跟读练习: Author Ocean Vuong on his new book The Emperor of Gladness | 7.30 - 通过YouTube学习英语口语
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Ocean Vuong, welcome to 7.30.
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Ocean Vuong, welcome to 7.30.
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Oh, thank you so much.
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Glad to be here.
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And we're here to talk about your new book,
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Emperor of Gladness, but also to talk about you as a writer.
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Your family were Vietnamese refugees living amongst the working poor in Connecticut.
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They didn't read or write,
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but they were great storytellers.
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Is that where your great gift for writing and your impulse to write comes from?
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Oh, thank you for that.
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I would say yes.
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I mean, I was the first to read and write in my family,
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but I was not the first poet.
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They were storytellers long before I came along.
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And I think in retrospect,
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what I got sitting in those rooms in the nail salon
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and after they came home from work was a masterclass in storytelling.
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They knew when to accelerate, decelerate.
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Now I know how to call those things as scene setting, dialogue, exposition.
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But they gave me that.
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They learned it on the fly.
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And they self-mythologized because I think they realized that they were a group of women who raised all sons.
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Four women gave birth to six sons.
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It was almost Shakespearean in the contrast.
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they were in a country where they had very little power,
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and because they didn't have access to English,
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the power was degrading from them day to day,
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and yet their sons were acquiring English at an exorbitant rate.
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And so to reconfigure the family dynamics,
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they mythologized themselves, and they told stories,
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and I noticed every single time they told it,
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it would shift a little bit, little details would change.
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And I said, wait a minute,
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are we in the world of fiction or non-fiction or myth
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or epic poems where are we I guess it doesn't matter they were the first hybrid practitioners as far as my experience.
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Despite that skill of theirs
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that you're describing of course you went on to become a highly accomplished writer with with awards
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and scholarships and positions at great universities did you ever try
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and disguise your accomplishment as a writer from your mother in particular because she didn't read?
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Well, yes and no. You know,
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I think a lot of the accomplishments were just words to them.
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They didn't see it.
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I mean, you know, things that I valued in my career,
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they just thought was just interesting facts.
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But there was a lot of shame,
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I think, in moving forward.
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I think my mother was at once deeply proud of me,
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but also deeply reluctant.
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And there was a sense of regret that my son is doing what I couldn't do,
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not because I didn't have the ability,
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but I never had the opportunity.
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And she would always joke and say,
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gosh, if I spoke English,
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I would be speaking to presidents, not you fool.
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That's how she would talk to us kids.
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And I believe her.
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I think that would be true.
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And so one day something really poignant happened where I realized I came home to visit
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and I started to pick up a book and read.
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And there was a pallor that came over her face and she looked at me reading a book.
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It's a simple little book,
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part of my school assignment.
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And there was this kind of longing,
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the way people look at,
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you know, vistas or mountains or something, you know.
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And I thought, gosh, I'm never going to read in front of her again,
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because it was this kind of action that she had no access to.
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And from then on, I never picked up a book in front of my mother again.
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And we found a way that way until she passed.
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But I couldn't bear to see my mother look at me with that kind of impossible yearning.
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I think this is the first book you've written since she passed away.
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How different is that without her,
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if not the direct audience,
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the part of the reason for writing and achieving not being there?
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oh it's it's unbearable you know i think every writer tells himself i write for myself
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or one day i'll write for myself and it will be glorious
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and i felt that way too i thought gosh maybe
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when i'm much older you know 50
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or 60 i'll finally write for myself i wonder what i would do
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when i get that opportunity and at 36 i got
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that opportunity and it felt incredibly vacant and full of grief and guilt.
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You know, here I am.
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I told myself I was going to be a professor for her to take care of my family.
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You know, I tried to shift away from that quintessential immigrant narrative.
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I won't be a doctor.
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I won't be a businessman to do right in society and pull ourselves from poverty.
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I'll be a poet instead.
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And ironically, I ended up doing the same thing, but with words.
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I ended up, you know,
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trying to do the best I can to be a professor,
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to earn a living and take care of my family and my mother.
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And then now she's gone.
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And so I think for me,
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this thing that I was waiting for,
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this golden opportunity, once it came,
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I realized I never really wanted it.
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I think I much prefer to be writing for and beside her.
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But we all have to move towards this new vista eventually and here I am.
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We don't choose it, but I got a chance to do it with this book.
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You said you wanted to write a book about people who are pushed to the fringes of society,
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but you didn't want the plot to improve their lives.
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Why is that?
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Well, I think plot systems traditionally almost have a tyrannical impulse.
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It's almost like, it functions very much like corporate dogma.
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Either you're useful to us or you're out.
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We kind of cut the fat, right?
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If you don't have a function,
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then you must be ejected.
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You are no longer part of the project.
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And I felt like, is life that way?
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Or is that, are there other interesting ways to have people exist without moving into the absolute tyranny of plot?
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And that's not to say that that's the only plot there is.
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I think plot also includes pattern.
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It can include detours, meanderings.
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And for me, resisting that allowed me to preserve the characters on their own terms.
