《排华法案》：一段美国华裔移民苦难史

PBS台新纪录片《排华法案》探索第一部限制特定种族移民并禁止其成员入籍的美国法律。上图为加州一处移民中心内的华裔妇女和儿童。 PBS

“The Chinese Exclusion Act,” appearing Tuesday as part of PBS’s “American Experience,” was in the works well before the election of Donald Trump. But it feels as if it were made for a moment when border walls and immigration controls are topics of daily conversation.

《排华法案》(The Chinese Exclusion Act)于周二在PBS台的《美国印象》(American Experience)节目上映，该片在唐纳德·特朗普当选之前就已开始拍摄制作。但感觉它好像是专门为边境墙与移民控制成为日常对话主题的时刻制作的。

Directed by the PBS stalwart Ric Burns and his longtime collaborator Li-Shin Yu (who was an editor on the 2003 PBS series “Becoming American: The Chinese Experience,” which covered some of the same ground), the documentary is centered on the 1882 act of the title, the first American law to restrict the immigration of a particular ethnic group and ban its members from citizenship.

该片由PBS台资深导演里克·伯恩斯(Ric Burns)和他的长期合作者虞丽幸(Li-Shin Yu)执导（虞丽幸是2003年PBS系列片《成为美国人：华人的经历》(Becoming American: The Chinese Experience)的剪辑，该片中包括了一些与本片相同的主题）。《排华法案》围绕的是1882年实施的这一法案，它是第一部限制特定族群移民并禁止其成员入籍的美国法律。

But the film’s scope is far larger. Tracing the story of Chinese immigration from 1840 (when the United States census showed a total of four Chinese among a population of 17 million) to the present, it provides a well-documented but not well-known alternate history — a corrective to the national myth of the melting pot.

但本片的范围要大得多。它追溯了中国移民从1840年（当时美国人口普查显示，1700万人口中共有4个中国人）到现在的故事，提供了一段详尽记录但并非众所周知的另类历史，不啻为对美国大熔炉神话的一种修正。

The filmmakers and their cast of mostly Asian-American historians frame the Exclusion Act as part of a long national narrative of racism, xenophobia, predatory capitalism and political calculation. The China trade and the Opium Wars, the Civil War and the collapse of Reconstruction, and cycles of economic depression and labor unrest all figure into a story that doesn’t begin to turn until well after World War II. It’s also a cautionary tale, reminding us that open ideas about immigration and citizenship that are now under attack have only had currency since the 1960s.

电影制作人和片中出现的历史学家（大多是亚裔美国人）把《排华法案》纳入长期种族主义、仇外心理、掠夺性资本主义和政治计算的国家叙事。对华贸易和鸦片战争，南北战争与重建时期的崩溃，经济萧条和劳工动荡的循环塑造了一个直到“二战”后才有所改变的故事。这也是一个警示性的故事，提醒我们，目前遭受攻击的关于移民与公民的开放观点直到1960年代才开始盛行。

Throughout the film, the contemporary parallels smack you in the face. Chinese laborers, imported to build the western side of the transcontinental railroad, are seen as a threat when the railroad is finished and the post-Civil War depression of the 1870s drives up white unemployment. A presidential candidate (Rutherford B. Hayes) exploiting anti-immigrant sentiment loses the popular vote but wins the electoral vote. Principled opposition to a citizenship ban (mostly from Republicans) is finally outweighed by the need to court Southern lawmakers readmitted to Congress after Reconstruction.

整部影片与当代的相似之处会令你震惊。华人劳工被引进美国，在西部修建贯穿整个大陆的铁路，1870年代，铁路竣工后，后南北战争时期的经济萧条导致白人失业，此时华人劳工又被视为威胁。利用反移民情绪的总统候选人卢瑟福·B·海耶斯(Rutherford B. Hayes)在普选中失利，但在选举团投票中获胜。重建时期之后，南方立法者重回国会，对他们的迎合终于战胜了对公民权禁令的原则性反对（主要来自共和党人）。

It’s a complicated and lengthy history to pack into two hours, and it takes some focus on the viewer’s part to keep the thread. Ms. Yu and Mr. Burns don’t deviate from the style that Mr. Burns and his brother Ken have helped codify — slow pans and zooms over myriad archival photos and objects, and interviews with an engaging group of scholars that includes Mae Ngai of Columbia, Erika Lee of the University of Minnesota, K. Scott Wong of Williams College and the ubiquitous California historian Kevin Starr.

