Socrates famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living. But，of course, if one keeps pausing to examine life, one will not live at all. Self-examination must therefore come only at stated intervals, with perhaps a last ruminative survey toward the end of one's life. Now that I am old but still have my wits about me, “Who am I?” is a question that I wish to put to myself before it is too late.

苏格拉底有一句名言：浑浑噩噩的生活不值得过。但是，当然，如果一个人一直停下来检视生活就根本活不下去。 因此，自我检查只能在规定的时间间隔内进行，也许最后一次反刍调查是在一个人生命的尽头。现在我老了，但我仍然有智慧，我是谁？” 这是一个我想在为时已晚之前对自己提出的问题。

From the experience of wise people like Montaigne, I know that I won't go far with this question—this exercise in self-examination—if I just withdraw into my study and reflect. That way leads to phantoms. The self is only knowabie through a sustained and cumulative mental effort, the most efficient form of which is writing. Writing produces a work. I now know myself through a work. Is it a true reflection of my real self? That question too seems to lead to phantoms- True and real are tricky words. Little is to be gained by grappling with them in an autobiography, unless one is a metaphysician and enjoys subtleties piled on subdeties almost for their own sake. Like most people, I am probably a compound of selves  but there is only one self—the one embodied in this work—that I can truly be said to know.

从蒙田(Montaigne)等智者的经验来看，我知道，如果我只是退入自己的书房并进行反思(这是自我检查中的练习)，我就不会在这个自省的问题上走得太远。那条路通向幻想。自我只有通过持续和累积的精神努力才是可知的，其中最有效的形式就是写作。写作产生作品。我现在通过一项工作了解自己。 是我真实自我的真实反映吗？这个问题似乎也会让人产生幻觉——“真的True”和“真实real”都是很微妙的词汇。在一本自传中与他们搏斗是不会有什么收获的，除非一个人是一个形而上学的人，几乎为了他们自己的利益而享受着堆积在次要事物上的微妙之处。 像大多数人一样，我可能是自我的复合体，但只有一个自我-在这部作品中体现的自我-我可以说是真正知道的。

Now that I know, is there any point in telling what I know to others? Socrates doesn't say, although I can imagine him sayings，“Self-knowledge is its own reward. Wanting to pass it on to others is vanity, like talking at length about oneself at a party.”I see that. Nevertheless, an alternative position is possible. Yes,an element of vanity is indubitably there: one wants to be thought well of, if not for outward accomplishments, then for the depth of one's self-understanding. But it is not all vanity. Wanting to communicate has a strong psychological justification. For if casual selfexamination can only lead to phantoms, sustained and disciplined selfexamination can still seem a little unreal unless it jells into a written work p4that can be read, mulled over, and understood by another individual. This is because we, as social beings through and through, need confirmation by others in order to know who we are. But the self that others confirm in everyday life is a rather shallow person constructed from a limited range of  habits and customs that society openly favors. Will the deeper and more complex self revealed in serious reflection also meet with approval, or will it elicit surprise and consternation? Much as I have always wanted a frank answer, it is only now, with the courage of second childhood or the indifference of approaching senility, that I dare to countenance—well, what? Not harsh judgment, for the circle I move in is far too enlightened for that, but rather an awkwardly polite inching away, the slightest dip in social temperature, shifts in behavior and mood so minimal and subtle that they are easily relegated to the basement of consciousness.

既然我知道了，告诉别人我知道的有什么意义吗？ 苏格拉底没有说，虽然我可以想象他说：“自我认识是自己的回报。 想把它传递给别人是虚荣心，就像在聚会上长篇大论地谈论自己。”我看到了。 然而，另一种立场是可能的。 是的，虚荣心的一个因素是不可避免的：一个人想被人好好考虑，如果不是为了外在的成就，那么就是为了一个人自我理解的深度。但这并不是所有的虚荣心。 想要交流有很强的心理正当性。因为如果不经意的自我反省只会导致幻象，那么持续而有纪律的自我反省仍然显得有点不真实，除非它凝成一篇可以被另一个人阅读、思考和理解的书面作品。这是因为我们，作为一个社会人，需要别人的确认(/认可/肯定）才能知道我们是谁。但是，在日常生活中，别人所证实的自我是一个相当肤浅的人，它是由社会公开偏爱的有限的习惯和习俗所构成的。严肃反思中揭示的更深更复杂的自我是否也会得到认可，还是会引起惊讶和惊愕？尽管我一直希望得到一个坦率的回答，但只是在现在，带着第二次童年的勇气，或带着接近衰老的漠然，我才敢于面对——嗯，什么?这并不是苛刻的评判，因为我所处的圈子太过开明，我不会那样做，而是一种笨拙而礼貌的慢慢挪动，社交温度的轻微下降，行为和情绪的微小变化，以至于它们很容易被归入意识的底层。

