[分享]Sixty-nine Cents

入得谷来,祸福自求。
Post Reply
Knowing
Posts: 34487
Joined: 2003-11-22 20:37

[分享]Sixty-nine Cents

Post by Knowing » 2007-09-06 11:32

ravaged wrote: 这期new yorker有一系列family dinners,很好看。最喜欢的是"sixty-nine cents" 和 "a man in the kitchen."

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/food/familydinners2007
嗯,我总算抽出空来看了会上周的New Yorker, 写新加坡街道小吃的那篇看的好谗,一边看一边在心里跟中文名字对号,都想去新加坡玩了,以前对这个干净整洁的花园城市国家可一点兴趣都没有。
sixty-nine cents 真好看,身为移民心有戚戚。"My parents didn’t spend money, because they lived with the idea that disaster was close at hand, that a liver-function test would come back marked with a doctor’s urgent scrawl, that they would be fired from their jobs because their English did not suffice. We were all representatives of a shadow society, cowering under a cloud of bad tidings that would never come."
I think that particular type of insecure will follow me the rest of my life, not that I am not at peace with it. Also I never really thought about it in relation to immigrant identity -- I always assumed "Oh, I am Chinese and the sense of insecure is in my genes."
Sixty-nine Cents
by Gary Shteyngart

When I was fourteen years old, I lost my Russian accent. I could, in theory, walk up to a girl and the words “Oh, hi there” would not sound like Okht Hyzer, possibly the name of a Turkish politician. There were three things I wanted to do in my new incarnation: go to Florida, where I understood that our nation’s best and brightest had built themselves a sandy, vice-filled paradise; have a girl, preferably native-born, tell me that she liked me in some way; and eat all my meals at McDonald’s. I did not have the pleasure of eating at McDonald’s often. My parents believed that going to restaurants and buying clothes not sold by weight on Orchard Street were things done only by the very wealthy or the very profligate, maybe those extravagant “welfare queens” we kept hearing about on television. Even my parents, however, as uncritically in love with America as only immigrants can be, could not resist the iconic pull of Florida, the call of the beach and the Mouse.

And so, in the midst of my Hebrew-school winter vacation, two Russian families crammed into a large used sedan and took I-95 down to the Sunshine State. The other family―three members in all―mirrored our own, except that their single offspring was a girl and they were, on the whole, more ample; by contrast, my entire family weighed three hundred pounds. There’s a picture of us beneath the monorail at EPCOT Center, each of us trying out a different smile to express the déjà-vu feeling of standing squarely in our new country’s greatest attraction, my own megawatt grin that of a turn-of-the-century Jewish peddler scampering after a potential sidewalk sale. The Disney tickets were a freebie, for which we had had to sit through a sales pitch for an Orlando time-share. “You’re from Moscow?” the time-share salesman asked, appraising the polyester cut of my father’s jib.

“Leningrad.”

“Let me guess: mechanical engineer?”

“Yes, mechanical engineer. . . . Eh, please Disney tickets now.”

The ride over the MacArthur Causeway to Miami Beach was my real naturalization ceremony. I wanted all of it―the palm trees, the yachts bobbing beside the hard-currency mansions, the concrete-and-glass condominiums preening at their own reflections in the azure pool water below, the implicit availability of relations with amoral women. I could see myself on a balcony eating a Big Mac, casually throwing fries over my shoulder into the sea-salted air. But I would have to wait. The hotel reserved by my parents’ friends featured army cots instead of beds and a half-foot-long cockroach evolved enough to wave what looked like a fist at us. Scared out of Miami Beach, we decamped for Fort Lauderdale, where a Yugoslav woman sheltered us in a faded motel, beach-adjacent and featuring free UHF reception. We always seemed to be at the margins of places: the driveway of the Fontainebleau Hilton, or the glassed-in elevator leading to a rooftop restaurant where we could momentarily peek over the “Please Wait to Be Seated” sign at the endless ocean below, the Old World we had left behind so far and yet deceptively near.

To my parents and their friends, the Yugoslav motel was an unquestioned paradise, a lucky coda to a set of difficult lives. My father lay magnificently beneath the sun in his red-and-black striped imitation Speedo while I stalked down the beach, past baking Midwestern girls. “Oh, hi there.” The words, perfectly American, not a birthright but an acquisition, perched between my lips, but to walk up to one of those girls and say something so casual required a deep rootedness to the hot sand beneath me, a historical presence thicker than the green card embossed with my thumbprint and freckled face. Back at the motel, the “Star Trek” reruns looped endlessly on Channel 73 or 31 or some other prime number, the washed-out Technicolor planets more familiar to me than our own.

On the drive back to New York, I plugged myself firmly into my Walkman, hoping to forget our vacation. Sometime after the palm trees ran out, somewhere in southern Georgia, we stopped at a McDonald’s. I could already taste it: The sixty-nine-cent hamburger. The ketchup, red and decadent, embedded with little flecks of grated onion. The uplift of the pickle slices; the obliterating rush of fresh Coca-Cola; the soda tingle at the back of the throat signifying that the act was complete. I ran into the meat-fumigated coldness of the magical place, the larger Russians following behind me, lugging something big and red. It was a cooler, packed, before we left the motel, by the other mother, the kindly, round-faced equivalent of my own mother. She had prepared a full Russian lunch for us. Soft-boiled eggs wrapped in tinfoil; vinigret, the Russian beet salad, overflowing a reused container of sour cream; cold chicken served between crisp white furrows of a bulka. “But it’s not allowed,” I pleaded. “We have to buy the food here.”

