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.
毛渐渐看清了一个事实，那就是在公认的等级背后，还有另外一个等级，可以解释为什么别人能得到他从未得到过的那些东西一“一个高中生美少女”醒目地位列其中，而这个神秘的等级将会决定他的生活。“你会意识到自己在有些事情上确实懂得不多，比如追求女生，或仅仅按照特定路数行动。但这些事情对于某些人来说很自然，他们在郊区上学，父母都已融入当地文化。”我要求他举个具体的例子，于是他提起曾在圣诞节后去自己白人女友家造访的经历。“她们全家人围坐在一起做菜，玩拼字游戏。”这一幕平常的美国郊区人家生活场景久久萦绕在毛的脑际：至少，就是在这里，所有“关于社会规范和礼仪”的那些只可意会无法言传的知识被代代相传。而这些东西没有哪个补习班会教给你。
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.
在收到毛的邮件之前，我自己就曾觉得，我最多不过是被亚裔疏离感的最后余烬灼伤一点点而已。的确，如果考虑到亚洲艺术家和时装设计师以及等等此类你能在纽约找到的成功亚裔人士令人难以置信的受追捧程度，似乎这种感觉注定将逐渐消失殆尽。然而这种疏离感现在却出现在一个比我小十几岁的纽约人身上。或许说有一部分亚裔美国人已经没有了疏离感，这确实可能是真的，可是在很大一部分亚裔身上，疏离感仍然存在并鲜活如昔。
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.
在我们见面几周后，毛介绍我认识了他同样来自史岱文森的好友丹尼尔·朱。朱去年从威廉姆斯学院毕业，在那里他的诗作曾获得过一项创意写作奖，贏得了18000美元的奖金。他花了一部分奖金到中国旅行，但现在已经回到美国，和父母一起住在布鲁克林唐人街。
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