https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/nyregion/28translate.html
By Ellen Barry
May 28, 2007
Something extraordinary happened to Maria
Farren of Flushing, Queens, on a recent trip to the grocery store. From the
familiar background chatter of people speaking Chinese, a syllable leapt out
from nowhere. It was not that she understood the word — she didn’t — but the
sound was familiar. That was enough of a surprise that she paused in mid-aisle.
“It’s just a din
of noise,” Ms. Farren said, “and all of a sudden you recognize something.”
So on a rainy
Wednesday evening, she was back in the basement room of the Queens housing
project where two dozen adults gather every week to learn Mandarin. The free
classes at the James A. Bland Houses draw a motley assortment of students; the
current session includes an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, a black woman who grew
up in the housing project and the practical-minded daughter of Hungarian
immigrants.
They have in common these two attributes: They have lived in
Flushing since before it was Asian, and they have decided that the time has
come to adapt.
“Kind of like, ‘If you
can’t beat ’em, join ’em,’ ” said Ms. Farren, whose Italian-American relatives
cannot fathom why she hasn’t left for New Jersey.
Pitched battles have been fought over language in Flushing,
whose white ethnic population has receded as Korean and Chinese immigrants have
arrived. In the late 1980s, when City Councilwoman Julia Harrison proposed a bill
requiring businesses to post signs in English, a public divide seemed to open:
On one side were the waves of Asian newcomers; on the other, longtime residents
who felt displaced and alienated.
But Man-Li Kuo
Lin’s weekly Mandarin class — arranged by Ms. Harrison’s successor, Councilman
John C. Liu — provides a different view of Flushing. Ms. Lin’s students filter
in after finishing a day’s work as paramedics or elementary school teachers.
They set up chairs under pipes labeled “hot kitchen/bath” and “chilled water supply,” which are periodically
traversed by mice. Some eat supper discreetly out of paper bags. Then they
stumble, with boisterous good humor, over the basics of Mandarin grammar.
In the center of
the front row, every Wednesday, sits an old man with a freckled scalp and a
frizz of white hair. This is Frank Sygal, 85, a retired stockbroker whose
enthusiasm in pursuit of Mandarin amazes and amuses his classmates.
His first
question of the night during one recent class, delivered in the accent of his
native Poland, was followed rapidly by several dozen follow-ups: “Why do you
say two words for ‘bladder’? I have one bladder! For one bladder it’s two
words? What is word for state of Israel? What is word for ‘oral surgeon’? If I
go to study medicine in China, what do they teach me?”
“Nobody taught
you in Poland to speak Chinese,” Mr. Sygal said.
Mr. Sygal grew up outside Krakow and lost his parents on an
August day in 1942 when German soldiers rounded up Jews, stripped off their
jewelry and machine-gunned them. His facility with languages helped him
survive: He spoke Russian with the Russian soldiers, Ukrainian with the
Ukrainians and German with the Germans, reserving Hebrew for private spaces.
Once he arrived in New York in 1949, there were two more languages to learn —
English and Spanish.
Now, at 85, he
has embarked on his last great linguistic effort. His progress has been
maddeningly slow; at one point, Mr. Sygal approached “dozens” of Chinese
people, he said, in a fruitless attempt to translate the word “ka-ching,” a
term he had seen in a headline in The New York Post and assumed to be Chinese.
He hopes that he will be able to carry on a conversation in Mandarin by the
time he is 95.
“If I be
around,” he said, “I be able to speak.”
To his left was
Cathy Stenger, driven to this class by the stubborn silence in her building’s
elevator. She bought an apartment in a Flushing co-op in 1986 and has since
seen 90 percent of the units go to Korean and Chinese families. She has a mute
bond with a woman from the sixth floor, who embraces her every time they meet,
and with an elderly man who soulfully grabs her hand.
“The fact of the
matter is, I can’t talk to them,” said Ms. Stenger, 65, whose parents
immigrated from Hungary.
Her
interest is not casual. Her co-op board is threatened by a breakaway group of
Asian tenants, she said, who are challenging bylaws about subletting or
dividing units. A downstairs neighbor manufactures medicinal herbs, and though
the woman added ventilation after Ms. Stenger complained, the scent sometimes
wafts up through her radiator connections. And when gas leaked into a hallway
recently, Ms. Stenger said, one of the neighbors hesitated to call 911 because
she was afraid that she would be charged for the service.
