☆父爱从未缺席

Turns Out All the Advice My Father Ever Gave Me Was Right 爸爸，您总是对的

◎ By Boris Fishman 译 / Norman Xin

“不听老人言，吃亏在眼前。”这句俗语不知被“老人”们念叨了多少次，而且往往是在我们因为没听“老人言”而“吃亏”的时候。尽管如此，年少轻狂的我们往往还是会一意孤行，直到有一天蓦然回首，才发现原来那些忠言蕴藏的都是生活的智慧。

Some years ago, having just failed out of an eight-year relationship, I was informed by my father that the woman I’d end up with would “wear a woven hat, and she would have a basket of fresh eggs in her hands.”

The woman I had until recently dated, and was still massively in love with, could not have resembled this profile less, so, even though my father is not a venturesome person and is not given to oratorical flights of fancy, I nodded indulgently and ignored him. He had been getting it wrong about me for years. This didn’t discourage him, or my mother, from regularly offering insight and guidance—my job was to abide it without erupting. I had learned to do that only recently, and was quite proud of my adult self-restraint.

I’m still unmarried, but several hundred dates—and several summers working on a farm—later, it appears more and more likely that he will turn out to be right. I’ll never look indifferently at a woman in heels, but I have become someone who wants quiet nights at home with a book in my hand and a down-to-earth partner by my side.

These days, I’m on a steady diet of humble pie where my father’s concerned. When I was 17 and brawling with a friend, he told me to let it go and drift away instead of having it out. This was weak-kneed, bourgeois pragmatism, as far as I was concerned—if I were brave, then it would have to be brutal, relationship-imploding truth. Almost 20 years later, I see that he was right, at least when it comes to casual friends—but then how would I have passed the years without all that drama? He was right when he said not to waste time going back to Russia; when he said that kindness matters above all in a person; when he warned me not to spend generosity and trust as cheaply as I was doing because I wanted to be an American believer instead of a Soviet cynic like him; when he … it’s a long list.

I have spent 20 years disagreeing with this man whom I physically resemble so closely that cashiers never have to wonder if we’re together in a checkout line, but with whom my points of emotional convergence were—I thought—heartbreakingly few. But the path I was traveling away from my father turns out to have been a circle.

“You’re depressed?” my father said to me during a typically woebegone late-20s stretch. “Why don’t you tear yourself a new asshole doing some labor, and then see how depressed you are?” At the time, I dismissed him as a medieval brute. But these days, after two days a week prepping in a New York City restaurant kitchen, and another two hoeing and haying on a farm in the Hudson Valley, if my heart is not quite solved of itself, it is at least too tired to worry.

All these years, I thought we couldn’t understand each other because my parents had been reared in the Soviet Union, and I mostly here. But when their advice began to make sense, I understood belatedly that our misunderstandings had simply to do with them being parents and me being their child. Some things really are universal.

My father’s advice du jour is about marriage. Very much in keeping with the advice he gave me 20 years ago, he insists that my partner should be, above all, kind. The rest will follow. I desperately want to find a way to feel this way, too, without reservations. Still, it seems too simplistic. I was once the kind of man whose eyes were closed to everything else by physical attraction. Not any more. These days, I find kindness sexy. And yet, I can’t go ahead if there isn’t also passion. But doesn’t the evidence suggest that here, too, my father may be right about appearance, and that intellectual spark, not being so important? And that I am about to waste God knows how many more years figuring out a way to believe it? I just don’t know.