"Who am I?^”is a fashionable question at the close of the millennium. Everyone seems to be asking it. Not only individuals but groups and even nations ask themselves "who am I?" or “who are we?" Among the major causes of a weakening sense of self are social and geographical mobility and rapid technological change. We are, as pundits say, in the midst of an identity crisis.Biographies and autobiographies abound. Self-revelations of a boastful kind arrive not only from the famous but ordinary folk and attract high ratings in the media. As a rootless person, I am a natural for self-examination, and this could lead, given the spirit of the times, to selfexposure through a variety of means, including that of autobiography. It may be that I am especially tempted, for I am rootless in more than one sense. I never lived in one place for more than five years until, at age thirtyeight, I moved to Minneapolis. Before that, I was constantly changing residence, first as a child with my family, then alone as an adult. One city after another was called “home”: Tianjin, Nanjing, Shanghai, Kunming, Chongqing, Canberra, Sydney, Manila, London, Oxford, Paris, Berkeley, Bloomington (Indiana), Chicago, Albuquerque, and Toronto. Fourteen years in Minneapolis and another fourteen in Madison, my current place of residence, are the only source of any rooted feeling I may have. SociaHy, I am likewise adrift and for a simple reason—I am single. The one portable soil—family—in which an individual is given natural grounding is not available to me.

“我是谁？”是千禧年末的一个时髦问题。 似乎每个人都在问。不仅个人，团体甚至国家都在问自己“我是谁？” 或者“我们是谁？” 自我意识减弱的主要原因包括社会和地理流动性以及迅速的技术变革。正如专家们所说，我们正处于身份危机之中。传记和自传比比皆是。自吹自擂的自我揭露不仅来自名人，也来自普通民众，并在媒体上引起了高收视率。作为一个无根的人，我很自然地会进行自我检查，考虑到时代精神，这可能会导致通过各种方式（包括自传）进行自我曝光。我可能很受诱惑，因为我在多种意义上是无根的。 我从未在一个地方居住超过五年，直到三十八岁时我搬到明尼阿波利斯。 在那之前，我一直在改变住所，首先是作为一个孩子和我的家人，然后作为一个成年人独自一人。 一个接一个的城市被称为“家”：天津、南京、上海、昆明、重庆、堪培拉、悉尼、马尼拉、伦敦、牛津、巴黎、伯克利、布鲁明顿（印第安纳）、芝加哥、阿尔伯克基和多伦多。在明尼阿波利斯呆了14年，在我现在的居住地麦迪逊又呆了14年，这是我所有根深蒂固的感觉的唯一来源。社交方面，我也是漂泊不定，原因很简单——我单身。我无法获得一个可以自然地接地的可移动土壤（家庭）。

How does my situation compare with that of others? By others, I have in mind first the people I know in daily life, mostly American friends. Their backgrounds differ: some have shown a far greater inclination to move from place to place, but even the most mobile are more plugged into society and the world than I, if only because they have spouses and offspring, and,  p5with them, necessary ties to neighborhood, school, and other iocal institutions. By others, I also have in mind total strangers—people who live elsewhere in the world or have lived in earlier times. Their sense of self, as recorded by ethnographers and historians ,provides me with the broadest possibie backdrop against which to raise the question of my own selfhood.

我的处境和其他人相比怎么样？ 通过别人，我首先想到的是我在日常生活中认识的人，大多是美国朋友。他们的背景各不相同：有些人表现出更倾向于从一个地方搬到另一个地方，但即使是最具流动性的人也比我更能融入社会和世界，哪怕只是因为他们有配偶和后代，而且他们与邻里、学校和其他地方机构有着必要的联系。我所指的还有一些完全陌生的人——那些住在世界其他地方或者在更早的时代生活过的人。根据民族志学家和历史学家的记录，他们的自我意识为我提供了最广泛的可能背景，在此背景下我可以提出自己的自我问题。

First， then, the Americans. As I remember it, not so long ago the question “Who am I?" seldom came up.  When it did, most men would probably have answered with a profession (plumber, lawyer) and most women with the family (wife of a plumber, mother of four children). Since the sixties, however,not only is the question raised more often but the old answer is no longer considered adequate. An individual requires a past, not j ust the present and a future, and an ancestral line, not just current family, to produce a solid sense of self .The search for ancestors and the old homestead, for cultural heritage, for things that are reassuringly fixed because they belong to the past, becomes a hobby as well as a serious attempt at discovering one’s identity； this is so not only with the old and the middle aged but even with the young, who thereby risk losing that quality of starry-eyed hopefulness that was once the unmistakable hallmark of young Americans.

