《目送》龙应台英译版

Seeing beloved one off By Long Yingtai translated by Dai Xiaoxia In the first day of Hua’an entering the primary school, I hold his hand in mine and we walked through several blocks to the Victoria school. It was in the early September , numerous fist-sized fruits were hanging all over the apple trees and pear trees in every courtyard, and branches all lowered their heads because of the heavy fruits, some of them even crossed the hedge and touched passenger’s hair below them. Lots of children, gathered in the school ground, were waiting for the first ring of class. They, with their small hands in their parents palms, looked around timidly. They were graduates of kindergarten, but there is a law they didn’t know yet that the ending of one thing is always the beginning of another. The moment the school bell rang, there was a blur of people coming and going, running to different directions. But in such a chaos I could still find the figure of my child—just like you can easily recognize the voice of your own baby when he is in the middle of a hundred crying babies in a room. Hua’an was walking forward, carrying a colorful schoolbag on his back. He turned his shoulder to me now and then, and his sight just touched my gaze in the empty space between us, like they had traveled through a boundless river of time. I looked at him until his small figure vanished behind the door. At the age of 16, he went to America for one year as an exchange student. I took him to the airport. In the moment of departure, we hugged each other like always, and my head only reached his chest,which felt like I was hugging the feet of a giraffe. Obviously, he was doing his best to stand his mother’s deep affection. He stood in the long line and waited the passport check, and I stood in the outside, my eye sight pinned on his figure, moved forward step by step. Finally in came his turn, he stopped for a moment, took his passport back from the customs window and then went through a door, disappeared like a flash. I kept waiting, waiting for his last glimpse of looking back before his departure, but he never did, not a single time. Now he is 21,and study in the same university in where I teach.But even if we happened to go the same way, he is reluctant to take my car. Even we are in the same car, he’ll put on his earphone—to enjoy the music by his own, his heart is like a door,tightly closed.Sometimes I could see him waiting for the bus across the street from the window of the high building : a tall and thin young man, staring at the gray sea. I could only imagine that the inner world of his is as deep and surgent as mine,but I cannot get in. Later, the bus arrived,blocked his figure. Then it drove away, leaving a post box standing alone in the empty street. Gradually, I realized that the so said parents and children relationship only means that you are destined to see him walking away further and further. You stand on this side of the road,and see his figure gradually disappearing in the turning, and the back shadow of his figure tell you this silently: never chase forward. Gradually,I realized that my sorrow is related to another back figure. After I got my doctor’s Degree, I came back to Taiwan to teach. In the first day of registering in the university, my father drove me there with his shabby van which used to transport fodder. I didn’t realize it until I got off his van that he did not stop at the front door,instead he pulled over at a narrow alley near the side door. After unloaded my luggage, he climbed to his seat and prepared to go. He already started the engine then, rolled down the window, he leaned his head out and said: “Daughter, I am so sorry, this shabby van really doesn’t fit to send you—a college professor to school.” I watched him driving his van carefully in reverse, then getting out of the alley slowly with a ball of black smoke steamed behind him. After his van got out of my sight in the turning ,I still stood there in a muse beside my trunk. It was more than ten years later that I went to visit him in the hospital every weekend. While I pushed his wheelchair outside to take a walk ,his head drooped to his chest. Once I found his excrement flowing from his trouser legs and I bent down trying to wipe it off with my handkerchief, my dress got stained and I had to rush to Taipei to work like that. The nurse took his wheelchair from me, and I grabbed my bag, saw them walking off and stopped for a moment in the automatic glass door, then disappeared behind it. It seems like I always rushed to the airport in twilight. In front of the cremator, the coffin was like a huge and heavy drawer, sliding forward slowly. I never thought I could stand so close,no more than 5 meters from the cremator door. The drizzle swayed in the long corridor with the wind. I pulled my rain-wetted hair aside, and gazed at the coffin with deep emotion, in the hope that I will remember the last time that I saw my father off. Gradually, I realized that the so said parents and children relationship only means that you are destined to see him walking away further and further. You stand on this side of the road,and see his figure gradually disappearing in the turning, and the back shadow of his figure tell you this in silence: never chase forward.