力掮客（或稱魔山記）第二部。大哥衣衫不整而群魔亂舞，比第一部更精彩。 Tempura and Meat Pie 就是現在這篇。大哥吃新年大餐的時候，忽然想起小時候的玩伴，一個醫生之子。據說大哥乃是被我的賀歲文章中一句“無憂大嚼”所感召而寫。 我總想翻譯之後再貼他的文章，無奈力不從心，故而一再耽擱。今天想到一個辦法，就是原文照登，等內力夠的時候再添上翻譯（或者不添也行）。我很幸運認識這麼一個會講故事的朋友，希望你也喜歡聽他說的故事。 ---------- x ---------- x ---------- x ---------- Tempura and Meat Pie --- 德州大哥原著 For the 2011 New Year Banquet, thanks to my darling wife’s efforts, I had Tempura Shrimp, Toro Sashimi, Tonkatsu, and Misoshiru, all home-made to the perfection, and two half-bottles of Nigori-sake. 為了2011 年的賀歲大餐，老婆親下庖廚。於是我吃了炸蝦甜不辣，肥鮪魚片，炸豬排，味噌湯，再加上兩盅甜米酒（Nigori-sake)，真是美不可言。 Born and raised a Mainlander Taiwanese, I never had much Japanese cuisine when I lived there, all because of some totally irrational Nippon-phobia running in my family blood. Perhaps it made perfect sense to my parents who had survived many wars with Japanese from the first half of the previous century to hold that kind of grudge against them, yet for someone like me it was more of a sentiment that I was taught to express. All I can say is that no Japanese, dead or alive, had done anything to me to deserve that much hatred. 我是大陸籍台灣人，生長於斯卻不常吃到日式美食，這全怪我家族血液中流淌的仇日情結。從我父母的角度，仇日的心態或許可以理解，畢竟他們經歷了上一世紀前半葉的對日戰爭而活了下來；而我卻是被他們教導了去仇日的。這樣說吧，沒有一個日本人 -- 死的也罷活的也罷 -- 對我幹過一檔惡事，值得我那樣子恨他們。 I am not here to debate with you the goings of Sino-Nippon diplomacy; for that I will gladly delegate them to those highly enthusiastic but utterly incapable. It just happened that while I was nibbling on my deep-fried cutlass fish, I thought about a childhood friend from whom I had my first taste of Tempura fish. 我無意在此爭辯中日關係的種種，那事我樂於讓給熱中而無能的一群人去進行。不過，就在我啃著油煎秋刀魚的時候，忽然想起幼年的一個朋友。從他那裡，我嚐到生平第一口炸魚甜不辣。 His last name was Lin so we shall address him by it. I think he must have been transferred into my grammar school at 5th grade as I had absolutely no memory of him prior to that year. Somehow he just materialized out of the thin air and the next thing I knew he was sitting either next to or not too far away from me, and we hooked up. 他姓林，就如此稱呼他吧。我猜他一定是五年級的時候轉到我的文法學校來，因為我的記憶在那一年之前沒有他。不知怎地他無中生有似的出現，且就坐在我的旁邊，而我們就熟了起來。 We became close friend after one lunch break when we each got curious at what the other had brought, I had some shiitake mushroom pork pie and he had tempura swordfish, and we decided to trade for a change. After we each considered the trade fair and satisfactory, we formed a pack of lunching together everyday. 經過一次午飯，我們成了好朋友。我們都好奇對方的飯盒裡帶了什麼；那一天我帶了香菇豬排，他帶的是旗魚甜不辣，我們決定交換午餐試試。如此交換既公平又合意，於是我們就此形成午餐二人組膩在一起。 【北橋註：翻譯至此，要與兒子吃午餐去了。下回再見】 One other common interest we shared was the war history, which naturally led to the scale models, particularly those from the days of Imperial Japanese Navy. He could afford the real model because his father was a well known gynecologist in our town and I got involved because I was good at sketching: Whatever model he had put together, carrier Akagi, Kaga, or battle cruiser Kirishima, I could sketch it on a piece of paper with an imaginary battle scene added around it. But we did many other things together beside this; we hung out playing war game, riding bicycles, and playing in the river, which was strictly forbidden at the time. I often played at his house, which was on the top floor of a 5-story building his family owned. The first 4 levels were all dedicated to clinic and hospital usages. The ground floor was part examine room and part pharmacy, and I believed there was an operating room at a corner of the second floor, although I had never gone into it. The rest of the 2nd and all of the 3rd and 4th floors were divided into wards for the outpatients and the nursery. Taiwanese believed that women after giving birth need to stay in bed to recuperate for one whole month and I found out much later that providing service to this custom (together with nursing of the newborns) was the real bread and butter for a gynecologist, at least back then and perhaps still is today – I wouldn’t know for sure. To get to Lin’s residence I had to climb through all 4 stories full of bleach and rubbing alcohol smells, and I always held my breath and rushed through the stairs in one draw. My lungs were young and legs strong, just like my heart. Ms. Lin was always helping out in either the pharmacy or the registration desk on the first floor. I always stopped by and asked her permission to go upstairs looking for Lin. She would smiled at me, without much affectionate but then I had no reason to expect any, and told me to go