Hillbilly Elegy Booknote
/JD Vance
◆ To these folks, poverty is the family tradition—their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.
◆ We do not like outsiders or people who are different from us, whether the difference lies in how they look, how they act, or, most important, how they talk. To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart.
我们不喜欢外来者或与我们不同的人，无论这种不同在于他们的外表、行为，还是最重要的是他们的谈话方式。要了解我，你必须了解我内心深处是一个苏格兰-爱尔兰乡巴佬。
◆ my home is a hub of misery.
◆ While reality permits some degree of cynicism, the fact that hillbillies like me are more down about the future than many other groups—some of whom are clearly more destitute than we are—suggests that something else is going on.
虽然现实允许一定程度的愤世嫉俗，但像我这样的乡下人对未来比许多其他群体更悲观——其中一些人显然比我们更贫穷——的事实表明，还有其他原因。
◆ Indeed it is. We’re more socially isolated than ever, and we pass that isolation down to our children. Our religion has changed—built around churches heavy on emotional rhetoric but light on the kind of social support necessary to enable poor kids to do well. Many of us have dropped out of the labor force or have chosen not to relocate for better opportunities.
◆ It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.
◆ There is a lack of agency here—a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself. This is distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America.
◆ Nor am I an unbiased observer. Nearly every person you will read about is deeply flawed. Some have tried to murder other people, and a few were successful. Some have abused their children, physically or emotionally. Many abused (and still abuse) drugs. But I love these people, even those to whom I avoid speaking for my own sanity. And if I leave you with the impression that there are bad people in my life, then I am sorry, both to you and to the people so portrayed. For there are no villains in this story. There’s just a ragtag band of hillbillies struggling to find their way—both for their sake and, by the grace of God, for mine.
Chapter 1
◆ Still, I always distinguished “my address” from “my home.” My address was where I spent most of my time with my mother and sister, wherever that might be. But my home never changed: my great-grandmother’s house, in the holler, in Jackson, Kentucky.
◆ Why, I’d ask my grandma—whom we all called Mamaw—did everyone stop for the passing hearse? “Because, honey, we’re hill people. And we respect our dead.”
我会问我的奶奶——我们都叫她“姥姥”——为什么每个人都为经过的灵车停下来？“因为，亲爱的，我们是山里人。我们尊重死者。”
◆ The surrounding mountains were paradise to a child, and I spent much of my time terrorizing the Appalachian fauna: No turtle, snake, frog, fish, or squirrel was safe. I’d run around with my cousins, unaware of the ever-present poverty or Mamaw Blanton’s deteriorating health.
◆ She loathed disloyalty, and there was no greater disloyalty than class betrayal.
◆ “There is nothing lower than the poor stealing from the poor. It’s hard enough as it is. We sure as hell don’t need to make it even harder on each other.”
她痛恨不忠，而最大的不忠莫过于背叛阶级。
“穷人偷窃穷人，是最卑劣的行为。本来就很难了。我们肯定不需要让彼此的日子更难过。”
◆ There were many explanations, but they all had one theme: The people of Breathitt hated certain things, and they didn’t need the law to snuff them out.
◆ “Man found dead. Foul play expected.” “Foul play expected?” my grandmother would roar. “You’re goddamned right. Bloody Breathitt got to that son of a bitch.”
◆ Some people may conclude that I come from a clan of lunatics. But the stories made me feel like hillbilly royalty, because these were classic good-versus-evil stories, and my people were on the right side.
◆ My people were extreme, but extreme in the service of something—defending a sister’s honor or ensuring that a criminal paid for his crimes.
◆ Mamaw shielded me from the worst of Jackson, but you can keep reality at bay only so long.
◆ When I asked Rick’s son what the young father did for a living, he told me the man had no job and was proud of it. But, he added, “they’re mean, so we just try to avoid them.”
◆ Nevertheless, parents send their children to these schools because they have little extra money, and the high school fails to send its students to college with alarming consistency. The people are physically unhealthy, and without government assistance they lack treatment for the most basic problems. Most important, they’re mean about it—they will hesitate to open their lives up to others for the simple reason that they don’t wish to be judged.
◆ Their paper suggests that hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them, or by pretending better truths exist. This tendency might make for psychological resilience, but it also makes it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly.
◆ We tend to overstate and to understate, to glorify the good and ignore the bad in ourselves. This is why the folks of Appalachia reacted strongly to an honest look at some of its most impoverished people. It’s why I worshipped the Blanton men, and it’s why I spent the first eighteen years of my life pretending that everything in the world was a problem except me.
◆ Jackson, like the Blanton men, is full of contradictions.
Chapter 2
◆ My grandparents—Mamaw and Papaw—were, without question or qualification, the best things that ever happened to me. They spent the last two decades of their lives showing me the value of love and stability and teaching me the life lessons that most people learn from their parents. Both did their part to ensure that I had the self-confidence and the right opportunities to get a fair shot at the American Dream.
◆ As Mamaw used to say, you can take the boy out of Kentucky, but you can’t take Kentucky out of the boy.