首先是美国人。 我记得，不久前很少出现“我是谁？”的问题。当这种情况发生时，大多数男性可能会以专业（水管工、律师)和大多数家庭妇女(水管工的妻子、四个孩子的母亲)来回答）。然而，自六十年代以来，提出的问题不仅更多，而且旧的答案已不再被认为是充分的。一个个体需要一个过去，而不是现在和未来，一个祖先的血统，而不仅仅是现在的家庭，才能产生一个坚实的自我意识. 寻找祖先和旧宅基地，寻找文化遗产，寻找那些因为属于过去而令人放心的固定的东西，成为一种爱好，也是一种认真探索自己身份的尝试；这不仅是对老年人和中年人，甚至对年轻人来说都是如此，他们因此有可能失去曾经是年轻美国人明确标志的那种充满幻想的希望的品质。

Does digging into the past really give men and women of our time a sense of identity and belonging? Perhaps, but the identity and belonging so gained are effects of present activity, present research into and present reconstruction of the past, and not a reimmersion in the past, which of course is impossible. The idea that one is able to return to an earlier time, to feel again the communal bond that existed then, is an illusion. But a powerful illusion can seem real, and maybe that is all that people in our fissiparous postmodern world need.

挖掘过去真的能给我们这个时代的男人和女人一种认同感和归属感吗?也许，但如此获得的认同感和归属感是当前活动的影响，对过去的研究和现在的重建，而不是过去重新沉浸，这当然是不可能的。一个人能够回到更早的时间，再次感受到当时存在的公共纽带的想法是一种错觉/幻觉。但是，一个强大的幻象看起来是真实的，也许这就是我们这个多变的后现代世界中人们所需要的一切。

What is not an illusion is the force of communal bonding in premodern times, among preliterate and nonliterate peoples. For the nostalgic modern man and woman, then, the question to be honestly confronted is: "If a reimmersion in the past is possible, do I really want it? Have I any clear idea what it is like to be so identified with the group that my individual self becomes almost a phantom?”The worlds ethnographic literature is so rich in strange habits and customs that most readers do not consider the virtual disappearance of the self in the group as anything special. But to one reader—me!—it is, and perhaps that says something about me. In any case， as a young student reading such literature, I could hardly credit anthropologist Dorothy Lee's account of the Wintu Indians of northern California, for whom, apparently， the self is not so much a bounded entity as a concentration that gradually fades at the edges and gives way to other entities. The Wintu do not, for example,“use and when referring to individuals who are, or live or act together.”They prefer to say John we,using p6 John as a specification, rather than John and I, where the we is exposed as made up of two separate individuals. And what happens when Lee asks a Wintu woman, Sadie Marsh, for her autobiography? Predictably, she tells a story about someone else—her first husband. When Lee insists on Sadie's own history, she proceeds to tell what she calls "my story”but about the first three quarters of it are occupied with the lives of her grandfather, her uncle, and her mother before her birth?¹

错觉不是识字民族与非识字民族在近现代的社会联系的力量。因此，对于怀旧的现代男人和女人来说，要诚实面对的问题是：“如果有可能重温过去，我真的想要吗？我是否有明确的想法，与团体如此认同？ 我的个人自我几乎变成了幻像？”世界民族志文学是如此丰富的奇怪的习惯和习俗，以至于大多数读者并不认为这个群体中的自我虚拟消失有什么特别之处。但对一个读者我来说！-是的，也许这说明了我的一些情况。无论如何，作为一个读这类文献的年轻学生，我几乎不能相信人类学家多萝西·李对北加州温图印第安人的描述，对他们来说，自我与其说是一个有界的实体，不如说是一种在边缘逐渐消失并让位给其他实体的集中体。例如，温图人不会“当指的是共同生活或共同行动的个人时，使用”and”(和)。”他们更喜欢说约翰我们，用约翰作为一个规范，而不是约翰和我，在那里我们是由两个单独的个人组成的。当李问一位温图妇女萨迪·马什的自传时，会发生什么？ 可以预见的是，她讲述了另一个人的故事-她的第一任丈夫。当李坚持讲述赛迪自己的历史时，她接着讲述了她所谓的“我的故事”，但故事的前四分之三都是关于她的祖父、叔叔和母亲在她出生前的生活。

Certain nonliterate peoples do have a strong sense of self and of individual differences. The Tswana of east Africa, for example, say that even children born of the same parents are more different than they are alike, especially in thought and feeling. But individuality, while clearly recognized, is feared rather than admired. It is suppressed, for beyond the recognition of individuality is the far keener awareness that an individual who stands alone, or who stands out in the group, is vulnerable.² What is distinctive of  Europeans, by comparison with other peoples, is this. From the sixteenth century onward, not only was there a growing recognition of individuality but a steady accretion of pride in it. First, family portraits were painted; then, increasingly, portraits of individuals and self-portraits; biographies, autobiographies, and reflexive essays (outstandingly, Montaigne^’s) were written. Of course, only people of substance could command and only people of talent could engage in these enterprises.³ Interestingly, many biographies and autobiographies produced before 1900 and even thereafter showed a note of uncertainty in that their authors seemed to want their subjects to be both unique and to have that uniqueness submerged in the categories of respectable society, past and present. And so, like the Wintu woman, they might spend inordinate space depicting parents, uncles and aunts, and their social worlds before introducing the distinctive self.