ahead or not for the moment because my friend might either have been out or was engaging in some important activity, which usually meant practicing violin. In my young and innocent mind, I thought Ms. Lin the hardest working woman in the whole world, fighting at all fronts simultaneously everyday. Needless to say, it took me another few years to learn that almost all physicians’ wives did the same if their husbands practiced privately: They weren’t really there to help out but to make sure that no hanky-pancky could go on between their doctor husbands and the nurses; it’s a turf thing. But, do I really want the truth all the time? I’ve been asking myself that question more often lately. My friend Lin was a good-nature, pure, and simple-minded chowder-head, and one thing he had not an iota of in his genetic makeup was musical talent. When we were both in the 6th grade, Ms. Lin began to let us play until she summoned him out to his violin lesson, and she would ask me to hang around the house and wait for Lin to finish his lesson, before we could resume our playtime. I think I was set up as an incentive for him to take his lesson, only she would not have done so had she known how big a distraction my presence would have been to his son. First of all, not to bash him down too badly, my friend really couldn’t play; his play sounded exactly as if he was sawing a piece of hardwood and ran into the knots every 2 minutes or so. To make it worse, you could hear the crying of the violin drifting and shifting from time to time as my friend started moving around the room and peeked through the studio door to make sure I was still waiting. The Maestro? The Maestro didn’t give a shit as he had seen and taught enough talentless rich kids and had long learned the art of viewing each one of them as a paystub easy-coming and easy-going. Lin had a sister, 2 to 3 years older than us, who also took the violin lesson, only she was much better at it than her brother. She constantly gave me a shit-face for whatever reason unknown to me; it’s probably a puberty thing. I saw very little of Dr. Lin as he was busy all the time. Examining and consulting new patients, delivering babies, and inspecting his inpatients grinded out much of his days. I usually ran into at 5pm, if I happened to stay that late, when he took a one and half hour dinner break before returning to his duty till 10pm. He would have a bath first and appear in his bathrobe (Yukata?) at their beautiful backyard where Lin and I played war games behind a pile of rocks put together as part of the Zen garden. Dr. Lin paid absolutely no attention to us and always stood on the little bridge watching his nishikigoi swim. Were I another 3 to 5 years older, the way he stood there with his hands cross at his back, and how his obviously not really watching the fish but staring at something beyond the realm of reality, would definitely have made me conclude that he was very unhappy - probably never having been for a single minute of his whole life. No one could have stayed motionless for that long unless he had his mind totally absent, and no thought except those extremely melancholy in nature could have brought that kind of effect upon a man. One day, I can’t remember exactly when, after my friend went in for his violin session I was led by Ms. Lin into Dr. Lin’s study and was asked to stay there for the duration because either she needed the living room for some other purpose or it was then under renovation. Anyway, I ended up sitting on Dr. Lin gigantic office chair made out of varnished wood and wicker back-support, facing a very large book lying opened on his mahogany desk with glass pad. It was a text book in Japanese about parasitic (tapeworms and others) and never before in my life had I seen a book so finely printed. To illustrate the anatomy of a worm it had many pages of color pictures printed over plastic sheets to reconstruct the 3-D details of the subject studied; with the turning of each page the reader descended down one layer deeper into the body of the worm, until he reached the very center of the animal and even there the detail wouldn’t stop. I had been a good reader since young and that book really had me; I began to read and tried to make sense out of it by guessing what all the kana might have meant between the kanji that I at least half-understood. So deeply absorbed within my effort I was, I failed to detect