这段复杂而漫长的历史被浓缩在两个小时之内，观众需要集中注意力才能跟上故事线索。虞丽幸和伯恩斯的风格，和伯恩斯和哥哥肯·伯恩斯(Ken Burns)一同确立的那种经典风格差不多——对无数档案照片和物品进行缓慢的移动拍摄与缩放，并采访了哥伦比亚大学的艾明如(Mae Ngai)、明尼苏达大学(University of Minnesota)的李漪莲(Erika Lee)、威廉姆斯学院(Williams College)的黄玉智(K. Scott Wong)以及观众耳熟能详的加州历史学家凯文·斯塔尔(Kevin Starr)。

(You could reasonably ask why a non-Asian-American filmmaker like Mr. Burns should be the driving force in such a prominent telling of an Asian-American story. The answer, beyond the quality of the work, lies in the inevitable advantage that established figures like him and, in the case of “Becoming American,” Bill Moyers have in raising money. “The Chinese Exclusion Act” is a production of Mr. Burns’s Steeplechase Films and the Center for Asian-American Media.)

（你也许会产生这样一个合理的疑问，在对亚裔美国人故事的一次如此的重要讲述中，为什么像伯恩斯这样的非亚裔美国电影人会成为推动力量？除了作品质量，答案在于他这种成名人物势必会有的优势，而在《成为美国人》当中，比尔·莫耶斯[Bill Moyers]亦参与了筹资。《排华法案》是由伯恩斯所在的的障碍赛马电影公司[Steeplechase Films]和亚裔美国媒体中心[Center for Asian-American Media]联合制作的。）

The film isn’t only concerned with politics and legislation. There is plenty of social history, of life in Chinatowns and the profound dislocations forced on Chinese-American families, as well as an account of the horrific wave of violence (including mass lynchings) and ethnic purges that struck around 300 cities and towns in the western United States in the years after 1882.

这部电影不仅关注政治和立法，还反映了很多社会历史、唐人街的生活以及华裔家庭被迫背井离乡的经历，描述了可怕的暴力浪潮（包括大规模私刑），乃至1882年后在美国西部约300个城镇发生的种族清洗。

A section on the Page Act of 1875, a forerunner to the Exclusion Act, reveals how a ban on immigration by Asian prostitutes — which led to grueling, humiliating interviews — effectively barred Chinese women from America while greatly contributing to the sexual stereotyping of all Asian women.

1875年的《佩奇法案》(Page Act)是《排华法案》的先导，片中关于它的部分揭示了对亚洲妓女移民的禁令——其中带来了令人痛苦和难堪的访谈——该法案实质上禁止了华人女性进入美国，同时极大加强了对所有亚洲女性的性别刻板印象。

There are also heroes in the story, like the American-born Wong Kim Ark, whose victory in the Supreme Court in 1898 established the birthright to citizenship that we’ve taken for granted until recently.

故事中也有英雄，比如生于美国的黄金德(Wong Kim Ark)，1898年，他在最高法院的胜利确定了在美国出生者均享有公民权，该权利直到最近才被我们认为是理所当然的。

The volume and tenaciousness of legal challenges to the Exclusion Act, and the eloquence of Chinese immigrants who spoke out and editorialized against it, feed a recurring if not very convincing theme in the film that the Chinese were particularly attracted to the democratic values of the founding fathers.

《排华法案》遇到了大量顽强的法律挑战，以及华裔移民的雄辩，他们用言语和文字阐述了自己的反对，在影片中形成了一个反复出现——虽说不是太有说服力——的主题，即华人是一个格外认同开国先贤民主价值的群体。

The more pertinent lesson would seem to be that nothing fundamentally changed until World War II shifted American alliances and sympathies from Japan to China. The Exclusion Act, originally intended to last 10 years, extended for more than 60, and wasn’t repealed until 1943. Against fear and racism, tenaciousness and eloquence were no match.

更为中肯的教训似乎是：直到二战令美国的同盟和同情对象从日本变成中国之前，一切都没有什么根本改变。《排华法案》本来只想持续10年，后来延长到60多年，直到1943年才被废除。在恐惧和种族主义面前，顽强和雄辩不是对手。

作者：MIKE HALE

翻译：晋其角

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