某些不识字的人确实有强烈的自我意识和个体差异。 例如，东非的人说，即使是父母相同的孩子也比他们相似的孩子更不同，尤其是在思想和感情上.但是，个性虽然得到了明确的承认，但却让人畏惧而不是钦佩。它被抑制了，因为除了对个性的认识之外，还有一种更强烈的意识，即一个独立自主或在群体中脱颖而出的个人是脆弱的²。 与其他民族相比，欧洲人的独特之处在于。 从十六世纪开始，人们不仅日益认识到个性，而且对个性的自豪感也不断增强。首先，家庭肖像画；然后，越来越多的个人肖像画和自画像；传记、自传和反思性文章（尤其是蒙田的）被创作出来。当然，只有真正的人才可以指挥，只有人才可以参与这些企业。有趣的是，许多在1900年以前甚至以后出版的传记和自传都显示出一种不确定性，因为他们的作者似乎希望他们的主题既是独特的，也希望这种独特性淹没在受人尊敬的社会、过去和现在的类别中。因此，就像温图的女人一样，他们可能会花在过度的空间里，描绘父母、叔叔阿姨和他们的社会世界，然后介绍独特的自我。

Even Americans, self-proclaimed individualists, were and probably still are more inclined to write family histories than autobiographies. Some of my retired colleagues, I note, use .their research skills to reconstruct their genealogical pasts. Typically, they trace their roots to Europe, envisage the epic journey of their ancestors across the Atlantic, the struggle for survival in a city of the eastern seaboard, the establishment of a comfortable foothold in a middle western farm, and then the story of their own generation—the births of siblings and cousins, their childhoods and early schooling. What surprises me is that most family histories end at this juncture.Why is this? Why stop just when information is sufficient to allow the depiction of fully rounded human individuals? A plausible answer is that, whereas life in the old country can seem romantic, the trip over the ocean epical, the struggles of forebears in the New World heroic, and early schooling nostalgic, the subsequent path of p7adulthood is, by comparison, commonplace—a succession of unexceptional family events,job changes, and promotions; these are not worth writing about or are worth writing about only to family members and close friends.

甚至自称个人主义的美国人，也比自传更倾向于写家庭历史。我注意到，我的一些退休同事使用他们的研究技能来重建他们的家谱过去。 典型的情况是，他们追溯到欧洲，设想他们的祖先跨越大西洋的史诗般的旅程，在东海岸的一个城市中为生存而奋斗，在中西部农场建立一个舒适的立足点，然后讲述他们自己这一代的故事-兄弟姐妹和表兄弟的出生，他们的童年和早期教育。 令我惊讶的是，大多数家庭历史都是在这个关头结束的。 为什么会这样？为什么在信息足够描述完整的人的时候就停止呢?一个看似合理的答案是，尽管在旧国家的生活可能看起来浪漫，在大洋彼岸的旅行具有传奇色彩，在新世界先辈的奋斗具有英雄气概，早期的学校教育具有怀旧色彩，但相比之下，成年后的道路却很平常——一连串平凡的家庭事件、工作变动和晋升;这些东西不值得写，或者只值得写给家人和亲密的朋友。

Such reflections have convinced me that most human beings, despite a tendency to boast a little in conversarion, in family circulars, or even (if opportunity offers) in a three-minute call to a radio talk show, are fundamentally modest. When the self-knowledge they seek and find becomes compendious,they do not seek to thrust it on others. Am I, then, an exception? What is my excuse, since I am without the sort of fame, notoriety, or exceptional life circumstance that might justify biographical or autobiographical treatment? The best answer should be the completed work itself. But I have a more general answer or maybe simply a conviction (partly religiouswhich is this: just as no human life is negligible, so no human life story is negligible, not worth telling. If a story seems a bore, the fault lies in the arrangement of words, not in the life. Critical, then, is the availability of a talented narrator. Am I such a one? Do I, for a start, have a good memory? Bad memory can be compensated by hard research. What is my attitude toward hard research—toward foraging among old Setters and digging into public archives in the absence of which an autobiography can seem lightweight?