that Dr. Lin had been standing behind and silently observing me for almost the entire hour. I apologized to him for turning his book but he said that’s alright. He asked me did I find it interesting and I answered yes. He then asked me from where have I learned to read Japanese and I told him that I didn’t know any, and that got him curious. He asked me then how could I read the book? I explained to him my method, which I learned from Conan Doyle’s ‘Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of Dancing Men’, and he was amused. Pointing randomly at a paragraph he asked me what its meaning might have been and I translated it for him; what I made out of it was probably 90% wrong but the 10% hitting the mark must have humored him so tremendously that he took out another 20-some of his books from a glass-covered bookcase, all in Japanese and all the finest print, and told me these were his textbook when he studied for his MD/PhD in Japan years ago (I have never figured out how that MD/PhD thing works, not only in Japan but throughout the rest of the world, but never mind, I don’t really want to know any more.) Now this one here was for brain anatomy whereas that one there for nerve-system, etc. If I stayed focus and study hard, he told me, I could one day become a good physician, bla-bla-bla. I thanked him for letting me know all these interesting subjects (I was genuinely thankful) and he smiled and told me to go play now as the sound of the violin (or its agony moaning from being butchered - sorry old buddy) had ceased a while ago. 5 minutes later I had completely forgot about his advice of staying focus and studying hard. It’s probably a good thing that I did because studying medicine would have bored me to death. On one Saturday afternoon, somewhere in the early summer of the 6th grade, I was playing with another friend of ours at the garden, both us waiting for Lin and his violin to finish torturing each other, when all of sudden - I still don’t know what had got into me that day - I decided to get into the pond and catch myself a nishikigoi. My barbaric act caused all those poor fish to panic and Ms. Lin happened to witness it from the window above. I raised my head and saw her watching us and she knew that I knew. Deciding to punish us a bit, probably more of a scare-tactic than really giving us hell, she locked the door to the garden from inside and left us there confined. She would have released us in an hour or two, probably after scolding us a bit, but how in the world would I have known then? Getting desperate and didn’t really want to face the music I persuaded my friend who was sobbing like a baby to first climb a very tall wall, then moved sideway along the top of it until we could hop over to a neighbor’s roof, and jumped down from there into the back alley and ran home like hell. I escaped and didn’t dare to show up at Lin’s place any more; actually, never again for the rest of my life. It was rather out of my own shame that I felt I can’t face them again even though they, Dr. and Ms. Lin, however, didn’t really take the whole matter that seriously. As a matter of fact, Ms. Lin came to our place a few days later while I was away with some other friends and asked my mother what was her plan for my future, never even bringing up the nishikigoi incidence (thank God.) What she came to talk to my mother about was now that she had made certain arrangements (O.K., having someone bribed) for Lin to attend a public middle school in northern Taipei, way out of our own school district, and the deal included the lining up his entire three years of home room teachers, all top nut-crackers famous for getting you drilled up for the high-school entrance exam coming 3 years later, Ms. Lin would like to know if my mother would consent to let me attend the same school with his son, and she would pick up the tab for all the ‘administration’ fees if my mother concurred to the plan. For whatever reason my parents didn’t take the offer and when the summer was over Lin and I went our separate way. Every morning he would head north and I south, and we each developed accordingly to our true nature. He stayed, I believed, pure and simple (I never saw or contacted him for even once during those three years so I could only extrapolated that from what I remembered of him), and I turned cynical, foxy, and to some extend, rotten inside, as I began to hang out with friends