For me, being older means knowing more, but that includes knowing more about how little I know. “I think there’s something about the liminal space of one’s 30s,” my ex-girlfriend, now a dear friend, said, “when we’ve become experts in some things, but not others. It’s almost less annoying to just be 22 and not know anything about anything.” (There is that great line by Rilke: “Beware, o wanderer, the road is walking, too.”) So, knowing now all that I don’t, why can’t I heed what seems more and more like wise advice from my parents? Is this a personal deviancy, a compensatory self-assertiveness for having grown up in a stifling political environment, and in a family that valued conformism? A deviancy that perhaps served my creativity, if not my well-being? (“I am glad that I paid so little attention to good advice; had I abided by it I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes.” —Edna St. Vincent Millay) Or are we all simply incapable of taking advice in the emotional realm if our intuition says otherwise? (“You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.” —John Steinbeck)

I called my mother for advice on taking advice. She was most tickled to hear that I was thinking about all the good advice she and my father gave me and I failed to take. “I’ve heard that there are children out there who listen to what their parents tell them,” she said, stifling a laugh. “But I’ve only heard.” Then I asked her whether there was someone in her life who consistently gave her good guidance, and whether she followed it regardless of her own intuition. “There is,” she said. “And unfortunately not.”

The wrinkle with us is that I’ve been advising my parents as long as they’ve been advising me. I was 9 when we immigrated to America; I learned English the fastest, and quickly became their ambassador to an unfamiliar language and culture—in many ways, the parent to the parents. At a time when most kids are studying their first multiplication tables, I was being asked by my parents how best to approach a city agency that dispensed elder care. And how to deal with a co-worker who liked making ostensibly innocent fun of my mother’s accent. And how to be less afraid.

The more personal the advice—the more it had to do with identity—the less likely they were to take it. In an intimate variation on the classic Soviet saying “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us,” my parents and I pretend to take each other’s advice and keep asking for more, even as time tends to prove the other side correct. How to explain this ageless, self-thwarting stubbornness? Family, I guess.

几年前，我刚刚结束一场持续八年的恋情，父亲就对我说，与我厮守终身的女人会“戴着毛线帽，手里还会拎着一篮子新鲜鸡蛋”。

这个形象和我此前一直约会、那时仍然深爱着的那个女人毫无相似之处。因此，尽管我父亲不是一个好冒险的人，也不是一个喜欢夸夸其谈、沉湎于幻想的人，但我还是在大度地点了点头之后直接无视他了。多少年来，在跟我有关的问题上，他屡屡出错。但这并不妨碍他和我母亲经常给我提出见解和指导—我要做的就是洗耳恭听，隐忍不发。那时我才刚刚学会这样做，对于自己作为一个成年人所具有的自我约束力也颇为自豪。

我现在仍然是孑然一身，但在经过了几百次的约会—以及在农场上工作了几个夏天—之后，父亲的话似乎越来越有可能应验了。我永远无法心如止水地看着一个穿高跟鞋的女人，但我却好像变了一个人，想要在家里捧着一本书，身边坐着朴实本分的另一半，度过一个又一个寂静的夜晚。

如今，在父亲面前，我一直是认错赔不是的角色。17岁的时候，我和朋友发生争吵，父亲告诉我就这样算了，让一切都过去，不要争个鱼死网破。在当时的我看来，这是懦弱的资产阶级实用主义行为—如果我勇敢，那就要争取真相，尽管这样会不留情面，并使朋友关系破裂。将近二十年之后，我发现他是对的，至少在对待普通朋友上是对的—但话又说回来，如果没有所有那些戏剧性的经历，我这么多年的日子又该怎么过呢？他的话都是对的：他说不要浪费时间回俄罗斯；他说一个人最重要的是善良；他告诫我，不要因为我想成为美国式的信仰者而不是像他那样的苏联式的愤世嫉俗者，就要像现在这样轻易地挥霍慷慨与信赖；他说……实在不胜枚举。

20年来，我一直和他意见相左。从身体特征上来说，我和他十分相似，以至于在排队结账时，收银员从来不用怀疑我们俩是一起的。但从情感上来说，我曾经认为我们的交集少得令人痛心。然而我却发现，我走过的要远离父亲的路，绕了一圈其实又回到了起点。