这样的思考使我相信，大多数人，尽管有一种在谈话中、在家庭传单上，甚至在三分钟的电台谈话节目中（如果有机会的话）吹嘘一点的倾向，但基本上都是谦虚的。当他们所寻求和发现的自知之明变得复杂时，他们不会试图把它强加给别人。那么，我是个例外吗？我的借口是什么，因为我没有那种名望，名声，或特殊的生活环境，可以证明传记或自传的待遇？最好的答案应该是完成的工作本身。 但我有一个更普遍的答案，或者可能只是一个信念(部分是宗教的，这就是：就像没有人的生命是可以忽略的，所以没有人的生命故事是可以忽略的，不值得讲述。如果一个故事看起来很无聊，那错就在于词语的安排，而不是生活。 那么，关键是一个有才华的叙述者的可用性。 我是这样的人吗？ 我，首先，有一个好的记忆吗？ 糟糕的记忆可以通过艰苦的研究来弥补。 我对努力研究的态度是什么——在没有自传的情况下，不愿在老作家觅食和挖掘公共档案？

As autobiographer, I confess to several weaknesses, most especially a poor memory. I can remember little of the first ten years of my life, which I spent in China. I have a better haul of images from Australia, where I lived from the ages of ten through fifteen, but it remains meager. The six months in the Philippines are quite vivid, and from 1946 onward—from age fifteen onward—1 can say that the details I am able to recall are at last respectably dense.

作为一名自传作者，我承认自己有几个弱点，尤其是记忆力差。我在中国度过的人生的头十年，我几乎不记得了。我有一些来自澳大利亚的照片，我从10岁到15岁住在那里，但还是很少。在菲律宾的六个月是相当生动的，从1946年起--从15岁起--我可以说，我能回忆起的细节终于相当密集了。

Doubts about my memory came to me in late middle age, when my brother Tai-Fu began to reminisce nostalgicahy about his childhood and mine. I have always been impressed by how much he can recall. Yet he is older than I by only one year. After a two-month visit to China in 1997, he returned to the United States full of stories of the village we lived in, the school we attended, sixty years ago. He contacted his childhood schoolmates. He remembers their names, what they were like, what he and they did together. Why can't I do the same? Why have 1 forgotten so much? Does this forgetfulness explain my lack of desire to return to China, for what's the point of visiting a landscape of memory that is so impoverished?

中年晚期，我对我的记忆产生了怀疑，那时我的哥哥岱孚开始怀念他的童年和我的童年。 我一直对他能回忆起多少印象深刻。 但他比我大一岁。 在1997年对中国进行了两个月的访问之后，他回到了美国。六十年前那里充满了我们生活的村庄，我们就读的学校。 他联系了他儿时的同学。 他记得他们的名字，他们是什么样子，他和他们一起做了什么。 为什么我不能这么做？ 为什么我忘了这么多？ 这种健忘是否解释了我不想回到中国，因为去参观一片如此贫穷的记忆风景有什么意义？

Teasingly, I say to Tai-Fu that the reason he remembers so much and 1 so little is that he is a pessimist, whereas I am an optimist. A pessimist puts his p8 golden age in the past, an optimist puts his in the future. I may have deliberately buried my store of childhood experiences so that I won't be tempted to stay there, so that I can be more accepting of the present and acquire an outlook toward the future that is hopeful rather than anxious.

 我开玩笑地对岱孚说，他记得这么多，我却这么少的原因是：他是个悲观主义者，而我是个乐观主义者。 悲观主义者把他的黄金时代放在过去，乐观主义者往往放眼未来。我可能故意把我的童年经历埋在地下，这样我就不会被诱惑留在那里，这样我就可以更多地接受现在，并获得对未来的展望，这是希望而不是焦虑。

My need to have a hopeful outlook toward the future may also have affected my understanding of the human past in general. I have not ignored the human past. On the contrary, I enjoy reading history. But my reading may have been selective, for from history books I gain the strong impression that earlier times could be pretty awful even in the midst of genuine achievements. When people today feel disgusted with the desecration of nature and the erection of meretricious or ugly buildings on its scarred back, they tend to seek vindication and reassurance from a golden age of long ago. Some find it in the eighteenth century (before the Industrial Revolution), some in the Middle Ages, some in classical antiquity, some in even mistier landscapes. The further back they go, the more likely it is that the perfection they locate there is a product of wishful thinking. Although that is not at all how I view the past, I was for a time ready to agree with Jacquetta Hawkes that eighteenth-century England might just be what people are looking for, if only from an aesthetic and ecological point of view. In that century, Englishmen possessed the land without committing outrages against it. Rich and poor alike “knew how to use the stuff of their countryside to raise comely buildings and to group them with distinctive grace. Town and country having grown up together to serve one another’s needs now enjoyed a moment of balance”⁴

