从高端精神追求到低层物质欲望的蜕变--解析台湾文学杂志《现代文学》小说中留美学生的艰难生活境遇

摘要

In 1960s,the Taiwan Literary Journal Modern Literature (xiantai wenxue)published a number of stories about the life of Taiwanese students studying in the United States.These stories focused on the hardship that these students suffered in the foreign land,especially their struggle for mere survival against material scarcity.Their lives were haunted with a series of contradictions:that between their dream of self-fulfillment and the limits of their families'resource;be-tween their self development and the requirement of family duties and emotional ties;between love and study/career;and between their self-esteem and the actual recognition received in the new environment.Moving from Taiwan to the United States,these students suddenly found that their noble pursuits of spiritual life become unpractical.They had to first of all find out a way to guarantee their survival.Such urgent economic pressure forced these students to undergo a painful trans-formation:growing up in the Confucian cultural atmosphere,they were forced then to abandon their identification with the ideal selfhood of a traditional Chinese intellectual and to learn to fight with tooth and claw.%台湾文学杂志《现代文学》中刊载了一系列关于留学生学习生活的小说，集中表现了主人公在异国他乡的求学过程中物质极度匮乏，只能挣扎生存的艰苦状态，深刻表现了留学生生活中切实存在的追求自我价值实现与家庭经济基础之间的矛盾；自我价值实现与伦理道德亲情之间的矛盾；忠于爱情与成就学业之间的矛盾；个人价值与当地社会认可之间的矛盾。从台湾到美国，留学生们发现自己的精神需求陡然间从高端跌入了低谷。低层次的生存需求成为他们在美国首先需要满足的。为了解决经济问题、生存问题，在儒家传统思想文化氛围中成长起来的留学生们不得不进行了一次思想上、行为上断根性的蜕变。留学生们所选择的生存之道则体现了他们与中国传统观念中文人气质、文人身份的彻底割裂。