- 2025-07-23
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吴同学的自述
To my mind, what marked point zero on the axis of memory that hurtled by in the past two years I spent at this school was the first history essay I wrote with AP US history teacher Chris who is also our Founding Foreign Principal at SHBS . It was an attempt to answer an ambitious prompt—the question of how empires shaped the world we live in today. And throughout this process of inquiry, for the first time, I felt my mind roaming with the vicissitudes of narrative and mentalities recounted by the voices of historians, and in particular, Sinologists, the voices of the English speaking world who tried to reckon with the monolith of a social entity that encompasses starkly divergent lives and beliefs of human relationships.
在我的记忆轴线上，那些在这所学校度过的两年时光如疾风掠过，而标记下零点坐标的，是我和 美国历史老师Chris-宏润博源外方校长 合写的第一篇历史论文。那篇文章试图回答一个宏大的命题——帝国如何塑造了我们当今的世界。在这一探究过程中，我的思绪第一次随历史学家的叙述与思维跌宕起伏，尤其是那些试图理解这个庞大而复杂的社会实体——囊括了截然不同的生命轨迹与人际信仰的中国——的英语世界汉学家的声音。
I came to know history as the story of how masses of humanity organize themselves and the story of how we trace our mark. History is fun. It’s fun to compile evidence of what different people thought and expressed, to piece together foreign mentalities and grapple with questions that we’ve been confronting since the beginning of time.
我开始意识到，历史是人类如何组织自身的故事，也是我们如何追溯自身痕迹的故事。历史是有趣的。那是一门关于搜集不同思想与表达的证据，拼凑出异域的思维方式，直面那些自古以来便萦绕人心的问题的学科。
Learning history unbolted a strange sort of liberty—one where a profound reservoir of knowledge is a prerequisite to interrogate what it means to be human. A liberty I didn’t know possible, and one I don’t want to live without.
学习历史打开了一种奇特的自由——在其中，对浩瀚知识的掌握是质询“何为人”的前提。这种自由，是我曾未想象过的，也是我无法割舍的。
I transferred to SHBS as a rising junior, reeling as I tried to ground the routines of my high school get-togethers with a new crowd and align my schedule with the imminent demands of application season. And I wondered why it is that the best time of our lives is to be pruned and cropped to adhere to the blueprint of a résumé we drew ourselves, as if handpicking the quirks I want to project on paper will refine the definition of personality.
我是在高二暑假前转入 SHBS 的，在努力适应新朋友间的社交节奏的同时，也调整着日程，以迎接申请季迫在眉睫的挑战。而我不禁思索，为什么人生中最美好的时光，要被修剪、裁剪，以迎合一份由我们自己勾勒的简历蓝图？仿佛精心挑选并展现在纸面上的个性特质，就能勾勒出一个完整的自我。
There are worlds to be probed, people to be felt, words to be voiced, and questions to be interrogated.
世界亟待探索，人心亟待触碰，言语亟待诉说，疑问亟待追问。
There are stories to be read.
有那么多故事值得认真对待。
The choppy, acute tempo of David Foster Wallace and his crowd of postmodernist indifference. The sprawling multitudes of Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children, which aspired to recount the lives of children born at the midnight of India’s independence—an autobiography that sears the limits of individual and collective consciousness, where children with magical powers convene to dream of their futures yet are inevitably disassembled by the contingencies of class, history, and youth. The stunning contradictions between heroism and reason, between tyrants who claim justice and the impassioned who claim faith in Sophocles’ play Antigone—and Stephanie will back me up on this, reasons for loving Ismene and why her role is key.
大卫·福斯特·华莱士及其后现代冷漠派所展现的急促、断裂的节奏。萨尔曼·鲁西迪的《午夜的孩子》铺展开来的浩瀚众生相——这本小说试图记录那些诞生于印度独立之夜的孩子们的命运，一部燃烧着个体与集体意识边界的自传，在其中，拥有魔力的孩童曾汇聚在一起，畅想未来，却终究被阶级、历史与青春的变幻拆散。英雄主义与理性之间的激烈冲突，暴君打着正义的旗号，激情者怀抱信仰的矛盾——这便是索福克勒斯的《安提戈涅》，而Stephanie 一定会支持我的观点——为什么剧中配角中的配角伊斯墨涅更值得我们的爱与钦佩，以及她的角色为何至关重要。
There are stories to be shared.
这个世界上有那么多可以被分享的故事。
Stories that amount to more than what Graham Swift dubbed “self-induced immurements” that writers are privileged to charm themselves with. Reimagining the lives of characters we encountered, bringing them to life, and seeking to reckon our own relationships with the world as we experiment with our newfound agency—when we write, create, and question—is more than the delusion of high-minded aestheticism. Stories feed the magic we need to stay attuned to reality, to create the version of reality we want, to prophesy the sort of life we seek and bind it in our minds. Stories remind us that there is love greater than ourselves and suffering greater than you and I, and that, above all, we all strive, ceaselessly, to live.
故事的价值，远不止作家格雷厄姆·斯威夫特所说的“自我施加的幽闭”——作家得以沉醉其中，构筑文字的魅力。当我们重新想象那些角色的生命，将他们赋予鲜活，或是在写作、创造、提问的过程中摸索自身与世界的关系时，我们所做的，远不止沉溺于高雅审美的幻梦。故事赋予我们维系现实的魔力，帮助我们塑造所期望的世界，预言我们追求的生活，并将其镌刻于心。这个世界上有大于你我的爱，有超越你我的苦难，有超出我们所认知，想象的生活方式。而我们都在不断地、奋力地活着。
That’s one of the reasons why I created a literary magazine (besides my own hobby of aligning text sizes and photographs). It is why I wanted to create a platform for sharing stories—not only for those who want to be heard, but also for those who feel unheard—and why I want to help people who are confused.
这正是我创办文学杂志的原因之一（当然也包括在我个人对于排版的爱好）。我希望建立一个分享故事的平台，不仅为那些渴望被听见的人，也为那些感到沉默无声的人。我希望能帮助那些困惑的人。
I found that our confusion is palpable with hope, with courage—to ask, to seek, to think, and to feel what truly matters.
我发现我们困惑中潜藏着希望和勇气。那是去追寻对我们每个人而言，真正重要之物的决心。
文 ｜
译 ｜
排版 |
G12 Ella Wu（英文）
Nicholas Han
Jang