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I won't look at a character and say,
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you need to just fit into this grand machine or you're going to be spat out.
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To me, the machine has to work alongside the people.
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And it was difficult to find a way through that.
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But I think for me,
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it was really important to allow characters to exist on their
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own terms without turning them into a function for a sum total of something else.
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Now, you spent time working in a fast food restaurant which is sort of the basis for the,
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I'm assuming, basis for the fast food restaurant in this book.
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What does that world where you worked,
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what does that tell us about what and how America is?
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Oh, the fast food restaurant is a kind of perfect parable.
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And in many ways, this novel is a parable.
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It's an epic parable about America itself because fast food,
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if nothing else, is about mirages.
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It's about the fantastical.
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It's the promise of absolute goodness and delivered through deception.
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Nothing is really cooked.
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Nothing is really made.
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It's all reheated.
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And there's this kind of sanguine joy that is performed.
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Meanwhile, the employees are often underpaid,
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exhausted, stuck, overtaxed, and outmatched.
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And yet, you know, it's also the fuel of this country.
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So many of us, of all,
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you know, if you're ever stuck in an airport,
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no matter who you are,
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no matter how much your salary is,
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you might be meandering eventually over to the McDonald's.
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And so there's at once a brutal reality that labor in this country often leads us to very little prosperity,
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but also the kind of utopic promise that no matter who you are,
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you can still get a Big Mac and it will still taste the same.
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You'll get the same experience.
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The King of Spain could have the same experience as the Joe Schmo down the street,
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because everything has been sort of made into democratic, consumerist monolith.
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And that contrast of both the dark and the strange possibility and kinship was something that is deeply rooted,
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I think, in the American ethos, as I understood it.
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The characters in this novel,
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you know, they are trapped in low-wage jobs.
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Life is hard.
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But they find community.
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What is it about that community that made you want to write about it?
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I witnessed just incredible moments of kindness,
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and I don't want to romanticize wage workers.
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I'm not here to say they're any more angelic or virtuous than anybody else.
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I don't think labor or suffering makes one virtuous.
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But what I realized was that why they were so,
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my colleagues were so generous with their kindness was that they knew that when someone was down and out,
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that they were just one day away,
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one check away from being exactly where those people are.
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And so it's the proximity to despair that made generosity and kindness so open and so willing.
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We expended it without thinking about the cost.
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And I think that was really admirable to me.
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As a young person, I think it was a foundational experience in my life
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that it's not about counting how much you lose or gain through these actions.
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It's that actually when you help your community, you benefit.
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You come out better because of it.
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Now, there's also a lot of violence in these people's lives.
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You said, I've never seen anyone commit violence and feel joy after.
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What is the role of violence in this community and in people's lives?
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Well, it becomes a microcosm of American life.
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I think America is a violent country.
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It has a violent history.
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I think that's why it's very difficult for Americans in general,
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both living and in the archive,
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to truly look in the past.
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Because you have to look at slavery,
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Native American genocide, land theft, natural disaster.
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the proliferation of corporations over nature in the natural world and the destruction therein.
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And so it's really hard to look at ourselves.
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And I think that's why we prefer mirages.
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We prefer, you know, slogans like, make America great again.
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And when you ask, where is that again?
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You'll never get a year, right?
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So we perform the nostalgia because it's so hallucinatory,
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But the violence is embedded into the fabric.
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And I don't, I'm not here to judge it.
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It's there.
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It's the fact of who we are.
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I'm more interested in saying, now what?
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What is the aftermath of violence?
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You know, luckily, not all of us are vanquished in violent acts.
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We do survive.
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The question that I'm interested as a writer is how do we survive?
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In what way?
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And is there still a method of dignity left in the aftermath of the long systems of American violence
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that we still feel today?
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There is a great beauty in the way that you don't judge,
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but you pose very big questions there.
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At the same time as a writer,
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you're working in a period when people are reading less,
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where perhaps books are less valued than they were.
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What makes you hopeful that your writing can have a positive impact on people's lives?
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I think history moves in cycles,
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for better and for worse.
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And regardless of what happens or what the medium of reading is,
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maybe in 10 years, we will be beaming novels into each other's heads instantly.
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And I would be the first to be okay with that.
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I'm a slow reader myself.
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If I could receive a Moby Dick in a few seconds,
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I'll be the first to sign up.
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But at the end of the day,
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no matter what happens, language is the ultimate technology.
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We as a society, as a people,
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can have the most powerful weapons,
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the greatest medicine, the highest technology.
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But whether we live or die to defend those things or to preserve them or value them depends on language.
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All wars begin with language.
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Gunfire, violence, those are incidents.
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War requires sustained, focused violence upon a group of people that,
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through violence, we have deemed worthy of death.
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So to me, those large systems begin with books, speeches, manifestos, language.
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So we will never break away from the tussle of language,
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regardless of the medium.
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And I think the novel is one of the most capacious ways to think through it without judgment.
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There's plenty of judgment in the world,
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news reports, textbooks, judgments are everywhere.
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We judge ourselves.
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But the novel allows this moment of world building,
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action, objective performance without absolute judgment.