◆ As one study noted, “Migration did not so much destroy neighborhoods and families as transport them.” In 1950s Middletown, my grandparents found themselves in a situation both new and familiar. New because they were, for the first time, cut off from the extended Appalachian support network to which they were accustomed; familiar because they were still surrounded by hillbillies.
◆ For starters, a remarkable stigma attached to people who left the hills of Kentucky for a better life. Hillbillies have a phrase—“too big for your britches”—to describe those who think they’re better than the stock they came from.
首先，对于那些离开肯塔基州山里去追求更好生活的移民来说，他们背负着沉重的耻辱感。山里人有句话形容那些自以为比父辈强的人，叫“太出息了”。
他们强烈地感觉到自己抛弃了家人，不管他们做什么工作，人们都期望他们定期回家探亲。
经济上的流动伴随着很多压力，也伴随着很多新的责任。
◆ Rather, these migrants disrupted a broad set of assumptions held by northern whites about how white people appeared, spoke, and behaved . . . the disturbing aspect of hillbillies was their racialness. Ostensibly, they were of the same racial order (whites) as those who dominated economic, political, and social power in local and national arenas. But hillbillies shared many regional characteristics with the southern blacks arriving in Detroit.”
而是这些移民扰乱了北方白人关于白人外貌、谈吐和行为的广泛假设……乡巴佬令人不安的一面是他们的种族性。表面看来，他们属于同一个种族（白人），与那些在当地和国家舞台上主宰经济、政治和社会力量的人属于同一个种族。但是，乡巴佬与来到底特律的南方黑人有许多地区特征。”
◆ Mamaw had her dreams but never the opportunity to pursue them. Her greatest love was children, in both a specific sense (her children and grandchildren were the only things in the world she seemed to enjoy in old age) and a general one (she watched shows about abused, neglected, and missing kids and used what little spare money she had to purchase shoes and school supplies for the neighborhood’s poorest children).
◆ She seemed to feel the pain of neglected kids in a deeply personal way and spoke often of how she hated people who mistreated children. I never understood where this sentiment came from—whether she herself was abused as a child, perhaps, or whether she just regretted that her childhood had ended so abruptly. There is a story there, though I’ll likely never hear it.
她似乎以一种非常私人的方式感受到了被忽视的儿童的痛苦，并经常说起她痛恨虐待儿童的人。我一直不明白这种情绪从何而来——也许她自己小时候就受过虐待，也许她只是后悔自己的童年结束得如此突然。虽然我可能永远也听不到这个故事了。
Chapter 3
◆ It was that culture from back then that expected the men were going to go out and do what they wanted to do.
◆ I couldn’t believe that mild-mannered Papaw, whom I adored as a child, was such a violent drunk. His behavior was due at least partly to Mamaw’s disposition. She was a violent nondrunk. And she channeled her frustrations into the most productive activity imaginable: covert war.
我无法相信，我小时候崇拜的温文尔雅的外公，竟然是个如此暴力的醉鬼。他的行为至少在一定程度上要归咎于外婆的脾气。她是个暴力的非醉鬼。她把她的挫败感转化为人们所能想象的最富有成效的活动：秘密战争。
◆ Because they were hill people, they had to keep their two lives separate. No outsiders could know about the familial strife—with outsiders defined very broadly.
◆ It’s not obvious to anyone why Mamaw and Papaw’s marriage fell apart. Perhaps Papaw’s alcoholism got the best of him. Uncle Jimmy suspects that he eventually “ran around” on Mamaw. Or maybe Mamaw just cracked—with three living kids, one dead one, and a host of miscarriages in between, who could have blamed her?
◆ What Papaw didn’t appreciate was that Armco offered something more than money: the ability to get out of a house where your mother threw vases at your father’s forehead.
Chapter 4
◆ Middletown is generic in other ways. It exemplified the economic expansion of the manufacturing-based Rust Belt town. Socioeconomically, it is largely working-class. Racially, there are lots of white and black people (the latter the product of an analogous great migration) but few others. And culturally, it is very conservative, although cultural conservatism and political conservatism are not always aligned in Middletown.
米德尔敦在其他方面也很普通。它体现了以制造业为主的“铁锈地带”城镇的经济扩张。从社会经济方面来说，这里主要是工人阶级。从种族上说，这里有很多白人和黑人（后者是类似的大迁徙的结果），但其他人很少。从文化上说，这里非常保守，尽管在米德尔敦，文化保守主义和政治保守主义并不总是一致的。
◆ Then there was the area where we lived—mostly single-family homes, with abandoned warehouses and factories within walking distance. Looking back, I don’t know if the “really poor” areas and my block were any different, or whether these divisions were the constructs of a mind that didn’t want to believe it was really poor.
◆ Main Street is now the place you avoid after dark.
◆ This has occurred for complicated reasons. Federal housing policy has actively encouraged homeownership, from Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act to George W. Bush’s ownership society. But in the Middletowns of the world, homeownership comes at a steep social cost: As jobs disappear in a given area, declining home values trap people in certain neighborhoods. Even if you’d like to move, you can’t, because the bottom has fallen out of the market—you now owe more than any buyer is willing to pay. The costs of moving are so high that many people stay put. Of course, the people trapped are usually those with the least money; those who can afford to leave do so.
