大学英语4(浙江大学版)原文 第二单元

All the Good Things

[1] He was in the first third-grade class I taught at Saint Mary's School in Morris, Minnesota. All 34 of my students were dear to me, but Mark Eklund was one in a million[N]. Very neat in appearance, he had that happy-to-be-alive attitude[N] that made even his occasional mischievousness delightful.

[2] Mark also talked incessantly. I had to remind him again and again that talking without permission was not acceptable. What impressed me so much, though, was his sincere response every time I had to correct him for misbehaving—"Thank you for correcting me, Sister[N]!" I didn't know what to make of it at first, but before long I became accustomed to hearing it

many times a day.

[3] One morning my patience was growing thin[N]when Mark

talked once too often, and then I made a novice-teacher's mistake.

I looked at Mark and said, "If you say one more word, I am going to

tape your mouth shut[N]!"

[4] It wasn't ten seconds later when Chuck blurted out, "Mark is talking again." [N] I hadn't asked any of the students to help me watch Mark, but since I had stated the punishment in front of the class, I had to act on it.

[5] I remember the scene as if it had occurred this morning. I walked to my desk, very deliberately opened the drawer and took out a roll of masking tape. Without saying a word, I proceeded to Mark's desk, tore off two pieces of tape and made a big X with them over his mouth. I then returned to the front of the room.

[6] As I glanced at Mark to see how he was doing, he winked at me. That did it! [N] I started laughing. The entire class cheered as I walked back to Mark's desk, removed the tape, and shrugged my shoulders. His first words were, "Thank you for correcting me, Sister."

[7] At the end of the year I was asked to teach junior-high math. The years flew by, and before I knew it[N] Mark was in my classroom again. He was more handsome than ever and just as polite[N]. Since he had to listen carefully to my instructions in the "new math", he did not talk as much in the ninth grade[N] as he had in the third.

[8] One Friday, things just didn't feel right[N]. We had worked hard on a new concept all week, and I sensed that the students were growing frustrated with themselves—and edgy with one another. I had to change the mood of the class before it got out of hand. So I asked them to list the names of the other students in the room on two sheets of paper, leaving a space between each name. Then I told them to think of the nicest thing they could say about each of their classmates and write it down.

[9] It took the remainder of the class period to finish the assignment, but as the students left the room, each one handed me the papers. Charlie smiled. Mark said, "Thank you for teaching me, Sister. Have a good weekend."

[10] That Saturday, I wrote down the name of each student on a separate sheet of paper, and I listed what everyone else had said about that individual. On Monday I gave each student his or her list. Some of them ran two pages. Before long, the entire class was smiling. "Really?" I heard whispered[N]. "I never knew that meant anything to anyone!" "I didn't know others liked me so much!"

[11] No one ever mentioned those papers in class again. I never knew if they discussed them after class or with their parents. But it didn't matter. The exercise had accomplished its purpose. The students were happy with themselves and one another again.

[12] That group of students moved on. Several years later, after I returned from a vacation, my parents met me at the airport. As we were driving home, Mother asked the usual questions about the trip—the weather, my experiences in general. There was a slight lull in the conversation. Mother gave Dad a sideways glance and simply said, "Dad?" My father cleared his throat as he usually did before saying something important. "The Eklunds called last night," he began.

[13] "Really?" I said. "I haven't heard from them for several years. I wonder how Mark is."

[14] Dad responded quietly. "Mark was killed in Vietnam," he said. "The funeral is tomorrow, and his parents would like it if you could attend." To this day I can still point to the exact spot on I-494[N] where Dad told me about Mark.

[15] I had never seen a serviceman in a military coffin before. Mark looked so handsome, so mature. All I could think at that moment was, Mark, I would give all the masking tape in the world if only you could talk to me[N].

[16] After the funeral, most of Mark's former classmates headed to Chuck's farmhouse for lunch. Mark's mother and father were there, obviously waiting for me. "We want to show you something," his

father said, taking a wallet out of his pocket. "They found this on Mark when

he was killed. We thought you might recognize it."

[17] Opening the billfold, he carefully removed two worn pieces of

notebook paper that had obviously been taped, folded and refolded many

times. I knew without looking that the papers were the ones on which I had

listed all the good things each of Mark's classmates had said about him.

"Thank you so much for doing that," Mark's mother said. "As you can see,

Mark treasured it."

[18] Mark's classmates started to gather around us. Charlie smiled rather sheepishly and said, "I still have my list. It's in the top drawer of my desk at home." Chuck's wife said, "Chuck asked me to put his in our wedding album." "I have mine too," Marilyn said. "It's in my diary." Then Vicki, another

classmate, reached into her pocket-book, took out her wallet and showed her worn and ragged list to the group. "I carry this with me at all times," Vicki said without hesitation. "I think we all saved our lists."

[19] That's when I finally sat down and cried. I cried for Mark and for all his friends who would never see him again. (1050 words)

Mother Tongue

Amy Tan

[1] I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language—the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all—all the Englishes I grew up with.

[2] Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life, and my book, The Joy Luck Club. The talk was going along well enough until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her—a speech filled with carefully constructed grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.

[3] Just last week, I was walking down

the street with my mother, and I again found

myself conscious of the English I was using,

the English I do use with her. We were talking

about the price of new and used furniture and I

heard myself saying this: "Not waste money

that way." My husband was with us as well,

and he didn't notice any switch in my English.

And then I realized why. It's because over the

twenty years that we have been together I've

often used the same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with.

[4] You should know that my mother's expressive command of English doesn't reflect how much she actually understands[N]. She reads financial reports, listens to Wall Street Week (a TV financial news program), converses daily with her stockbroker, and reads many types of books with ease. Yet some of my friends tell me they only understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother's English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It's my mother tongue. Her language, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world.

[5] Lately, I've been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to other people as "broken" English. But I shrink with pain when I say that. It always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than "broken", as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked certain wholeness and soundness. I've heard other terms used, "limited English", for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people's perceptions of the "limited" English speaker.

[6] I know this for a fact[N], because when I was growing up, my mother's "limited" English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.

[7] My mother has long realized the limitations of her English as well. When I was fifteen, she used to ask me to call people on the phone to pretend I was she. In this guise, I was forced to ask for information or even complain and yell at people who had been rude to her. One time it was a call to her stockbroker in New York. She had cashed out her small stock portfolio[N] and it just so happened we were going to go to New York the next week, our very first trip outside California. I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not very convincing, "This is Mrs. Tan."

[8] And my mother was standing in the back whispering, "Why he don't send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money."

[9] And then I said in perfect English, "Yes, I'm getting rather concerned. You had agreed to send the check two weeks ago, but it hasn't arrived."

[10] Then she began to talk more loudly, "what he want, I come to New York tell him front of his boss, you cheating me?" And I was trying to calm her down, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker, "I can't tolerate any more excuses. If I don't receive the check immediately, I am going to

speak to your manager when I'm in New York next

week."

[11] Why were there not more Asian Americans

represented[N]in American literature? Why are there

few Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so many Chinese students go into engineering? Well, these are broad sociological questions I can't begin to answer. But I have noticed in surveys that Asian students, as a whole, always do significantly better on math achievement tests than in English. And this makes me think that there are other Asian-American students whose English spoken in the home might also be described as "broken" or "limited". And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing and into math and science, which is what happened to me. Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me[N]. I became an English major my first year in college, after being enrolled as a pre-med. (1079 words)