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And I think I'm personally much better thinker because of that.
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You know, listening to you talk,
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it's like having a giant bath in language.
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You use language in your books,
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in your poems, and when you speak with such fine clarity and such beauty.
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Do you remember when you realized you had this ability to put words together to make beautiful things?
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I think it was when I became a teacher.
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I had the great luck of being a professor at a very young age,
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relatively, 26 years old.
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Why they let me in a university at 26, I don't know.
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You'll have to ask the dean.
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I can't speak to that,
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but they let me in.
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And I think what happens is that when you step into a classroom,
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even before a single soul enters it,
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teacher, student, an empty classroom itself is a laboratory of care.
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It is filled with optimism.
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It is filled with hope and possibility.
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So when you walk into that,
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you walk into that with care.
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And language and writing is such a feeble and delicate medium.
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One comma, off place, and everything falls apart.
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You have the wrong clause,
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and the sentence just sags and falls through.
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So it becomes mimetic of the work of the civic duty of pedagogy and teaching,
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is that you have to do something with care and you're using language with care and intention and deliberateness.
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And so I think that vocation to me is more clearer to me than even the work of writing.
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The writing, it might be a byproduct of the teaching because that vocation centres care,
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delicacy and a kind of determination with hope that renews me every season.
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I've heard people say about your writing
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that it appeals in particular to young people because you speak to them so directly about feelings.
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So how important do you think it is as a writer to speak to young people about those things?
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Oh, thank you for that question.
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I think this is my 11th year as a professor.
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And what I've noticed, you know,
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in a very unsettling way is that our students,
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at least in America, I can't speak for other places,
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they are more and more self-conscious of trying.
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There's a kind of surveillance culture around social media.
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And they would say, I want to be a poet.
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I want to be a good writer.
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But it's a bit cringe.
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Right? this cringe culture that I don't want to be perceived as trying and having an effortful attempt at my dreams.
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And as a teacher, that's a horrifying sort of report from the field.
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And so I think they are absolutely scared of judgment.
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And so in fact, they perform cynicism because cynicism can be misread as it often is as intelligence.
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You know, you're disaffected, You're too cool.
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You've seen it all.
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And so they pull back.
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But in fact, they are deeply hungry for sincere, earnest effort.
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They often do it privately.
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They don't want to admit to each other that they're actually trying really hard to do what they want to do.
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But amongst their peers, I think sincerity is something we deeply hunger for, particularly young people.
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but we are embarrassed when sincerity is in the room.
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And the classroom is a wonderful place to eradicate that,
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but it's up to the teacher because you do have some sort of authority.
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You do have to set the tone.
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And if you set the tone for your students and you welcome them,
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that you won't judge them,
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that they can be sincere and earnest without being condemned or ridiculed for it,
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that they can try their best and it won't be cringy to do so,
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then you truly liberate them towards their best selves.
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You've given us so much through the beauty of your writing,
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but you're also giving us the freedom to be sincere again.
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Ocean Vuong, it's a real pleasure for me and for our audience,
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I know, to talk to you.
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Thank you very much indeed.
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Thank you, Sarah.
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It's a deep honour.
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关于本课
在本课中，学习者将通过观看Ocean Vuong的访谈视频，深入了解故事叙述的重要性以及如何将其运用到英语口语练习中。通过分析他与母亲的关系和家庭背景，学习者将获得提高英语表达能力的灵感，同时增强对文学和叙事技巧的理解。这也是一个结合了英语口语练习和shadow speech的机会，帮助学习者在真实语境中提升口语能力。
关键词汇与短语
- 故事叙述（Storytelling）
- 母亲（Mother）
- 成就（Accomplishments）
- 文化（Culture）
- 羞愧（Shame）
- 家族（Family）
- 叙事技巧（Narrative Techniques）
- 自我神话（Self-mythologized）
练习小贴士
在进行shadow speak练习时，建议你首先放慢视频播放速度，并集中注意力于Ocean Vuong的语速和语调。你可以尝试逐句模仿他的说话方式，包括情感的表达和语调的变化。这样不仅能够帮助你更好地理解内容，还能提升自己的发音和流利度。特别是在叙述故事的部分，可以注意他如何设定场景和进行对话，这些都是非常宝贵的英语口语练习的技巧。此外，你在观看视频时，可以考虑使用注释功能来记录下与视频对话不符的部分，以便日后重复练习。通过这种技巧，你将能更有效地掌握英语。
什么是跟读法？
跟读法 (Shadowing) 是一种有科学依据的语言学习技巧，最初开发用于专业口译员的培训，并由多语言者Alexander Arguelles博士普及。这个方法简单而强大：您在听英语母语原声的同时立即大声重复——就像是一个延迟1-2秒紧跟说话者的影子。与被动听力或语法练习不同，跟读法强迫您的大脑和口腔肌肉同时处理并模仿真实的讲话模式。研究表明它能显着提高发音准确性，语调，节奏，连读，听力理解和口语流利度——使其成为雅思口语备考和真实英语交流最有效的方法之一。