◆ The other reason most still call it Armco is that Kawasaki was a Japanese company, and in a town full of World War II vets and their families, you’d have thought that General Tojo himself had decided to set up shop in southwest Ohio when the merger was announced. The opposition was mostly a bunch of noise. Even Papaw—who once promised he’d disown his children if they bought a Japanese car—stopped complaining a few days after they announced the merger. “The truth is,” he told me, “that the Japanese are our friends now. If we end up fighting any of those countries, it’ll be the goddamned Chinese.”
◆ “A lot of students just don’t understand what’s out there,” she told me, shaking her head. “You have the kids who plan on being baseball players but don’t even play on the high school team because the coach is mean to them. Then you have those who aren’t doing very well in school, and when you try to talk to them about what they’re going to do, they talk about AK. ‘Oh, I can get a job at AK. My uncle works there.’ It’s like they can’t make the connection between the situation in this town and the lack of jobs at AK.” My initial reaction was: How could these kids not understand what the world was like? Didn’t they notice their town changing before their very eyes? But then I realized: We didn’t, so why would they?
◆ Even after most American car companies transitioned away from steel-bodied cars, Papaw would stop at used-car dealerships whenever he saw an old Ford or Chevy. “Armco made this steel,” he’d tell me. It was one of the few times that he ever betrayed a sense of genuine pride.
◆ Despite that pride, he had no interest in my working there: “Your generation will make its living with their minds, not their hands,” he once told me. The only acceptable career at Armco was as an engineer, not as a laborer in the weld shop. A lot of other Middletown parents and grandparents must have felt similarly: To them, the American Dream required forward momentum. Manual labor was honorable work, but it was their generation’s work—we had to do something different. To move up was to move on. That required going to college.
◆ It’s not like parents and teachers never mention hard work. Nor do they walk around loudly proclaiming that they expect their children to turn out poorly. These attitudes lurk below the surface, less in what people say than in how they act. One of our neighbors was a lifetime welfare recipient, but in between asking my grandmother to borrow her car or offering to trade food stamps for cash at a premium, she’d blather on about the importance of industriousness. “So many people abuse the system, it’s impossible for the hardworking people to get the help they need,” she’d say. This was the construct she’d built in her head: Most of the beneficiaries of the system were extravagant moochers, but she—despite never having worked in her life—was an obvious exception.
这并不是说父母和老师从来不提努力学习。他们也不会到处大声宣告，他们希望自己的孩子将来一事无成。这些态度隐藏在表面之下，与其说表现在人们说的话上，不如说表现在他们的行为上。
◆ I was certain my ignorance was rooted in some failure of character. I just felt stupid.
◆ But to a little kid who wanted to do well in school, it was a crushing defeat. In my immature brain, I didn’t understand the difference between intelligence and knowledge. So I assumed I was an idiot.
Chapter 5
◆ We’d all eventually learn that there was much to dislike about Bob. But what drove Mamaw’s initial dislike were the parts of him that most resembled her. Mamaw apparently understood what would take me another twenty years to learn: that social class in America isn’t just about money. And her desire that her children do better than she had done extended past their education and employment and into the relationships they formed. When it came to spouses for her kids and parents for her grandkids, Mamaw felt, whether she knew it consciously, that she wasn’t good enough.
◆ “One time I got in a fight and you told me that I did good,” I told her. She said, “Well, then, I was wrong. You shouldn’t fight unless you have to.” Now, that made an impression. Mamaw never admitted mistakes.
◆ Mom had a lot of Mamaw’s fire, which meant that she never allowed herself to become a victim during domestic disputes. It also meant that she often escalated normal disagreements beyond where they should go.
◆ Mom and Bob’s problems were my first introduction to marital conflict resolution. Here were the takeaways: Never speak at a reasonable volume when screaming will do; if the fight gets a little too intense, it’s okay to slap and punch, so long as the man doesn’t hit first; always express your feelings in a way that’s insulting and hurtful to your partner; if all else fails, take the kids and the dog to a local motel, and don’t tell your spouse where to find you—if he or she knows where the children are, he or she won’t worry as much, and your departure won’t be as effective.
妈妈和鲍勃的问题是我第一次接触婚姻冲突解决。以下是我学到的经验：如果大喊大叫可以解决问题，就不要心平气和地讲道理；如果争吵过于激烈，可以打耳光和拳头，但男人不能先动手；用侮辱和伤害伴侣的方式表达你的感受；如果其他方法都失败了，带着孩子和狗去当地的汽车旅馆，不要告诉你的配偶去哪里找你——如果他或她知道孩子们在哪里，他或她就不会那么担心，你的离开也不会那么有效。
◆ Not every day was like that, of course. But even when the house was ostensibly peaceful, our lives were so charged that I was constantly on guard. Mom and Bob never smiled at each other or said nice things to Lindsay and me anymore. You never knew when the wrong word would turn a quiet dinner into a terrible fight, or when a minor childhood transgression would send a plate or book flying across the room. It was like we were living among land mines—one wrong step, and kaboom.
