揚希爾‧康 (YOUNGHILL KANG)

  一個朝鮮人發現紐約 A Korean Discovers New York

    早先我一貫夢見紐約──不是巴黎，不是倫敦，不是柏林，不是慕尼黑，不是維也納，也不是被歲月掩埋的羅馬。

    揚希爾‧康(1903－1972)生於朝鮮，l 921年移居美國，他是位教師、翻譯家、小說家和回憶錄作者。通過自己的創作，康試圖向美國讀者介紹亞洲。他出版的第一部書是《東方詩篇譯本》(1921)。他一共寫了好幾本書，包括自傳性的《茅草屋頂》 (1931)和《從東到西》(1937)。以下這篇典型的關於移民經歷的敘述便是摘錄自《從東到西》一書。

    我從具有千年歷史、以詩人和學者眾多聞名於世的城牆 環繞的古城 ──漢城，來到紐約。我不是直接到達的，但可以說幾乎是如此。駛自遠東的一艘大輪船把我載到加拿大溫哥華，然後我在美洲大陸作橫跨三千英里的旅行，其路程之遙超過從橫濱到溫哥華的一半距離。在哈利法克斯我登上另一艘班船駛向紐約。到了紐約我才感覺到自己注定要真正「下船」了。我的新生活的開端必須在這裏奠定基礎。在朝鮮，「下船」是個習語，意為「出生」，因為「子宮」和「船」為同一個詞。有個故事講述一位朝鮮幽默家身無分文卻需要過河。船夫將他擺渡到對岸後，向他要船錢。可是這位幽默大師對剛下船的船夫說：「你不會向自己的兄弟要船錢，是嗎?我們倆從同一船上下來。」於是他就不用付船錢了。對於在美國的白皮膚多數人種中作一次跨行星的旅行，我的唯一懇求與那位幽默家的滑稽說法一樣。當我進入一個對月亮陰暗的部分不屑一顧、講求實際的國家時，僅是個兩手空空的無名小卒。我恰巧是在反東方移民法通過前夕到達美國的。 

    然而這些年來，紐約，這個建立在岩石上但根基不牢，緊張不安，熙熙攘攘，多彩如夢的神奇城市卻成了我的巨型機械孵卵器。 

    早先我一貫夢見紐約──不是巴黎，不是倫敦，不是柏林，不是慕尼黑，不是維也納，也不是被歲月掩埋的羅馬。那時我才十八歲，青春年少，美國對我來說僅是個名稱，我竟天真地逕自作出反應，這確實令人不可思議……猶如固執的飛蛾遵照某種深奧莫測的法則確定自己的飛行方向。但是我對自己說：「我既不要夢想也不要詩意，更不要一切傳統，決不要滿月。」即使在分崩離析的狀態，朝鮮也擁有這些，而等待著她的是死亡。我渴望快捷、不受阻礙的行動、流動性以及難以名狀的新奇。由行動產生夢，產生詩。唯靜止的夢才是毫無用處的荒原。所以我懷著對新月的崇拜來到這裏，那新月不是金秋時節的圓月，而是冬臨大地時的一彎弦月。 

    「終於到紐約啦!」我聽見四周的旅客們說。而這一資訊是不需要通報的。這城市屹立在神秘的白色和紫紅色中，屹立在白色的朦朧中，宛如昨夜的夢，新鮮、新奇、難以置信……但它確實屹立在揚揚自得的物質主義的高傲和自豪中。這是些年輕、苗條、端莊、一千層樓(或許只是對我來說顯得這麼高，因為我來自一個國家，那兒的建築從不敢向地球挑戰)的怪物，一個個都像通天塔，高塔林立．參差不齊地插入雲天，不啻通天塔之城。這些女性巨人，命運女神，密密麻麻地站立在美國的邊緣。她們不是為一位帝王、一個幽靈或任何人的宗教而建造的，而是由幾個生硬、冰冷、神奇的單詞──機會、事業、繁榮、成功──物化而成，而這些商業辭彙來源於一個自然資源豐富的國家世界規模的貿易活動。這些白色的建築物聳立在岩石上。她們的裙子不沾一點兒泥土。她們就如智慧女神一般被構思出來，躍入視野；她們藐視地球。沒有什麼比美國更稱得上是機器時代的豐碑了。

