Mao was becoming clued in to the fact that there was another hierarchy behind the official one that explained why others were getting what he never had—a high-school sweetheart" figured prominently on this list—and that this mysterious hierarchy was going to determine what happened to him in life. "You realize there are things you really don't understand about courtship or just acting in a certain way. Things that somehow come naturally to people who go to school in the suburbs and have parents who are culturally assimilated." I pressed him for specifics, and he mentioned that he had visited his white girlfriend's parents' house the past Christmas, where the family had "sat around cooking together and playing Scrabble." This ordinary vision of suburban American domesticity lingered with Mao: Here, at last, was the setting in which all that implicit knowledge "about social norms and propriety" had been transmitted. There was no cram school that taught these lessons.
毛漸漸看清了一個事實，那就是在公認的等級背后，還有另外一個等級，可以解釋為什么別人能得到他從未得到過的那些東西一“一個高中生美少女”醒目地位列其中，而這個神秘的等級將會決定他的生活。“你會意識到自己在有些事情上確實懂得不多，比如追求女生，或僅僅按照特定路數行動。但這些事情對于某些人來說很自然，他們在郊區上學，父母都已融入當地文化。”我要求他舉個具體的例子，于是他提起曾在圣誕節后去自己白人女友家造訪的經歷。“她們全家人圍坐在一起做菜，玩拼字游戲。”這一幕平常的美國郊區人家生活場景久久縈繞在毛的腦際：至少，就是在這里，所有“關于社會規范和禮儀”的那些只可意會無法言傳的知識被代代相傳。而這些東西沒有哪個補習班會教給你。
Before having heard from Mao, I had considered myself at worst lightly singed by the last embers of Asian alienation. Indeed, given all the incredibly hip Asian artists and fashion designers and so forth you can find in New York, it seemed that this feeling was destined to die out altogether. And yet here it was in a New Yorker more than a dozen years my junior. While it may be true that sections of the Asian American world are devoid of alienation, there are large swaths where it is as alive as it has ever been.
在收到毛的郵件之前，我自己就曾覺得，我最多不過是被亞裔疏離感的最后余燼灼傷一點點而已。的確，如果考慮到亞洲藝術家和時裝設計師以及等等此類你能在紐約找到的成功亞裔人士令人難以置信的受追捧程度，似乎這種感覺注定將逐漸消失殆盡。然而這種疏離感現在卻出現在一個比我小十幾歲的紐約人身上。或許說有一部分亞裔美國人已經沒有了疏離感，這確實可能是真的，可是在很大一部分亞裔身上，疏離感仍然存在并鮮活如昔。
A few weeks after we meet, Mao puts me in touch with Daniel Cliu, his close friend from Stuyvesant. Chu graduated from Williams College last year, having won a creative writing award for his poetry. He had spent a portion of the $18,000 prize on a trip to China, but now he is back living with his parents in Brooklyn Chinatown.
在我們見面幾周后，毛介紹我認識了他同樣來自史岱文森的好友丹尼爾·朱。朱去年從威廉姆斯學院畢業，在那里他的詩作曾獲得過一項創意寫作獎，贏得了18000美元的獎金。他花了一部分獎金到中國旅行，但現在已經回到美國，和父母一起住在布魯克林唐人街。
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