当然，不是每一天都是这样。但即使房子表面上很平静，我们的生活也充满了压力，我总是保持警惕。妈妈和鲍勃不再对彼此微笑，也不再对我和林赛说好话。你永远不知道一个错误的词会把安静的晚餐变成一场可怕的争吵，或者一个轻微的童年过失会把盘子或书扔过房间。就像我们生活在地雷区一样——一步走错，就会爆炸。
◆ Mom was released from jail on bond and prosecuted for a domestic violence misdemeanor. The case depended entirely on me. Yet during the hearing, when asked if Mom had ever threatened me, I said no. The reason was simple: My grandparents were paying a lot of money for the town’s highest-powered lawyer. They were furious with my mother, but they didn’t want their daughter in jail, either. The lawyer never explicitly encouraged dishonesty, but he did make it clear that what I said would either increase or decrease the odds that Mom spent additional time in prison. “You don’t want your mom to go to jail, do you?” he asked. So I lied, with the express understanding that even though Mom would have her liberty, I could live with my grandparents whenever I wished. Mom would officially retain custody, but from that day forward I lived in her house only when I chose to—and Mamaw told me that if Mom had a problem with the arrangement, she could talk to the barrel of Mamaw’s gun. This was hillbilly justice, and it didn’t fail me.
妈妈被保释出狱，并被控犯有家庭暴力轻罪。这个案子完全取决于我。然而，在听证会上，当被问及妈妈是否曾威胁过我时，我说没有。原因很简单：我的祖父母花了很多钱请了镇上最有权势的律师。他们对妈妈很生气，但他们也不希望自己的女儿坐牢。律师从未明确鼓励过我不诚实，但他确实明确表示，我说的话要么会增加要么会减少妈妈在监狱里多待的时间的可能性。“你不希望你妈妈坐牢，对吧？”他问道。所以，我撒了谎，明确知道即使妈妈会获得自由，我也可以随心所欲地和祖父母住在一起。妈妈将正式保留监护权，但从那天起，我只有在自己选择的情况下才能住在她家——姥姥告诉我，如果妈妈对这种安排有异议，她可以用枪指着妈妈。这是乡下人的正义，它没有辜负我。
Chapter 6
◆ And unless you’re a particularly capable sociopath, dishonesty can only take you so far. So, for a time, I dutifully answered, walking people through the tangled web of familial relationships that I’d grown accustomed to.
而且，除非你是一个能力特别强的反社会者，否则不诚实只能让你走到这一步。所以，有一段时间，我尽职尽责地回答了这个问题，向人们解释了我已经习惯的错综复杂的家庭关系。我有一个同父异母的哥哥和姐姐，但我从未见过他们，因为我的生父把我送了人。
◆ It wore the pain of a defeat known by only a person who experiences the highest high and the lowest low in a matter of minutes.
◆ I stood in the narrow walkway that separated the living room from the dining room and asked Mamaw a question that had been on my mind since she ordered Mom to drive us home safely. I knew what she’d say, but I guess I just wanted reassurance. “Mamaw, does God love us?” She hung her head, gave me a hug, and began to cry.
◆ When I asked Mamaw if God loved us, I asked her to reassure me that this religion of ours could still make sense of the world we lived in. I needed reassurance of some deeper justice, some cadence or rhythm that lurked beneath the heartache and chaos.
当我问姥姥上帝是否爱我们时，我请她让我放心，我们信仰的宗教仍然可以理解我们所生活的世界。我需要一些更深层次的正义、一些隐藏在心痛和混乱之下的韵律或节奏来让我放心。
◆ Of all the things that I hated about my childhood, nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures. To her credit, Mom had avoided abusive or neglectful partners, and I never felt mistreated by any of the men she brought into our home. But I hated the disruption. And I hated how often these boyfriends would walk out of my life just as I’d begun to like them. Lindsay, with the benefit of age and wisdom, viewed all of the men skeptically. She knew that at some point they’d be gone. With Bob’s departure, I had learned the same lesson.
在我童年时代所痛恨的所有事情中，没有什么比“父亲形象”的旋转门更让我痛恨的了。值得赞扬的是，妈妈避免了暴虐或疏忽的伴侣，我也从未觉得她带回家的任何男人对我不好。但我痛恨这种干扰。我痛恨这些男朋友总是会在我开始喜欢他们的时候离开我的生活。林赛在年龄和智慧的帮助下，以怀疑的眼光看待所有男人。她知道他们总有一天会离开。随着鲍勃的离开，我也学到了同样的教训。
◆ In the end, the only lesson that took was that you can’t depend on people. “I learned that men will disappear at the drop of a hat,” Lindsay once said. “They don’t care about their kids; they don’t provide; they just disappear, and it’s not that hard to make them go.”
最后，我唯一吸取的教训是，你不能依赖别人。“我明白了男人会在一瞬间消失，”林赛曾经说过，“他们不在乎孩子；他们不提供；他们就消失了，让他们消失并不难。”
◆ MIT economist Jonathan Gruber even found that the relationship was causal: It’s not just that people who happen to live successful lives also go to church, it’s that church seems to promote good habits.
◆ Despite their reputation for clinging to their religion, the folks back home resembled Mamaw more than Dad: deeply religious but without any attachment to a real church community.
