英国卫报：中国,我想回来!(11)（在线收听）

In her novel Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, Marilyn Chin, whose family moved to the US from Hong Kong, writes: "Deep in her heart, she knew that each step backward would only mean regret – the vector goes in only one direction, the homing geese must find their new nest, the 10,000 diasporas will never coagulate – there was no way back to the Middle Kingdom."

全家从香港迁往美国的陈美玲在她的小说《月饼泼妇的复仇》中写道：“在她的内心深处，她知道每后退一步只会意味着遗憾——方向只有一个，归巢的大雁必须找到自己的新巢，一万名散居海外的人永远不会聚集在一起——没有办法回到中央王国。”

Since March 2020, the pandemic has forced us into our homes. At the time of writing, more than 575,000 Americans have died of Covid-19. As borders have closed, I became more and more trapped in the fact of my Americanness. In the country where I was born, I watched years of inflammatory news headlines and anti-China rhetoric explode into anti-Asian violence. In the WeChat group, worried relatives talked of US Covid death tolls and stories of street attacks.

自2020年3月以来，新冠迫使我们回家。截至发稿时已有超过57.5万美国人死于新冠。随着边境的封锁，我越来越被自己的美国身份所困。在我出生的国家，我目睹了多年的煽动性新闻头条和反华言论演变成反亚洲暴力。在微信群里，忧心忡忡的亲属们谈到了美国新冠肺炎的死亡人数和街头袭击事件。

While Americans have been told to stay indoors, life in China has been near-normal for some time. In October, my oldest aunt, an insatiable adventurer, went on vacation to Everest. While she was there she piled a few stones on top of each other, a miniature Tibetan altar. She sent us a picture via WeChat. "So their souls may rest in peace," she said in the group. Another aunt replied: "You are at the spot closest to heaven, and closest to Mom and Dad."

虽然美国人被告知待在家里，但中国人的生活已经接近正常有一段时间了。10月，我的大姨，一个贪得无厌的冒险家，去珠穆朗玛峰度假。她在那里把几块石头堆叠在一起，形成了一个微型的西藏祭坛。她通过微信给我们发了一张照片。“这样他们的灵魂就可以安息了，”她在群里说。另一个阿姨回复说：“你在离天堂最近的地方，离爸爸妈妈最近的地方。”

Since my grandparents passed, their children have filled the WeChat group with messages to them. They address my grandparents' spirits directly, sometimes with heartfelt messages of longing, sometimes with regret, sometimes diary entries with news, complaints and gossip. For the parts where my Chinese wasn't up to it, there was in-app machine translation available, its innocent English, though fraught with errors, achieving a kind of poetry.

自从爷爷奶奶去世后，他们的孩子们就在微信群里填满了给他们的留言。他们直接说给爷爷奶奶的灵魂听，有的是发自内心的渴望，有的是遗憾，有的是写新闻、抱怨和八卦的日记。而对于那些看不懂的中文我可以用应用内的翻译软件翻译，虽然翻译出来的英文错误连连，但它很简单，就像一首诗。