张爱玲散文 精彩片段：
A Return to the Frontier
When I got off the plane in Taipei on my way to Hong Kong, I did not expect to see anyone I knew. I had asked the Chus not to meet me, knowing they were busy just then. But it was possible that they would get somebody else to come in their stead, so I was not surprised when an efficient-looking man in neat western clothes approached me. "You are Mrs. Richard Nixon?" He said in English.
I had seen many photographs of the blonde Mrs. Nixon and never imagined I resembled her. Besides, he should be able to tell a fellow Chinese even behind her dark glasses. But with a womans inability to disbelieve a compliment altogether, no matter how flagrantly untrue, I remembered that she was thin, which I undoubtedly was. Then there was those glasses. "No, I am sorry," I said, and he walked away to search among the other passengers.
It struck me as a little odd that Mrs. Nixon should come to Formosa, even if everybody is visiting the Orient just now. Anyhow there must have been some mix-up, as there was only this one embassy employee to greet her.
"Did you know Mrs. Nixon is coming today?" I asked my friends Mr. And Mrs. Chu, who had turned up after all.
"No, we havent heard," Mr. Chu said. I told them about the man who mistook me for her and what a joke that was. "Um," he said unsmiling. Then he said somewhat embarrassedly, "Theres a man who is always hanging around the airport to meet American dignitaries. Hes not quite sane."
I laughed, then went under Formosas huge wave of wistful yearning for the outside world, particularly America, its only friend and therefore in some ways a foe.
"How does it feel to be back?" Mr. Chu asked. Although I had never been there before, they were going along with the official assumption that Formosa is China, the mother country of all Chinese. I looked around the crowded airport and it really was China, not the strange one I left ten years ago under the Communists but the one I knew best and thought had vanished forever. The buzz of Mandarin voices also made it different from Hong Kong. A feeling of chronological confusion came over me.
"It feels like dreaming." And taking in all the familiar faces speaking the tones of homeland, I exclaimed, "But its not possible!" Mr. Chu smiled ruefully as if I had said, "But you are ghosts."
Mrs. Chu told me as we left the airport, "This is an ugly city, but the minute you get out of town it is beautiful."
They lodged me in a mountain inn. I got the Generals Suite, where the generals stay when they come uphill to report to the Generalissimo, who lives a few steps away across the road. The suite was reached through a series of deserted little courtyards, with its own rock garden and lotus pond. In the silence there was just the sound of the evening drizzle on the banana palm and in the bathroom a tap of sulphur water constantly running out of a stone lion mouth and splashing over the rim of the cement tank. There were rattan furniture on the tatami flooring and a wardrobe and bed with stained sheets. I told myself not to be fastidious. But there were bedbugs. Finally I had to get up near dawn to sleep on the ledge of the honor recess, where in Japanese living rooms the best vase and picture scroll are displayed. The maid was frightened when she come in the morning and could not find me.
It was plain that the generals had feminine companionship while spending the night awaiting audience with the Generalissimo. I wondered at the ease of procuring girls almost next door to that Christian and Confucian founder of the New Life Movement. Surely it was unseemly with"Heavens countenance only a foot away," as we used to describe an audience with the emperor. After I left Taipei for the countryside, I realized that prostitution was more open on this land than perhaps anywhere else in the world. In a small-town newspaper five or six advertisements of this type appeared in one day: "Joy and Happiness Prostitutes Domicile, 1st class. 124 Shin Ming Road. Swarms of pretty girls like clouds, offering the best services."
In the countryside Formosa peels back, showing older strata. There were more native Formosans than refugees. The mixed emotions of my homecoming of sorts gave way to pure tourist enthusiasm.
From time to time Mrs. Chu, sitting next to me in the bus, whispering next to me in the bus, whispered urgently, "shandi, shandi!" I just caught a glimpse of a shandi, or mountain dweller, a gray little wraith with whiskers tattooed on her cheeks carrying a baby on her back and loitering outside a shop along the highway. "Shandi, shandi!" Again the breathless little cry and a nudge. I saw gypsylike children in ragged T-shirts and skirts, carrying smaller children. "They all come to town when theres a Japanese picture on," Mrs. Chu said.
"Oh, do they speak Japanese?"