评论
打印
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.'"
朱还记得他在威廉姆斯学院的第一个学期的情景，低年级的辅导员会时不时地找他谈话，问他感觉还好吧，有没有一些不如意的事情。他说：“我正努力地适应这个地方，我没有特别开心，但我也没有感到沮丧郁闷。”但他的那些白人朋友也会对他说相同的话：“他们会说，‘丹，有时很难知道你在想什么。’”
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."
朱长着一张讨人喜欢的脸，但是用矜持来概括他的举止性格是没错的。他说话时语调温和，脸部动作很少。他把自己的这些特质都归因于家庭环境。他说：“在中国家庭中成长的孩子，用不着说话，你只需闭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."
在史岱文森高中读书期间，他课余时间只在一个由亚洲人组成的圈子里玩，这个圈子的朋友是按照乘哪条地铁线来分类的。但是当他到威廉姆斯以后，朱慢慢意识到一些奇怪的事：这些新英格兰的白人走在一起会互相微笑，态度友善。“当你处在这样的环境中，你会感受到每个人都是友好的。”
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."
他决定自己也应该多微笑。他说：“这是我必须主动学习的事情，就像当你做交易的时候，你把钱递过去——然后微笑一下。”他说自己已经有些进步，但是还有很多要改善的地方。他说：“我试着彻底摆脱18年来中国式的教育。威廉姆斯的这4年对此有帮助，但也仅仅止步于此。”
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."
他告诉我说：“我认为我想做的就是可以很擅长一些事情，这样社交的缺乏就不会影响到我。”朱是一个出生在美国的聪明、勤奋、资质无可挑剔的年轻人。他相信自己有能力赢得这个世界的尊重。但是他不太相信自己骨子里能感觉到在威廉姆斯学院碰到的人们的那种自在。他说：“这种感觉离我有好几代远。”
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.
研究人员谈到了一些人提到的所谓“竹天花板”——美国企管中的不同种族占据各自的位置的结构如同金字塔，界限分明，很难打破，大部分亚洲人处于底端，极少数处于中间管理层，事实上还没有人进入更高的领导层。