Still, none of
the changes have made her consider leaving Flushing.
“A lot of my
friends it bothers,” she said. “My friends moved.”
The Mandarin
classes, now in their second 10-week session, were the brainchild of Donald
Henton, 73, a retired city bus driver who has lived in Flushing since 1968.
Mr. Henton asked Councilman Liu to sponsor the lessons last year
during a community meeting at which most of the comments were made in Mandarin.
He feels a responsibility for the classes’ success; on Tuesday nights, he calls
40 people just to remind them to come.
There have been moments of disappointment for Mr. Henton, who
expected the classes to be standing-room-only. He has met cold shoulders among
his own neighbors in the Bland Houses, where 78 percent of the tenants are
black or Hispanic. On a sunny afternoon in the housing project’s courtyard,
Robert Winston, whose family moved to New York from Jamaica, responded to the
idea of studying Mandarin with a long belly laugh. Anita Garcia, whose parents
moved from Puerto Rico, practically spat.
“I was born
here,” said Ms. Garcia, who is 44. “Why should I learn their language?”
For years,
tenants in the Bland Houses have worried that they would be priced out of an
increasingly crowded and prosperous neighborhood. From the bench where he sits
with his friends, Mr. Winston said, he can see both the Asian-dominated
playgrounds and the basketball court used by the Bland Houses’ old guard.
Mr. Henton, a
longtime supporter of Councilman Liu, agreed that big changes are coming. It’s
time to adjust, he tells people at Bland Houses. But only one of his neighbors
is attending the second session of Mandarin classes, he said, even after he
slipped 400 fliers advertising the lessons under tenants’ doors.
“You know what
they say? They didn’t get it,” he said.
Still, students
return week after week. At break time, Ms. Lin leads them — a clumsy, giggling corps de ballet — in dance sequences from
Chinese opera. A vivacious woman who volunteers her services, she peppers the
class with small revelations: Under Chinese etiquette, when you sneeze, a
person will pretend he or she did not hear you; Chinese people will not ask or
answer the question “How are you” for fear of hearing or prompting a lie; the
fourth of the tones used in Mandarin — known as the “high falling” sound — is
so difficult that if you say it too many times, as she put it, “you will feel
hungry.”
After six
lessons, the students have begun to come to class with stories of progress:
words overheard on the subway, characters recognized on signs. Dolores Morris,
who has lived next door to a Chinese family for a year and a half, finally
approached her “lovely neighbor.”
Affection has
grown between the two families, despite the language barrier. The neighbors
take out the Morrises’ garbage to save her husband, who is 75, the physical
strain, and they send their daughter to the Morrises’ door with steaming plates
of food. Ms. Morris, 63, decided to begin Chinese lessons as a surprise. After a few lessons, she “took a big deep breath” and
went up to her neighbor in the back yard.
Nervously,
she repeated the Mandarin phrase she had learned — “I am learning to speak
Chinese” — and proudly showed her textbook to her neighbor, who looked
surprised and disappeared inside. Though Mandarin is the dominant dialect in Flushing,
the woman’s daughter emerged from the house and explained that her mother never
learned to read or speak it; a native of Fujian province, she only spoke
Fuzhounese, the dialect spoken in the city of Fuzhou and its region.
Ms. Morris
laughed, telling the story. She said she has no immediate plans to begin
studying Fuzhounese.
As it stands, when the neighbors bring gifts of food, “I’ll
point to my mouth and rub my stomach and smile,” she said. “We’ll probably keep
doing that.”
