(单词翻译:单击)
中英文本
My grandparents, by whom I mean my yeye (yeye: my father's father) and nainai (nainai: my father's mother) lived in Hefei, in Anhui province. Hefei is a sleepy, midsize city, overshadowed by Nanjing to the east and Wuhan to the west. For tourists, it's most likely a stopover on the way to the famous Yellow Mountain to the south. Growing up, my brother and I had regularly spent long summer holidays at my grandparents' apartment there, sharing beds with aunts and cousins, splaying out in front of the air conditioners, walking to the internet cafe to play Starcraft and virtual pet games, getting spiced beef jerky and Calbee shrimp chips from the nearby shop and watching soapy Chinese dramas in the evening. To get to the apartment, we buzzed in through a heavy front door and stomped up three floors of cold concrete steps. Outside the building, there was a mulberry tree; occasionally, my grandmother would use the leaves to raise silkworms.
我的祖父母,也就是我的爷爷(我父亲的父亲)和我的奶奶(我父亲的母亲)住在安徽合肥
The rest of the time, we were in California. Since I wasn't physically with my family in China, WeChat, the ubiquitous social media app for Chinese speakers, became the portal through which I could peer to the other side. Our WeChat group is a repository of baby photos, funny videos and chatter between all the relatives. When I scroll far up, there are holiday photos, old conversations between my aunts about my grandparents' health, small squabbles and gossip about their daily lives.
其余的时间我们都在加州
"At six o'clock this morning, the old princess said she was hungry, and she got up to eat," they would write of my grandmother. "Good thing the caretaker knows her rules by now."
“今天早上六点钟老夫人就喊饿了,立马就要起来吃饭,”他们在说我的祖母
"No gas at my house this morning, but luckily I got a dinner invitation from my friend. I brought over strawberries and pickled clover from Chongming Island," one aunt wrote, sending pictures.
“今天早上我家没油了,不过很幸运,朋友让我去他家吃晚饭
"I like Song Joong-Ki," a female cousin wrote of a famous pretty boy actor during a conversation about Korean celebrities, and another aunt, 30 years her senior, gravely affirmed, "I also like Song Joong-Ki", to my cousin's amusement.
“我喜欢宋仲基,”一位堂姐在谈论韩国名人时这样说道,另一位年长她30岁的阿姨一脸严肃地说道,“我也喜欢宋仲基
My grandmother, who could read WeChat but never figured out how to type, occasionally entered nonsense letters as she scrolled through. My father would always reply, "Poor Mama. What are you trying to say?"
我的祖母能看懂微信上的聊天,但不太会打字,她在刷屏幕时偶尔会输入一些毫无意义的字母
At my grandmother and my grandfather's funerals, WeChat was the technology that let us be present at those ceremonies in real time. But it is an imperfect portal: one cannot truly be back. We couldn't put flowers on the bodies; we couldn't, as our relatives in China did, go back to the apartment afterwards and lay oranges by my grandparents' photos. How alienating it was, to be sending our spirits through our screens – rectangles the size of our hands. My grandparents' deaths still do not feel real. Not really. They were already so far away. My grandmother is still listed in my WeChat contacts, a name that, when I scroll through my phone, makes me startle.
在祖母和祖父的葬礼上,微信是一项能够让我们实时出席那些仪式的技术
词语解释
1.internet cafe 网吧
Young men pack the local Internet cafe to play videogames.
当地的网吧里满是玩电子游戏的年轻人
2.ubiquitous 普遍存在的
Now advertisements are ubiquitous.
现在广告无处不在
译文由可可原创,仅供学习交流使用,未经许可请勿转载 。