“我从未告诉你的秘密”——论《无声告白》中的种族歧视和性别歧视

‘Secrets I Have Never Told You': On Racial and Gender Discrimination in Everything I Never Told You

华裔作家伍绮诗的首部长篇小说《无声告白》(2014)以温婉细腻的文风将种族、婚姻、家庭以及个人成长等"我从未告诉你的秘密"设置在同一个家庭的屋檐下,采用反复迂回的叙事结构,讲述华洋混血的詹姆斯·李一家的悲剧故事。"种族偏见"带给父亲詹姆斯的是痛楚记忆,家庭的羁绊使母亲玛丽琳的梦想零落成泥,来自父母错位偏执的爱把莉迪亚拖向了湖底。莉迪亚的死使李家被淹没的历史浮现出来,种族歧视、性别歧视、爱与期待的"绑架",这些埋藏在内心深处从未对外人甚至对家人讲过的苦衷得以一一倾述,呈现给读者的是振聋发聩的无声,生死悲凄的告白。

In a gentle and subtle style that places under the same roof of a family the‘secrets that I have never told you’about race,marriage,family and personal growth,Everything I Never Told You(2014),the first novel by Celeste Ng,a Chinese-American writer,adopts a repetitive and circuitous narrative structure in telling the tragic story of the family of James Lee,of mixed Chinese blood,in which‘racial discrimination’leaves James,his father,with only painful memory,family restrictions reduce Marilyn,his mother’s dream to dust,and the misplaced,paranoid love of the parents ends up pulling Lydia down to the bottom of the lake.It is Lydia’s death that causes the submerged history of the Lee family to emerge so that racial and gender discrimination,and the‘kidnapping’of love and expectation,all the unutterable that lie buried deep within,not even revealed to the family members,are poured out in a representation that shows the readers silent but eye-opening confessions of life and death.