郭曼麗翻譯
在皇后區，普通話課程也是美國人適應華人移入的新社區文化的課程
郭曼麗教導每週一次的普通話班，其學生包括 Frank Sygal，(照片中間) 他 85 歲，至少會說七種語言。照片歸功於紐約時報攝影師Credit... Uli Seit for The New York Times
皇后區法拉盛的瑪麗亞·法倫最近去雜貨店採購時，發生了一件非同尋常的事情。嘈雜的漢語交談聲中，突然冒出一個熟悉的音節。不是她聽懂了這個詞，她沒有聽懂，而是那個聲音很熟悉。這足以讓她驚訝地停在過道中間。
“這只是一陣嘈雜聲，”法倫女士說，“突然間，你認出了一些東西。”
因此，在一個下雨的周三晚上，她回到了皇后區政府低收入住宅項目(James A. Bland
Houses)的地下室，每周有二十多位成年人聚集在這裡學習普通話。 James A. Bland
Houses 所發起及組織的免費普通話課程吸引了各式各樣的學生。本週上課參加者包括一位 85 歲的二次大戰猷太人大屠殺的倖存者、一位在低收入住房項目中長大的黑人婦女和一位務實的匈牙利移民的女兒。
他們都有這兩個共同點：他們在成為亞洲人之前就住在法拉盛，以及他們認為是時候該適應了。
“這有點像，‘如果你不能打敗他們，就加入他們，’”法倫女士說，她的義大利裔美國親戚無法理解她為什麼不搬去新澤西。
隨著韓國和中國移民的到來，法拉盛為語言問題展開了激烈的戰鬥，法拉盛的白人人口已經減少。在 1980 年代後期，當市議員 Julia Harrison 提出要求企業必須張貼英文標誌的法案時，公眾似乎出現了分歧：一方面是亞洲新移民的浪潮；另一方面，長久以來居住這裏的白人民感到流離失所和被疏遠。
但是，由哈里森女士的繼任者:
劉醇義市議員 (John C. Liu) 安排的郭曼麗老師 (Man-Li Kuo
Lin)每週的普通話課為法拉盛提供了不同的視角。郭女士的學生在完成一天的護理人員或小學教師的工作後進入位於這棟政府低收入住宅項目大樓的地下室活動中心。他們在天花板標有“熱水-廚房/浴室”和“冷水供應”的各種管道下設置了椅子，老鼠會定期穿過這些管道。有些人小心翼翼地吃著紙袋中的晚餐。然後，他們以熙鬧的幽默感蹣跚地學習著普通話語法的基礎知識。
每週三，前排中央坐著一位頭皮有雀斑、白髮捲曲的老人。這是 85 歲的 Frank Sygal，一位退休的股票經紀人，他對普通話的熱情讓他的同學們感到驚訝和開心。
他在最近的一堂課上當晚的第一個問題是用他的家鄉波蘭口音提出的，緊隨其後的是幾十個後續問題：“你為什麼說‘膀胱’兩個字？我只有一個膀胱！為甚麼一個膀胱是兩個字？以色列國的中文是什麼？ “口腔外科醫生”是什麼？如果我去中國學醫，他們教我什麼？”
“在波蘭沒有人教你說中文，”西格爾先生說。
1942 年 8 月的一天，Sygal 先生在克拉科夫郊外長大，失去了父母，當時德國士兵圍捕猶太人，剝去他們的珠寶並用機關槍掃射他們。他的語言能力幫助他活了下來：他和俄羅斯士兵說俄語，對烏克蘭人說烏克蘭語，對德國人說德語，將希伯來語保留在私人空間。 1949 年他到達紐約後，還有兩種語言需要學習——英語和西班牙語。
現在，85 歲高齡的他開始了他最後一次偉大的語言努力。他的進步慢得令人抓狂。有一次，Sygal 問了“數十名”中國人，試圖翻譯“ka-ching”這個詞，他曾在《紐約郵報》的頭條上看到這個詞，並被認為是中文，但沒有結果。 .他希望自己能在 95 歲時用普通話進行對話。
“如果我屆時還在，”他說，“我就能說普通話了。”
坐他左邊是凱茜·斯騰格，她被大樓電梯裡的長期沉默驅策到來上這堂課。 1986 年，她在法拉盛的合作公寓中購買了一套公寓，此後 90% 的公寓都是於韓國和中國家庭。她與六樓的一位女士保持著無聲的聯繫，每次見面時都會擁抱她，還有一位深情地抓住她的手的老人。