of more dubious characters (Take a good look at me now and you’ll see what I mean by the word ‘dubious.’) And that mean and hateful society of ours didn’t, probably never does, reward the well-behaving and simple-minded kid like Lin but favor always statistically rascals like me (or Chen Shui-Bien, Ma Yin-Jo, and all the rest of crappy famous-but-shameless people of ‘status’) whose lousy personalities are time and again excused by our ability to score well in the nation-wide entrance exams at either the high-school or the college level. Three years later I got into one of those prestigious high schools and he scored worse than shit, ending up in a private school known for picking up the casualties of war (And yes, getting into and trying to win those exams were like going into battles; either you march or you die.) His sister also got into a prestigious high school for girls only, two years ahead of me, and I ran into her a lot at the bus stop as we would both be heading to the same direction for school now. She still gave me the shit-face every time; either she never grew up or I just grew up to be too handsome a stud for her to resist – I will let your own imagination derive your own conclusion for you. I did run into Lin a few times and every time I felt bad about it, not for him but for myself. I didn’t know whether to say Hi to him or not because he looked timid and always lowered his head and kept staring downward at the ground while he walked, avoiding any possible eye contact. It was a great relief that I only ran into him a handful of times, and when you were that young your heart had the agility of turning away as a mean to minimize any form of discomfort. By the time I was in college the thought of him was completely off my mind. All these happened almost 40 years ago, and it’s rather funny that on top of all other possible reminiscence triggers I could have pulled, eating tempura shrimp and cutlass fish was the one to bring its vivid details back to life again. As I have now squandered almost half a century worth of my life away, Dr. Lin, if he is still alive, would have pushed 80 by now. But I doubt it, someone worked that hard for that extended period of time and constantly enshrouded with thoughts clearly representing cases of extreme melancholia would not have lasted long. Perhaps it was best that way; even if it means that whatever locked between his eyebrows pushing together will stay eternally mysterious to me. Ms. Lin, the Queen bee of her hive, constantly guarding over the mating right of her husband and conceiving unfortunately some obviously unrealistic expectations of her son, was actually quite benevolent to me given the circumstances. Maybe she had a motif, using me as either an incentive or a companion to get her son going but so what? She wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last mama-bear in this world to protect her cub by all means necessary. She never wronged me into doing anything I didn’t want to do myself, and she didn’t rat me out on the nishikigoi incidence; many other would have, without breaking a sweat either. As for my friend Lin, my wife had it right, after she had heard my story over the sake. Damn, that woman is right every time and I can love her just for that, not to mention all her other great qualities! She told me that I should pick up my sorry-ass fictitious sympathy (Ding-Dong!) and think of how realty works its wonder unfailingly. My friend would have got into a so-so college, and then spent a few years in Japan to get an advanced degree, returned home to start as a middle-class clerk in some Kabushiki-Gaisha based on his family ties, and worked contently until he inherited most of his parents’ wealth. Given my descriptions of his character, he would probably hold on to those wealth conservatively and live a worry-free life for the next 50 years to come; definitely unlike some smart-ass who could have changed 5 jobs within the last 14 years, moving east, west, north and south (then back to west) across the continental U.S. during the same time, and still haven’t figured out what had hit him repeatedly all these years. Yeah, I know I am a real sap but how I wish I could have said hello to Lin for the one last time and asked him how he had been doing, and would he like me to draw him another sketch of carrier Akagi braving the stormy sea? |
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