Chu remembers that during his first semester at Williams, his junior adviser would periodically take him aside. Was he feeling all right? Was something the matter? "I was acclimating myself to the place," he says. "I wasn't totally I happy, but I wasn't depressed." But then his new white friends made similar remarks. "They would say, 'Tan, it's kind of hard, sometimes, to tell what you're thinking.'"
朱還記得他在威廉姆斯學院的第一個學期的情景,低年級的輔導員會時不時地找他談話,問他感覺還好吧,有沒有一些不如意的事情。他說:“我正努力地適應這個地方,我沒有特別開心,但我也沒有感到沮喪郁悶。”但他的那些白人朋友也會對他說相同的話:“他們會說,‘丹,有時很難知道你在想什么。’”
Chu has a pleasant face, but it would not be wrong to characterize his demeanor as reserved. He speaks in a quiet, unemphatic voice. He doesn't move his features much. He attributes these traits to the atmosphere in his household. "When you grow up in a Chinese home," he says, "you don't talk. You shut up and listen to what your parents tell you to do."
朱長著一張討人喜歡的臉,但是用矜持來概括他的舉止性格是沒錯的。他說話時語調溫和,臉部動作很少。他把自己的這些特質都歸因于家庭環境。他說:“在中國家庭中成長的孩子,用不著說話,你只需閉上嘴按照父母吩咐的去做就可以了。”
At Stuyvesant, he had hung out in an exclusively Asian world in which friends were determined by which subway lines you traveled. But when he arrived at Williams, Chu slowly became aware of something strange: The white people in the New England wilderness walked around smiling at each other. "When you're in a place like that, everyone is friendly."
在史岱文森高中讀書期間,他課余時間只在一個由亞洲人組成的圈子里玩,這個圈子的朋友是按照乘哪條地鐵線來分類的。但是當他到威廉姆斯以后,朱慢慢意識到一些奇怪的事:這些新英格蘭的白人走在一起會互相微笑,態度友善。“當你處在這樣的環境中,你會感受到每個人都是友好的。”
He made a point to start smiling more. "It was something that I had to actively practice," he says. "Like, when you have a transaction at a business, you hand over the money—and then you smile." He says that he's made some progress but that there's still plenty of work that remains. "I'm trying to undo eighteen years of a Chinese upbringing. Four years at Williams helps, but only so much."
他決定自己也應該多微笑。他說:“這是我必須主動學習的事情,就像當你做交易的時候,你把錢遞過去——然后微笑一下。”他說自己已經有些進步,但是還有很多要改善的地方。他說:“我試著徹底擺脫18年來中國式的教育。威廉姆斯的這4年對此有幫助,但也僅僅止步于此。”
I guess what I would like is to become so good at something that my social deficiencies no longer matter, he tells me. Chu is a bright, diligent, impeccably credentialed young man born in the United States. He is optimistic about his ability to earn respect in the world. But he doubts he will ever feel the same comfort in his skin that he glimpsed in the people he met at Williams. That kind of comfort, he says—"I think it's generations away."
他告訴我說:“我認為我想做的就是可以很擅長一些事情,這樣社交的缺乏就不會影響到我。”朱是一個出生在美國的聰明、勤奮、資質無可挑剔的年輕人。他相信自己有能力贏得這個世界的尊重。但是他不太相信自己骨子里能感覺到在威廉姆斯學院碰到的人們的那種自在。他說:“這種感覺離我有好幾代遠。”
Researchers were talking about what some refer to as the "bamboo ceiling"—an invisible barrier that maintains a pyramidal racial structure throughout corporate America, with lots of Asians at junior levels, quite a few in middle management, and virtually none in the higher reaches of leadership.
研究人員談到了一些人提到的所謂“竹天花板”——美國企管中的不同種族占據各自的位置的結構如同金字塔,界限分明,很難打破,大部分亞洲人處于底端,極少數處于中間管理層,事實上還沒有人進入更高的領導層。