“事實是，我無法與他們交談，”65 歲的斯滕格女士說，她的父母從匈牙利移民過來。
她的學習中文不是隨便決定的。她說，她的合作公寓董事會受到一群分離的亞洲租戶的威脅，他們正在挑戰關於轉租或分割單元的規定。樓下的一個鄰居在製作藥草，儘管在斯滕格女士抱怨後，這位女士增加了通風設備，但氣味有時還是會從她的暖氣連接器飄出。斯滕格女士說，最近當煤氣洩漏到走廊時，一位中國鄰居猶豫是否該撥打 911，因為她擔心會被收費。
儘管如此，這些變化都沒有讓她考慮離開法拉盛。
“我的很多朋友都感到憂慮，”她說。 “我的朋友都搬家了。”
普通話課程現在是為期 10 週課程的第二期課，是 73 歲的唐納德·亨頓 (Donald Henton)
的創意，他是一名退休的紐約市公車司機，自 1968 年以來一直住在法拉盛
去年，亨頓先生在一次社區會議上要求劉議員能贊助中文課程，因為這個社區大會大部分發言都是用普通話發表的。他覺得自己對這中文課程負有責任；週二晚上，他打電話給 40 個人，提醒他們過來。
亨頓先生曾有過失望的時刻，他原本以為這些課程會是擁擠到只能站著上課的。他在居住在這政府樓 Bland Houses 的鄰居中遇到了冷漠的反應，那裡 78% 的住戶是黑人或西班牙裔。一個陽光明媚的下午，在住宅項目的院子裡，全家從牙買加搬到紐約的羅伯特·溫斯頓（Robert Winston）大笑著回應學習普通話的想法。父母從波多黎各搬來的安妮塔加西亞幾乎吐了口水。
“我出生在這裡，”44 歲的加西亞女士說，“我為什麼要學習他們的語言？”
多年來，Bland Houses 的租戶一直擔心他們會在日益擁擠和繁榮的社區中被定價過高。溫斯頓先生說，從他和朋友們坐的板凳上，他既可以看到以亞洲人為主的運動場，也可以看到 Bland Houses 老後衛使用的籃球場。
長期以來一直支持劉議員的亨頓先生也同意，巨大的變化即將到來。現在是調整的時候了，他告訴 Bland Houses 的人們。但他說，他的鄰居中只有一個人參加了普通話課程的第二堂課，即使他在房客門下放了 400 張宣傳課程的傳單。
“你知道他們說什麼？他們不認為如此，”他說。
儘管如此，學生們還是一週又一週地返回上課。休息時間，郭女士帶領他們，一個笨拙、咯咯笑的芭蕾舞團，跳中國戲曲的舞蹈片段。這位活潑開朗的志願服務老師在課堂上講了一些小啟示：按照中國的禮儀，當你打噴嚏時，旁人會假裝他或她沒有聽到；中國人不會問或回答“你好嗎”的問題，因為只會聽到一些客套話；普通話中使用的四聲字音調——被稱為“高落”音—太難了，如果你說太多次太用力，“你會感到飢餓”。
第六節課後，學生們開始帶著進步的故事來上課：在地鐵上偷聽到的話，在標誌上認出的字符。在中國家庭隔壁住了一年半的多洛雷斯·莫里斯終於和她的“可愛鄰居”接觸了。
儘管存在語言障礙，但兩個家庭之間的感情卻越來越深。鄰居們幫忙拿出莫里斯一家的垃圾，以挽救她 75 歲的丈夫身體勞損，他們把女兒送到莫里斯家門口，端著熱氣騰騰的食物。 63 歲的莫里斯女士突然決定開始中文課。幾節課後，她“深深地吸了一口氣”，走到後院的鄰居那裡。
她緊張地重複著她學過的普通話短語:“我正在學習說中文”，並自豪地把她的課本拿給她的鄰居看，鄰居看起來很驚訝，消失到屋裡面。這位女士的女兒從屋裡出來，解釋說雖然普通話是法拉盛的主要語言，她的母親卻從未學會閱讀或說普通話。她是福建人，只會說福州話，那是福州市及臨近地區的一種方言。
莫里斯女士笑著講述了這個故事。她說她沒有立即開始學習福州話的計劃。
就目前而言，當鄰居帶來食物禮物時，“我會指著我的嘴，揉著肚子笑，”她說。 “我們可能會繼續這樣做。”
No comments:
Post a Comment