 我对未来抱有希望的需要也可能影响了我对人类过去的总体理解。我没有忽视人类的过去。相反，我喜欢读历史。但我的阅读可能是有选择性的，因为从历史书中我得到了一个强烈的印象，那就是即使是在真正的成就之中，早期也可能是相当糟糕的。当今天的人们对亵渎自然和在其伤痕累累的背上建造丑陋不堪的建筑感到厌恶时，他们往往会从很久以前的黄金时代寻求辩护和安慰。有些人在十八世纪（工业革命前）发现了它，有些是在中世纪，有些是在古典时期，有些是在更模糊的风景中。他们越往前追溯，他们所找到的完美就越有可能是一厢情愿的产物。尽管我对过去的看法并不如此，但在一段时间内，我已经同意杰奎塔·霍克斯的观点，即从美学和生态的角度来看，十八世纪的英格兰可能正是人们所追求的。在那个世纪，英国人拥有这片土地而没有对它进行暴行。无论贫富，“都知道如何利用他们农村的东西来建造漂亮的建筑，并以独特的优雅将它们组合起来。城镇和国家为了满足彼此的需要而共同成长，现在享受了片刻的平衡”

But that was my first impression. With a closer look, I began to see a more piebald picture, as did other writers, though not (it would seem) Hawkes herself. For example, in his biography of Samuel Johnson, John Wain wrote longingly of lovely landscapes in Johnson’s time that have since disappeared. However, in the midst of the praise he had to acknowledge that they had a strikingly incongruous and somewhat sinister element, namely, a large number of diseased and disfigured human beings and animals.⁵ Another egregious blemish, which surprisingly few landscape historians have dwelt on, was the large number of gibbets on which the tarred corpses of criminals were displayed.Whenever possible, the gibbets were located on prominences and at crossroads to achieve maximum visibility, Timid travelers made detours around them, especially during dark nights.⁶

百度：但那是我的第一印象。仔细一看，我开始看到一幅更加斑驳的画，其他作家也一样，尽管霍克斯本人（看起来）并没有。例如，在他对塞缪尔·约翰逊的传记中，约翰·韦恩渴望描写约翰逊时代的美丽风景，这些风景后来消失了。然而，在赞扬的过程中，他不得不承认，他们有一个惊人的不协调和有点邪恶的因素，即大量患病和毁容的人和动物。5另一个令人震惊的缺陷，令人惊讶的是，很少有景观历史学家研究过，是大量的绞刑架，上面放着涂有柏油的罪犯尸体显示。任何时候有可能，绞刑架被安置在突出物和十字路口，以获得最大的能见度，胆小的旅行者绕道而行，特别是在黑暗的夜晚。

I confessed earlier that I might have repressed my childhood experiences, especially the good ones, so as to allow a more genial view of my later years. P9I may have played the same trick on human history； that is, to feel comfortable with the present and entertain hope for the future, I may have read into human history a broadly progressive trend that many sophisticated historians disallow. I have persuaded myself of the existence of progress by envisioning the social position I would have had to occupy in order to feel content in successively earlier times.I conclude that in the eighteenth century, I would have to have been a squire with sizable land holdings; in the Middle Ages, a great baron； and in ancient Egypt, no less than the pharaoh himself.

我早些时候承认，我可能压抑了我的童年经历，特别是美好的经历，以便对我的晚年有一个更亲切/温和的看法。 我可能对人类历史也玩过同样的把戏；也就是说，为了对现在感到舒服，并对未来抱有希望，我可能在人类历史中读到了许多老练的历史学家不允许的广泛进步的趋势。 我已经通过设想我必须占据的社会地位来说服自己进步的存在，以便在更早的时候连续感到满足。 我的结论是，在十八世纪，我必须是一个拥有大量土地的乡绅；在中世纪，我是一个伟大的男爵；在古埃及，我不亚于法老本人。

I can enjoy history even when its reports are grim because history, as presented to me by historians, is not (it hardly needs be said) the past but rather a colorful landscape—delusively complete—that lies before me and that I can explore appreciatively or critically with my mind’s eye. My own past_, not having been reordered by a historian, is not a landscape. Like all pasts, it is a thin spread of oddments, piled high here and there, that happens to have survived. A traditional autobiographer would consider it his task to file them in separate categories and time slots and in one way or another dress them up so that, together, they have a semblance of completion, of being a finished landscape or an unbroken story line. But I am not such an autobiographer. I cannot be a proper historian of my own past because I cannot bear to look at the material remains, which have forme an indescribable air of sadness. Perversely perhaps, threadbare jeans, chewing gum hardened by age, rusted paper clips, and stained high-school and college diplomas speak of immense loss rather than survival. The pastness of the past causes me bewilderment and, at times, a feeling akin to nausea.