    我來到這紐約，沒有任何地方能比它離我的家鄉更遠。我們的住房低矮，飽經風霜，長滿苔蘚，憎惡毫無生氣的線條──確定、有限、冷漠之物，喜愛迴旋曲和向上的筆觸。屋頂像船似地翹起，總忘不了興風作浪的自然力。我的家鄉恰好距離這裏半球之遙，再往前走便意味著縮短而不是加大距離。我那茅屋錯落，群山懷抱的小村離這巨大的叛逆之城紐約是何等遙遠啊! 而紐約的反叛精神激動著我的心。它的野性將大塊混凝土層層壘起，在最後一刻彷彿躊躇再三才加蓋，頂部皆似精巧的冰山；它的揮霍未經祈禱便為獲取光明劫掠煤礦和瀑布，用鑽石般璀璨奪目的無數電燈裝飾這座超脫自然的偉大城市──這一切令我，一個亞洲人心醉神迷。在紐約身上我看到的不是彌爾頓筆下的撒旦，而是布萊克的撒旦。

From an old walled Korean city some thousand years old－Seoul－ famous for poets and scholars, to New York. I did not come directly. But almost. A large steamer from the Orient landed me in Vancouver, Canada, and I travelled over three thousand miles across the American continent, a journey more than half as far as from Yokohama to Vancouver. At Halifax, straightway I took another liner. And this time for New York. It was in New York I felt I was destined really "to come off from the boat." The beginning of my new existence must be founded here. In Korea to come out from the boat is an idiom meaning to be born, as the word "pai" for "womb" is the same as "pai" for "boat"; and there is the story of a Korean humorist who had no money, but who needed to get across a river. On landing him on the other side, the ferryman asked for his money. But the Korean humorist said to the ferryman who too had just stepped out, "You wouldn't charge your brother, would you? We both came from the same boat." And so he travelled free. My only plea for a planet-ride among the white-skinned majority of this New World is the same facetious argument. I brought little money, and no prestige, as I entered a practical country with small respect for the dark side of the moon. I got in just in time before the law against Oriental immigration was passed.

      But New York, that magic city on rock yet ungrounded, nervous, flowing, million-hued as a dream, became, throughout the years I am recording, the vast mechanical incubator of me.

      It was always of New York I dreamed－ not Paris nor London nor Berlin nor Munich nor Vienna nor age-buried Rome. I was eighteen, green with youth, and there was some of the mystery of nature in my simple immediate response to what was for me just a name . . . like the dogged moth that directs its flight by some unfathomable law. But I said to myself, "I want neither dreams nor poetry, least of all tradition, never the ftill moon." Korea even in her shattered state had these. And beyond them stood waiting－ death. I craved swiftness, unimpeded action, fluidity, and amorphous New. Out of action rises the dream, rises the poetry. Dream without motion is the only wasteland that can sustain nothing. So I came adoring the crescent, not the full harvest moon, with winter over the horizon and its waning to a husk.

      "New York at last!" I heard from the passengers around me. And the information was not needed. In unearthly white and mauve, shadow of white, the city rose, like a dream dreamed overnight, new, remorselessly new, impossibly new. . . and yet there in all the arrogant pride of rejoiced materialism. These young, slim, stately things a thousand houses high (or so it seemed to me, coming from an architecture that had never defied the earth), a tower of Babel each one, not one tower of Babel but many, a city of Babel towers, casually, easily strewn end up against the skies－ they stood at the brink, close-crowded, the brink of America, these Giantesses, these Fates, which were not built for a king nor a ghost nor any man's religion, but were materialized by those hard, cold, magic words－ opportunity, enterprise, prosperity, success－ just business words out of world-wide commerce from a land rich in natural resource. Buildings that sprang white from the rock. No earth clung to their skirts. They leaped like Athene from the mind synthetically; they spurned the earth. And there was no monument to the machine-age like America.

      I could not have come farther from home than this New York. Our dwellings, low, weathered, mossed, abhorring the lifeless line－ the definite, the finite, the aloof－ loving rondures and an upward stroke, the tilt of a roof like a boat always aware of the elements in which it is swinging－ most fittingly my home was set a hemisphere apart, so far over the globe that to have gone on would have meant to go nearer not farther. How far my little grass-roofed, hill- wrapped village from this gigantic rebellion which was New York! And New York's rebellion called to me excitedly, this savagery which piled great concrete block on concrete block, topping at the last moment as in an afterthought, with crowns as delicate as pinnacled ice; this lavishness which, without a prayer, pillaged coal mines and waterfalls for light, festooning the great nature-severed city with diamonds of frozen electrical phenomena－ it fascinated me, the Asian man, and in it I saw not Milton's Satan, but the one of Blake.