◆ For the first time, I heard his side of the story: that the adoption had nothing to do with a desire to avoid child support and that, far from simply “giving me away,” as Mom and Mamaw had said, Dad had hired multiple lawyers and done everything within reason to keep me.
◆ I don’t doubt the truth of this account, and though I empathize with the obvious difficulty of the decision, I have never felt comfortable with the idea of leaving your child’s fate to signs from God.
◆ I’d heard people joke that if you played Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” backward, you’d hear some evil incantation, but a member of Dad’s church spoke about the Zeppelin myth as if it were actually true.
◆ These were quirks, and at first I understood them as little more than strict rules that I could either comply with or get around. Yet I was a curious kid, and the deeper I immersed myself in evangelical theology, the more I felt compelled to mistrust many sectors of society. Evolution and the Big Bang became ideologies to confront, not theories to understand.
这些都是怪癖，起初我理解它们不过是严格的规定，要么遵守，要么避开。然而我是个好奇的孩子，我越深入浸信会神学，就越觉得必须对社会的很多领域心存怀疑。进化论和宇宙大爆炸成了要面对的意识形态，而不是要理解的理论。
◆ As a young teenager thinking seriously for the first time about what I believed and why I believed it, I had an acute sense that the walls were closing in on “real” Christians.
作为一个十几岁的少年，我第一次认真思考自己的信仰和信仰的原因，我敏锐地意识到，“真正的”基督徒正在被围困。
Chapter 7
◆ To this day, being able to “take advantage” of someone is the measure in my mind of having a parent.
◆ We recognized instinctively that many of the people we depended on weren’t supposed to play that role in our lives, so much so that it was one of the first things Lindsay thought of when she learned of Papaw’s death. We were conditioned to feel that we couldn’t really depend on people—that, even as children, asking someone for a meal or for help with a broken-down automobile was a luxury that we shouldn’t indulge in too much lest we fully tap the reservoir of goodwill serving as a safety valve in our lives. Mamaw and Papaw did everything they could to fight that instinct.
我们本能地意识到，我们依赖的很多人并不应该在我们的生活中扮演那样的角色，以至于当林赛得知外公去世的消息时，第一个想到的就是这一点。我们习惯于觉得我们无法真正依赖别人——即使还是孩子的时候，向别人要点吃的或者在汽车抛锚时寻求帮助也是一种奢侈，我们不应该过多沉溺其中，以免我们完全耗尽生活中充当安全阀的善意。外公外婆尽其所能地与这种本能作斗争。
◆ “the measure of a man is how he treats the women in his family.” His wisdom came from experience, from his own earlier failures with treating the women in his family well.
◆ Though she never said anything to make me feel unwanted, Mamaw’s life had been a constant struggle: From the poverty of the holler to Papaw’s abuse, from Aunt Wee’s teenage marriage to Mom’s rap sheet, Mamaw had spent the better part of her seven decades managing crises.
◆ In the months after Papaw’s death, I remembered the woman I found in an isolated corner of Deaton’s funeral home and couldn’t shake the feeling that, no matter what aura of strength Mamaw projected, that other woman lived somewhere inside her.
◆ Perhaps it was the setting, or perhaps it was the fact that Lindsay was almost eighteen, but as my sister confronted my mother, I began to see my sister as the real adult. And our routine at home only enhanced her stature.
Chapter 8
◆ “Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?” I asked. At fourteen, I knew at least a little about professional ethics. “Aren’t you supposed to ask me what I think about things and not just criticize me?” I launched into an hour-long summary of my life to that point.
◆ I explained the situation well enough: After an hour, she said simply, “Perhaps we should meet alone.”
◆ Mom had a massive blind spot in the way that she perceived the world.
◆ but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.”
但令人惊讶的是，在关于穷孩子为什么在学校挣扎的整个讨论中，重点完全放在公共机构上。正如我以前高中的一位老师最近告诉我的那样，“他们想让我们成为这些孩子的牧羊人。但没有人想谈论这样一个事实：他们中的许多人是由狼抚养长大的。”
◆ The constant moving and fighting, the seemingly endless carousel of new people I had to meet, learn to love, and then forget—this, and not my subpar public school, was the real barrier to opportunity.
Chapter 9
◆ I exploded. I told Mom that if she wanted clean piss, she should stop fucking up her life and get it from her own bladder. I told Mamaw that enabling Mom made it worse and that if she had put her foot down thirty years earlier, then maybe Mom wouldn’t be begging her son for clean piss. I told Mom that she was a shitty mother and I told Mamaw that she was a shitty mother, too. The color drained from Mamaw’s face, and she refused to even look me in the eye. What I had said had clearly struck a nerve.
◆ Her life was a clinic in how to lose faith in people, but Mamaw always found a way to believe in the people she loved.
她的生活是一个关于如何失去对人的信任的诊所，但外祖母总能找到相信她所爱的人的方法。所以我不后悔心软。
◆ More important, she was a hard woman to live with, quick-witted and sharp-tongued.
◆ For reasons I never quite understood, Mom equated money with affection. Perhaps she felt that I would never appreciate that she loved me unless she offered a wad of spending money. But I never cared about the money. I just wanted her to be healthy.