我可以欣赏历史，即使它的报告是严峻的，因为历史，正如历史学家向我介绍的那样，不是（几乎不需要说）过去，而是一个丰富多彩的景观-令人难以置信的完整-摆在我面前，我可以用我的眼睛欣赏或批判性地探索/而是一幅丰富多彩的风景画ーー虚幻地完整ーー就在我面前，我可以用心灵之眼欣赏或批判地探索它。 我自己的过去，没有被历史学家重新排序，不是一个风景。 就像所有的过去一样，它是一个薄薄的分散的奇数，堆积在这里和那里，碰巧幸存下来。一个传统的自传作者会认为他的任务是把它们分成不同的类别和时间段，并以某种方式把它们装扮起来，这样，它们就有了一种完成的样子，一幅完成了的风景画或一条完整的故事线。 但我不是这样的自传作者。 我不能成为我自己过去的适当历史学家，因为我不能忍受看着物质遗迹，这些遗迹形成了一种难以形容的悲伤气氛。 也许令人费解的是，穿线牛仔裤、嚼口香糖、生锈的回形针、染污的高中和大学文凭说明了巨大的损失，而不是生存。 过去的过去使我困惑，有时，一种类似于恶心的感觉。

Strange to say, ideas and theories of the past do not distress me by their pastness. For example, when I open Thomas Burnett book, The Theory of the Earth (1684),I am aware of the musty smell coming out of its yellowed pages, I am aware that its author has long ago returned to dust. But the ideas in the book, quaintly dated as they may be, are still a flaming of the human spirit that inspires. Ideas are of their time yet transcend it. I see them this way because they are not like matter, which decays, or worse, like biological matter, which enters into a stage of putrescence before turning into minerals. I am not temperamentally equipped to be a historian of material life, but I can be a historian of the spirit. And by spirit, I mean the whole range of mental and psychological capabilities, including not only ideas, thoughts, and philosophies but also the tone and coloring of experience in all its variety. It surprises me that though my factual memory is poor, my memory of the psychological character,or mood, of past events is extraordinarily vivid. 

百度：说来奇怪，过去的思想和理论并没有因为它们的过时而使我苦恼。例如，当我打开托马斯·伯内特（Thomas Burnett）的书《地球理论》（The Theory of The Earth）（1684年）时，我意识到发霉的气味从它发黄的书页里冒出来，我意识到它的作者早就灰飞烟灭了。但这本书中的思想，尽管年代久远，仍然是一种激励人心的人类精神的火焰。思想是他们的时代，但超越了它。我这样看它们，是因为它们不像腐烂的物质，更糟的是，它们不像生物物质，在变成矿物之前进入腐朽阶段。我在气质上不具备成为物质生活历史学家的条件，但我可以成为精神历史学家。我所说的精神，是指所有的心理和心理能力，不仅包括思想、思想和哲学，还包括各种各样经验的基调和色彩。令我吃惊的是，尽管我的真实记忆很差，但我对过去事件的心理特征或情绪的记忆却异常生动。

P10Thus readers are forewarned of this work’s shortcomings. They will not find the compendious factual information， firm chronological arc, and highlighting of the more public events that many memoirs provide. And yet, paradoxically, one of the work's merits is that it has these shortcomings. The fact is, a fat volume ill suits my personality; a sense of progression is necessarily weak in my life for lack of such powerful springboards as courtship, marriage, birth of children, and so on； last, an introvert much prefers home entertainment--the compact videos of his own mind-to the hurly-burly public events of the wide screen.

百度：因此，读者提前知道了这部作品的不足之处。他们将找不到简明的事实信息，坚定的时间顺序，以及许多回忆录所提供的更为公开的事件的强调。然而，矛盾的是，这部作品的优点之一就是它有这些缺点。事实上，一本厚厚的书不适合我的个性；在我的生活中，由于缺乏诸如求爱、结婚、生孩子等强有力的跳板，进步感必然很弱；最后，一个内向的人更喜欢家庭娱乐——他自己头脑中的紧凑视频，而不是大屏幕上喧嚣的公共事件。

Besides these “shortcomings,”which I now regard as negative merit, I can also point to some of the work's positive qualities. I can claim that it is the first autobiography ever written by a middle-class Chinese American geographer. The claim is bolder than it sounds, for the combination of “middle-class Chinese”  and “geographer”makes the writing of autobiography most unlikely. Either one alone would deter the venture. A middle-class Chinese such as myself cannot offer the attractive and highly marketable theme of struggle and heroic climb from Chinatown poverty to suburban affluence. For 1 had no such struggle and climb.Chinese immigrants who were middle-class professionals have always been accepted and successful in the United States. And what is more boring than a story of unqualified success--from good student to well-paid engineer? As for that other category, “geographer,” into which I fall, most geographers are too extroverted, too happily engaged with external reality, to write their life stories. And so the field is left open to me: a middle-class Chinese, yes, but one who in his life long bachelordom is obliged, on that account alone, to live outside the Chinese social fold; a geographer, yes, but a maverick in the discipline to the degree that, unlike most other geographers, my landscapes are “inscapes,” as much psychological conditions as material arrangements.

