學習了解他者：毛翔青的小說《島之佔有》

Learning to Understand the Other: Timothy Mo's Novel An Insular

在這本一九八六年出版的《島之佔有》小說中，中（粵）、英混血的作者描寫了一八三○年代與鴉片戰爭的諸項歷史事件，以及隨後香港淪為殖民地的相關情節。除了摹繪英國基於貿易的利益征服大清帝國的大時代背景外，此書也可視為主角基甸‧卻斯──一位美國貿易公司年輕職員──以中國為背景下的成長小說。從最初的好奇到完全融入中國文化，結局是主角在美國成為了一位從事中國研究的講座教授。從對歐洲與中國最初相互輕視且充滿敵意的二元對立作為出發點來分析這本小說，觀察到主角逐漸超越內心潛在的種族優越感──一種建構於歐洲自我觀點成見──的改變。由於當時的中國對歐洲並不關注，因此此書內容純粹由歐洲單方面的觀點來描寫。然而主角極具穿透性的洞察力，讓歐洲與中國的文化互動成為小說化一個絕佳的範例與背景，書中人物及詮釋的方式都成為對他者進行理解的絕佳媒介。

In his novel, which appeared in 1986, the author, who himself is of mixed British-Cantonese descent, deals with the historical events leading up to the opium war in the 1830s and the subsequent foundation of the colony of Hong Kong. In addition to being a fascinating historical account of the subjugation of the Chinese Empire at the hands of the British and the mercantile colonial interests motivating it, it is also a kind of bildungsroman about Gideon Chase, the young clerk of an American trading company operating in China. After becoming initially interested and finally totally absorbed in Chinese culture, he eventually ends up as a distinguished professor of Chinese Studies in the United States. The analysis of the novel will trace the trajectory from mutual contempt and hostility between Europeans and Chinese plus its underlying binarisms to Chase's going beyond the ethnocentric perception of the Other as an aberration from a norm that is constituted by the European self. In the present case this is a one-sided process because the Chinese are singularly uninterested in the Europeans, but Gideon Chase's penetrating insights into the intricacies of Chinese culture provide a fictionalized instance of how the encounter between Europeans and Chinese could have worked out had there been more intercultural mediators like him with his hermeneutical approach to understanding the Other.