出于我永远无法理解的原因，妈妈把金钱等同于感情。也许她觉得，除非她给我一大笔零花钱，否则我就不会明白她有多爱我。但我从来不在乎钱。我只想让她健康。
◆ According to Middletown High School legend, a student called in a bomb threat during one of Selby’s exams, hiding the explosive device in a bag in his locker. With the entire school evacuated outside, Selby marched into the school, retrieved the contents of the kid’s locker, marched outside, and threw those contents into a trash can. “I’ve had that kid in class; he’s not smart enough to make a functioning bomb,” Selby told the police officers gathered at the school. “Now let my students go back to class to finish their exams.”
◆ After a few months, I came home and asked Mamaw why only poor people bought baby formula. “Don’t rich people have babies, too?” Mamaw had no answers, and it would be many years before I learned that rich folks are considerably more likely to breast-feed their children.
几个月后，我回到家，问姥姥为什么只有穷人买婴儿配方奶粉。“富人不也有孩子吗？”姥姥没有答案，很多年后我才了解到，富人更有可能给孩子喂母乳。
◆ Political scientists have spent millions of words trying to explain how Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly Republican in less than a generation. Some blame race relations and the Democratic Party’s embrace of the civil rights movement.
◆ As far back as the 1970s, the white working class began to turn to Richard Nixon because of a perception that, as one man put it, government was “payin’ people who are on welfare today doin’ nothin’! They’re laughin’ at our society! And we’re all hardworkin’ people and we’re gettin’ laughed at for workin’ every day!”
◆ Despite our efforts to draw bright lines between the working and nonworking poor, Mamaw and I recognized that we shared a lot in common with those whom we thought gave our people a bad name. Those Section 8 recipients looked a lot like us. The matriarch of the first family to move in next door was born in Kentucky but moved north at a young age as her parents sought a better life. She’d gotten involved with a couple of men, each of whom had left her with a child but no support. She was nice, and so were her kids. But the drugs and the late-night fighting revealed troubles that too many hillbilly transplants knew too well. Confronted with such a realization of her own family’s struggle, Mamaw grew frustrated and angry.
尽管我们努力在工作穷人与非工作穷人之间划清界限，但姥姥和我认识到，我们与那些我们认为给我们的同胞带来坏名声的人有很多共同之处。那些第8区补助的领取者看起来和我们很像。第一个搬进隔壁的家庭的女家长出生在肯塔基州，但年轻时随父母搬到北方，寻求更好的生活。她曾与几个男人交往过，每个男人都给她留下了一个孩子，但没有抚养费。她很好，她的孩子也很好。但毒品和深夜的争吵暴露了太多移居山里的人所熟知的麻烦。面对自己家庭挣扎的现实，姥姥变得沮丧和愤怒。
◆ In her more compassionate moments, Mamaw asked if it made any sense that our society could afford aircraft carriers but not drug treatment facilities—like Mom’s—for everyone.
在她更富有同情心的时刻，奶奶会问，我们的社会能够负担得起航空母舰，却不能为每个人提供像妈妈这样的药物治疗设施，这有什么道理。
◆ Mamaw’s sentiments occupied wildly different parts of the political spectrum. Depending on her mood, Mamaw was a radical conservative or a European-style social Democrat. Because of this, I initially assumed that Mamaw was an unreformed simpleton and that as soon as she opened her mouth about policy or politics, I might as well close my ears. Yet I quickly realized that in Mamaw’s contradictions lay great wisdom. I had spent so long just surviving my world, but now that I had a little space to observe it, I began to see the world as Mamaw did. I was scared, confused, angry, and heartbroken. I’d blame large businesses for closing up shop and moving overseas, and then I’d wonder if I might have done the same thing. I’d curse our government for not helping enough, and then I’d wonder if, in its attempts to help, it actually made the problem worse.
外祖母的观点在政治光谱上占据了截然不同的位置。根据心情的不同，外祖母有时是一个激进的保守派，有时是一个欧洲式的社会民主党人。因此，我起初认为，外祖母是一个没有开化的笨蛋，只要她一开口谈论政策或政治，我就应该堵上耳朵。然而，我很快意识到，外祖母的矛盾中蕴含着大智慧。我花了很长时间才在这个世界上生存下来，但现在我有了观察这个世界的一小片空间，我开始像外祖母那样看待这个世界。我感到害怕、困惑、愤怒和心碎。我责怪大企业关门停业，迁往海外，然后我又怀疑自己是否也会这样做。我诅咒我们的政府没有提供足够的帮助，然后我又怀疑，政府在试图提供帮助的过程中，实际上使问题变得更糟。
◆ As millions migrated north to factory jobs, the communities that sprouted up around those factories were vibrant but fragile: When the factories shut their doors, the people left behind were trapped in towns and cities that could no longer support such large populations with high-quality work. Those who could—generally the well educated, wealthy, or well connected—left, leaving behind communities of poor people. These remaining folks were the “truly disadvantaged”—unable to find good jobs on their own and surrounded by communities that offered little in the way of connections or social support.