“你觉得郁闷？”在我快30岁时典型的一段忧郁日子里，父亲问我，“为什么不找点活干，把自己累个半死，然后再看看你还郁闷不？”当时，我只当他是个中世纪的野蛮人，无视他的话。但如今，我每周有两天要在纽约市一家餐馆的厨房里做学徒工，还有两天要在哈德逊河谷的一家农场里锄地、割草。忙碌之后，如果说我的心情还没有完全自动好起来，至少也是累得没工夫忧虑了。

这些年来，我一直认为我们无法彼此理解的原因是我的父母在前苏联长大，而我主要是在美国长大。然而，当他们的建议开始合乎情理，我才后知后觉地明白，我们的误会不为别的，只是因为他们是父母，而我是孩子。有些事的确是放之四海而皆准的。

父亲最近热衷于提出婚姻方面的建议。跟他20年前给我的建议如出一辙，他还是坚持说我的伴侣首先应该善良。有了善良，别的也都会有。我也非常想找到什么办法让自己毫无保留地认同这一观点。不过，这似乎过于简单化了。曾经，我是那种只注重外表的吸引力而对其他一切都视而不见的人。但现在不是了。如今，我发现善良是性感的。然而，如果不是同时具有激情，我还是走不下去。但这是否证明，父亲认为外表和智慧的火花并不是那么重要，这一点或许也是对的？也证明了我还要再浪费不知多少年的时间才能有办法相信这一点？我真的不知道。

对我来说，年龄越大就意味着知道得越多，但这也意味着我也越来越多地了解自己的无知。“关于30多岁的人处于阈限空间这种说法，我觉得还是有道理的，”我的前女友、现在的好朋友这样说过，“在这个年龄，我们在某些方面成为专家，在其他方面却不是。22岁对什么都很无知的时候，几乎也没有那么多烦恼。”(里尔克诗里那句话说得好：“流浪的人儿，当心，路也是会行走的。”)因此，现在既然知道了我的无知，为什么我就不能听一听父母那似乎越来越明智的建议呢？对于一个在沉闷的政治环境和重视顺从的家庭环境里长大的人来说，这算不算是一种个体的变异，一种补偿性的自我主张呢？这种变异就算不是有利于个人的福祉，或许有利于我的创造力？(“很高兴我几乎没有理会什么忠告；如果我听从了忠告，或许就不会犯下某些对我很有价值的错误了。”—埃德娜·圣文森特·米莱)又或者，如果我们从直觉上排斥某些建议，是不是就无法从情感上接受呢？(“你知道忠告是怎么回事。只有在它符合你本来也想做的事时，你才会愿意接受它。”—约翰·斯坦贝克)

我给母亲打电话，想让她在如何接受建议的问题上给我些建议。听说我在思考她和父亲曾给我提出而我未能接受的建议，她被逗乐了。“我听说有些孩子还是很听父母的话的，”她说，强忍住不让自己笑出声来，“不过只是听说。”接着我问她，在她一生中有没有人一直给她好的引导，她是否不管自己的直觉就言听计从。“有这样的人，”她说，“不幸的是，我没有听从。”

我们家的问题在于，在父母给我忠告的同时，我也一直在给他们提供建议。在我们移居美国时，我才九岁。我英语学得最快，很快便成了他们与一种陌生的语言和文化之间的使者—在许多方面，我成了父母的父母。当大多数孩子刚开始学习乘法表时，父母就已经在问我怎样才能更好地和负责养老的市政部门打交道，以及如何应对一个喜欢拿母亲的口音开玩笑的同事(尽管这些玩笑表面上并无恶意)，还有怎样减少恐惧感。

这些建议越是涉及个人—越是和身份有关—就越难被他们接受。前苏联有句老话：“我们假装工作，他们假装给我们工资。”把这句话稍作修改，就是父母和我都假装接受彼此的建议，也会寻求更多的建议，尽管时间往往证明对方才是正确的。该如何解释这种亘古不变的自我挫败的偏执呢？我猜或许因为我们是一家人吧。