I felt coldness, not the air-conditioned chill of southern Georgia but the coldness of a body understanding the ramifications of its own demise, the pointlessness of it all. I sat down at a table as far away from my parents and their friends as possible. I watched the spectacle of the newly tanned resident aliens eating their ethnic meal―jowls working, jowls working―the soft-boiled eggs that quivered lightly as they were brought to the mouth; the girl, my coeval, sullen like me but with a hint of pliant equanimity; her parents, dishing out the chunks of beet with plastic spoons; my parents, getting up to use free McDonald’s napkins and straws while American motorists with their noisy towheaded children bought themselves the happiest of meals.

My parents laughed at my haughtiness. Sitting there hungry and all alone―what a strange man I was becoming! So unlike them. My pockets were filled with several quarters and dimes, enough for a hamburger and a small Coke. I considered the possibility of redeeming my own dignity, of leaving behind our beet-salad heritage. My parents didn’t spend money, because they lived with the idea that disaster was close at hand, that a liver-function test would come back marked with a doctor’s urgent scrawl, that they would be fired from their jobs because their English did not suffice. We were all representatives of a shadow society, cowering under a cloud of bad tidings that would never come. The silver coins stayed in my pocket, the anger burrowed and expanded into some future ulcer. I was my parents’ son.
有事找我请发站内消息

karen
Posts: 3020
Joined: 2003-11-22 18:51

Post by karen » 2007-09-06 11:46

纽约人每年的食物双刊都特好看。 这期的食物短文好像都是移民思乡的内容。小K你看那个两个俄国大妈在ESL课上为个俄国老头争风吃醋的短故事了吗? 真逗。 :-D
新加坡那篇里的美食家Seetoh, Bourdain在他书里被这人带去吃海鲜,吃得他大叫“这是我吃过最美味的海鲜!” 弄得我也想去新加坡了。

Knowing
Posts: 34487
Joined: 2003-11-22 20:37

Post by Knowing » 2007-09-06 13:23

还没看到那儿呢。这期那么厚。
SEETOH很牛啊,不知道他中文名字叫什么,我应该去弄本他的食经来看看。一开始我差点以为他是菜篮。
有事找我请发站内消息

ravaged
Posts: 494
Joined: 2003-12-06 0:16

Post by ravaged » 2007-09-06 13:58

yes, it rings true in so many ways. i also loved his description of consuming the scenery and the food. being uprooted is always a more thorough experience in hindsight; you adopt new smells, new taste, sensations and longings not completely expressible in your native tongue, and you don't quite know whether your new identity is a layer of superficial impressions easily shed and replaced or a seeping transformation, until you look back...
Now that happy moment between the time the lie is told and when it is found out.

Jun
Posts: 27816
Joined: 2003-12-15 11:43

Post by Jun » 2007-09-06 14:26

可是我也认识中国人新移民的就没有饥荒心理,不太在意存钱的,花钱颇大方的,很能享受的。

美国人里祖父母辈儿的,经历过大萧条时期的也很节省很怕家庭经济破产的。

Knowing
Posts: 34487
Joined: 2003-11-22 20:37

Post by Knowing » 2007-09-06 14:31

Jun wrote:可是我也认识中国人新移民的就没有饥荒心理,不太在意存钱的,花钱颇大方的,很能享受的。

美国人里祖父母辈儿的,经历过大萧条时期的也很节省很怕家庭经济破产的。
凡事都有例外,有例外正因为有常例。
饥荒心理不一定是单一因素导致的。经过战争时代和大萧条这种大事件,对个人肯定有巨大影响。
而且有时候不安全感藏的深。比如我就不是拼命存钱的类型。但是不安全感深深的埋在心里,到重大决定的时候还是会冒头的。当然饥荒心理也不是什么绝对好或者坏的事情。
有事找我请发站内消息

笑嘻嘻
Posts: 23477
Joined: 2003-11-22 18:00

Post by 笑嘻嘻 » 2007-09-06 14:38

我觉得好像年龄段分得挺明显。比我大的新移民重存钱的多,比我小的新移民重享乐的多。我这个年龄段的两个极端都有。最多的大概是既享乐又想省钱的。
云浆未饮结成冰

洛洛
Posts: 2564
Joined: 2003-12-05 12:35

Post by 洛洛 » 2007-09-06 15:12

我觉得正常的下馆子看电影买衣服出去旅游都不算是享乐主义,所以可以把我自己归在省钱/居安思危派。
混坛上另一颗新星
luoluo11.ycool.com

lvxiu
Posts: 170
Joined: 2006-07-16 19:27

Post by lvxiu » 2007-09-06 15:24

我是财迷派的,但是又喜欢玩乐。 :-(
左手有鸡右手鸭!

Post Reply