当数百万人向北迁移到工厂工作时，这些工厂周围涌现出的社区充满活力，但也很脆弱：当工厂关门时，被留下的人们被困在城镇和城市中，这些城镇和城市无法再为如此庞大的人口提供高质量的工作。那些有能力的人——通常是受过良好教育、富有或人脉广泛的人——离开了，留下了贫穷的社区。这些剩下的人是“真正弱势群体”——他们无法自己找到好工作，周围也没有社区提供什么关系或社会支持。
◆ Though insightful, neither of these books fully answered the questions that plagued me: Why didn’t our neighbor leave that abusive man? Why did she spend her money on drugs? Why couldn’t she see that her behavior was destroying her daughter? Why were all of these things happening not just to our neighbor but to my mom? It would be years before I learned that no single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America. Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith.
◆ This is the reality of our community. It’s about a naked druggie destroying what little of value exists in her life. It’s about children who lose their toys and clothes to a mother’s addiction.
◆ This was my world: a world of truly irrational behavior.
◆ Nothing for the kids’ college tuition, no investment to grow our wealth, no rainy-day fund if someone loses her job. We know we shouldn’t spend like this. Sometimes we beat ourselves up over it, but we do it anyway.
没有孩子的大学学费，没有增长财富的投资，没有失业时的应急资金。我们知道不应该这样花钱。有时我们为此自责，但我们还是会这样做。
◆ We choose not to work when we should be looking for jobs. Sometimes we’ll get a job, but it won’t last. We’ll get fired for tardiness, or for stealing merchandise and selling it on eBay, or for having a customer complain about the smell of alcohol on our breath, or for taking five thirty-minute restroom breaks per shift. We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance—the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.
我们选择在应该找工作的时候不工作。有时我们会得到一份工作，但这份工作不会长久。我们会因为迟到而被解雇，或者因为偷窃商品并在eBay上出售商品而被解雇，或者因为顾客抱怨我们嘴里有酒味而被解雇，或者因为每班工作休息5次，每次休息30分钟而被解雇。我们谈论努力工作的价值，但告诉自己，我们没有工作的原因是一些我们认为的不公平现象：奥巴马关闭了煤矿，或者所有的工作机会都给了中国人。这些都是我们用来解决认知失调的谎言——我们所看到的世界和我们所宣扬的价值观之间的断裂联系。
◆ After saying goodbye to the fourth dog, our hearts harden. We learn not to grow too attached.
◆ Not all of the white working class struggles. I knew even as a child that there were two separate sets of mores and social pressures. My grandparents embodied one type: old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking. My mother and, increasingly, the entire neighborhood embodied another: consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful.
不是所有的白人工人阶级都在挣扎。我小时候就知道，有两种不同的习俗和社会压力。我的祖父母体现了其中一种：守旧、默默忠诚、自力更生、努力工作。我母亲和越来越多的整个社区体现了另一种：消费主义、孤立、愤怒、不信任。
◆ I was unusually upset—devastated, even—to leave them. I wanted nothing more than to spend the day with Mamaw and the babies. I told Mamaw that, and instead of telling me to “quit your damn whining” like I expected, she told me she wished that I could stay home, too. It was a rare moment of empathy. “But if you want the sort of work where you can spend the weekends with your family, you’ve got to go to college and make something of yourself.” That was the essence of Mamaw’s genius. She didn’t just preach and cuss and demand. She showed me what was possible—a peaceful Sunday afternoon with the people I loved—and made sure I knew how to get there.
离开他们时，我异常难过，甚至有些崩溃。我只想和姥姥和婴儿们一起度过这一天。我告诉了姥姥，她没有像我想的那样对我说“别再发牢骚了”，而是说她希望我也能待在家里。这是一个难得的同理心时刻。“但是，如果你想做那种可以和家人一起过周末的工作，你就得上大学，然后有所成就。”这是姥姥的聪明之处。她不仅说教、咒骂和要求。她向我展示了什么是有可能的——一个和所爱的人一起度过的平静的周日下午——并确保我知道如何实现它。
◆ Entire volumes are devoted to the phenomenon of “resilient children”—kids who prosper despite an unstable home because they have the social support of a loving adult.
整本书都是关于“适应力强的孩子”现象的——这些孩子在不稳定的家庭中茁壮成长，因为他们拥有充满爱心的成年人的社会支持。
Chapter 10
◆ “act like you’ve been there.”
◆ Mamaw wrote every day, sometimes several times, offering extended thoughts on what was wrong with the world in some and few-sentence streams of consciousness in others. Most of all, Mamaw wanted to know how my days were going and reassure me. Recruiters told families that what most of us needed were words of encouragement, and Mamaw delivered that in spades.
◆ 外祖母每天都写信，有时一天写好几封，在信中详细阐述她对世界的看法，有的信只有寥寥数语，表达她的意识流。最重要的是，外祖母想知道我过得怎么样，并安慰我。征兵人员告诉我们的家人，我们大多数人需要的是鼓励的话语，而外祖母给了我数不清的鼓励。
◆ I was naturally drawn to those like me. “The person I talk to most,” I wrote to my family in my first letter home, “is from Leslie County, Kentucky. He talks like he’s from Jackson. I was telling him how much bullshit it was that Catholics got all the free time they did. They get it because of the way the church schedule works. He is definitely a country kid, ’cause he said, ‘What’s a Catholic?’ And I told him that it was just another form of Christianity, and he said, ‘I might have to try that out.’” Mamaw understood precisely where he came from. “Down in that part of Kentucky, everybody’s a snake handler,” she wrote back, only partially joking.