 除了这些“缺点”（我现在认为它们是负面的优点）之外，我还可以指出一些作品的积极品质。我可以说这是有史以来第一位由中产阶级华裔美国地理学家撰写的自传。这种说法比听起来要大胆，因为“中产阶级的华人”和“地理学家”的结合使得自传的写作极不可能。任何一个人都能阻止这场冒险。 像我这样的中产阶级华人不能提供有吸引力和高度市场化的斗争主题，即从唐人街的贫困到郊区的富裕的英勇攀登。 因为我没有这样的挣扎和攀登。作为中产阶级专业人士的中国移民在美国一直被接受并获得成功。还有什么比不合格的成功故事更无聊——从好学生到高薪工程师？ 至于另一类“地理学家”，我认为，大多数地理学家过于外向，过于愉快地参与外部现实，以至于无法写出他们的人生故事。 因此，这个领域对我来说是开放的：一个中产阶级的华人，是的，但是一个在他一生的单身生活中，仅仅因为这个原因，他不得不生活在中国社会之外；一个地理学家，是的，但在学科上是一个特立独行的人，因为与大多数其他地理学家不同，我的风景是“隐蔽的/内在的”，心理条件和物质安排一样多。

What else is distinctive about my autobiography? Another mark of distinction, I suggest, is that it records an unusual overall direction or movement in life. For most people, life moves from private to public一from a childhood spent in the home and neighborhood to an adulthood spent in public forums of increasing scope: local, regional, national. My life, by contrast, has moved in the opposite direction—from public to private, from world to self. It has always seemed to me that my childhood was public. Its stage was the Chinese nation and the world. It could seem that way for two reasons. One was the drama of the war with Japan followed by the Second World Wan These wars impinged directly on my family and on me. The other was my father’s position in Chinese society: though an official of the middle rank even at the zenith of his career, he was nevertheless a member of the elite at a time when the educated class was small.

 我的自传还有什么与众不同的地方？ 我认为，区别的另一个标志是，它记录了生活中一个不寻常的总体方向或运动。对于大多数人来说，生活从私人生活变成了公共生活-从童年时期在家庭和社区中度过的童年到成年期在范围日益扩大的公共论坛中度过的：地方，区域，国家。相比之下，我的生活却朝着相反的方向发展——从公共到私人，从世界到自我。 在我看来，我的童年是公开的。 它的舞台是中华民族和世界。看起来有两个原因。一个是对日战争，接着是第二次世界大战，这些战争直接冲击了我和我的家庭。另一个是我父亲在中国社会中的地位：尽管即使是在职业生涯的顶峰时期，他还是中层官员，但在受过良好教育的班子里，他还是一个精英阶层。

P11By the time I turned into a young adult. World War II had ended. Events in the world no longer impinged on me quite so directly. My life became private, my world shrank to the various campuses at which I studied or worked.Meanwhile, at these sheltered campuses, my mental life was able to expand. Self-examination has made me more aware of who I am； examination has made me more aware of the nature of external reality. These activities continued into middle age and old age. And so the direction of my life is not quite from public to private. In its mature half, I have been able to regain the world, though it is one of ideas and thought rather than one of action and events.

当我刚成年时。第二次世界大战已结束。世界性事件不再直接影响我。我的生活变得私密，我的世界缩小到我学习或工作的各校园。同时，在这些庇护的校园里，我的精神生活得以扩展。自我审视使我更清楚自己是谁；审视使我更清楚外部现实的本质。这些活动一直持续到中年和老年。因此，我的生活方向不是完全从公共到私人。在它成熟的一半，我已经能够重新获得世界，尽管它是一个想法和思想，而不是一个行动和事件。

This spiraling path provides the autobiography with a temporal structure that it would otherwise lack. And so, following the introduction, I turn to “World Stage and Public Events,” and then to two chapters of increasing subjectivity： if the one is personal, the other is intimate. When I wrote earlier that even the ordinary life experiences of an ordinary individual should have general interest and import, I had this core section of my autobiography in mind. By contrast, “Salvation by Geography” is both more individualistic, being an account of my own contributions to geography, and a return to the wider world.

这条螺旋形的路径为自传提供了一个时间结构，否则它将缺乏时间结构。因此，在导言之后，我转向“世界舞台和公共事件”，然后转向增加主观性的两章：如果一个是个人的，另一个是亲密的。当我早些时候写道，即使是一个普通人的普通生活经历也应该具有普遍的兴趣和意义时，我心里就有了这篇自传的核心部分。相比之下，“地理拯救”更具有个人主义色彩，因为它记述了我自己对地理的贡献，也是对更广阔世界的回归。