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I landed in Shanghai and took a high-speed train to Hefei. Before I left, I read an article on how the US-China trade war was affecting the price of soy. When I arrived in Hefei it was evening, and I was just in time for my nainai's 90th birthday dinner. I walked out of the enormous, near-empty train station to meet my uncle's car, and we drove to a family restaurant on a quiet street. When we brought out the cake, nainai's great-granddaughter, my little niece, offered her a plastic yellow crown with lights and helped her blow out the candles.
我在上海下得飛機，然后坐高鐵去合肥。在我離開之前，我讀了一篇關于中美貿易戰如何影響大豆價格的文章。我到合肥的時候已經是晚上了，正好趕上奶奶的90歲生日晚宴。我走出巨大的、幾乎空無一人的火車站去尋找我叔叔的車，我們開車來到一條安靜的街道上的一家家庭餐廳。當我們拿出蛋糕時，奶奶的曾孫女，也就是我的小侄女，給了她一個帶著燈的黃色的塑料皇冠，并幫她吹滅了蠟燭。
My grandfather wasn't present at the dinner table. Before I arrived, I had harboured some hope – not knowing the full extent of his dementia – that I could talk to him still, excavate his memories. But by the time I arrived, it was already too late. Mentally, he was long gone.
我的祖父不在餐桌上。來之前我還曾抱著一絲希望——不知道他癡呆的程度有多嚴重——希望我還能和他說說話，挖掘出他的記憶。但等我回去時已經太晚了，他早已經神志不清了。
His name was Qian Feng, Qian as in "money", the family name I have inherited. He was born in 1925, in the year of the bull, on an impoverished farm in Jiangsu where they wove cotton and herded cows. He had six siblings and no formal education. Because he was always hungry, at the age of 15 he ran away to join the Chinese Communist party army, where he knew he'd be fed. He fought against the Japanese in the second world war, and was deaf in one ear because of a war wound. In the army, he learned how to write. From his illiterate, uneducated background, he became a professional writer, producing novels, stories and essays. This, a classic story of proletariat triumph, is one of the great origin myths of my family.
他的名字叫錢峰，“錢”就是英語里的“錢”，我繼承了這個姓。他于1925年(牛年)出生在江蘇的一個貧困的農場里，他們在那里織棉花、放牛。他有六個兄弟姐妹，都沒有接受過正規教育。因為總是挨餓，他在15歲時便跑去參加了中國共產黨的軍隊，他知道自己在那里能有口吃的。第二次世界大戰時他還曾和日本人作過戰，并且因為戰傷而導致一只耳朵聾了。他在軍隊里學會了如何寫作，從一個沒有受過教育的文盲變成了一名職業作家，創作小說、故事和散文。這是一個關于無產階級勝利的經典故事，也是我們家族最偉大的起源神話之一。
With my grandmother, he had five children. The first was born in 1953. Three of their children harboured ambitions to become writers; instead, those three went on to study medicine. Two, including my father, emigrated to the US. And then there was me, his granddaughter, born in a suburb of Los Angeles in a democratic country, in a completely different place and time, in the affluent, bourgeois west – and I wanted to be a writer as well.
他和祖母有五個孩子。第一個孩子出生在1953年。他們有三個孩子都有成為作家的抱負，然而這三個孩子并沒有走上作家的道路，而是學起了醫。另外包括我父親在內的兩人移民到了美國。然后是我，他的孫女，出生在洛杉磯郊區的一個民主國家，在一個完全不同的地方和時代，在富裕的、資產階級的西方——而我，也想成為一名作家。