◆ Mamaw’s letters never contained the necessary punctuation and always included some articles, usually from Reader’s Digest, to occupy my time.
◆ Marine Corps boot camp is set up as a life-defining challenge. From the day you arrive, no one calls you by your first name. You’re not allowed to say “I” because you’re taught to mistrust your own individuality. Every question begins with “This recruit”—This recruit needs to use the head (the bathroom); This recruit needs to visit the corpsman (the doctor).
◆ At every turn, recruits are reminded that they are worthless until they finish boot camp and earn the title “marine.”
◆ Every time the drill instructor screamed at me and I stood proudly; every time I thought I’d fall behind during a run and kept up; every time I learned to do something I thought impossible, like climb the rope, I came a little closer to believing in myself. Psychologists call it “learned helplessness” when a person believes, as I did during my youth, that the choices I made had no effect on the outcomes in my life.
◆ If I had learned helplessness at home, the Marines were teaching learned willfulness.
◆ 每当教官对我大喊大叫，而我骄傲地挺立时；每当我以为自己在训练中落后，而继续坚持时；每当我学会做一件我认为不可能的事情，比如爬绳索时，我就越来越相信自己。心理学家称之为“习得性无助”，当一个人像我年轻时那样，认为我所做的选择对我的生活结果没有任何影响时，就会产生这种无助感。
◆ He’d cut my hair before, and I’d walked by his shop nearly every day for eighteen years. Yet it was the first time he’d ever shaken my hand and treated me as an equal.
◆ When AK Steel—which provided health care for Mamaw as Papaw’s widow—announced that they were increasing her premiums, Mamaw simply couldn’t afford them. She barely survived as it was, and she needed three hundred dollars extra per month. She told me as much one day, and I immediately volunteered to cover the costs. She had never accepted anything from me—not money from my paycheck at Dillman’s; not a share of my boot camp earnings. But she accepted my three hundred a month, and that’s how I knew she was desperate.
AK钢铁公司——它为外公的遗孀外婆提供医疗保险——宣布要增加她的保费，外婆根本负担不起。她本来就勉强维生，现在她每个月需要多出 300 美元。有一天，她这样告诉我，我立刻自告奋勇地承担了这些费用。她从来没接受过我的任何东西——没有我从迪尔曼公司拿回家的薪水，也没有我新兵训练营收入的分红。但她接受了我每月 300 美元的资助，这就是我知道她走投无路的原因。
◆ As her heart rate dropped and we realized that her time drew near, I opened a Gideon’s Bible to a random passage and began to read. It was First Corinthians, Chapter 13, Verse 12: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” A few minutes later, she was dead.
◆ For the first time, Uncle Jimmy learned Mom’s true financial impact on Mamaw—the drug rehab charges, the numerous “loans” never repaid. To this day, he refuses to speak to her.
◆ We used to complain constantly about the biggest perceived difference between our jobs and civilian jobs: In the civilian world, your boss wasn’t able to control your life after you left work. In the Marines, my boss didn’t just make sure I did a good job, he made sure I kept my room clean, kept my hair cut, and ironed my uniforms. He sent an older marine to supervise as I shopped for my first car so that I’d end up with a practical car, like a Toyota or a Honda, not the BMW I wanted.
◆ The Marine Corps demanded that I think strategically about these decisions, and then it taught me how to do so.
我们过去常常抱怨我们的工作和平民工作之间最大的不同：在平民世界里，你的老板无法控制你下班后的生活。在海军陆战队里，我的老板不仅确保我工作出色，他还确保我保持房间整洁，理发，熨烫制服。他派一名老兵监督我买第一辆车，这样我最终会买一辆实用的车，比如丰田或本田，而不是我想要的宝马。
我了解到，领导力更多地取决于赢得下属的尊重，而不是对他们发号施令；
◆ We discussed how to build relationships with the press, how to stay on message, and how to manage my time. I got better, and when hundreds of thousands flocked to our base for a biannual air show, our media relations worked so well that I earned a commendation medal.
我们讨论了如何与媒体建立关系，如何保持信息一致，以及如何管理我的时间。我做得越来越好，当数十万人涌向我们基地参加一年两次的航空展时，我们的媒体关系处理得非常好，我获得了一枚表彰奖章。
◆ The experience taught me a valuable lesson: that I could do it.
◆ In the Marines, giving it your all was a way of life.
◆ I’m not saying ability doesn’t matter. It certainly helps. But there’s something powerful about realizing that you’ve undersold yourself—that somehow your mind confused lack of effort for inability. This is why, whenever people ask me what I’d most like to change about the white working class, I say, “The feeling that our choices don’t matter.” The Marine Corps excised that feeling like a surgeon does a tumor.
Chapter 11
◆ Though I didn’t know it, I was witnessing a phenomenon that social scientists call “brain drain”—people who are able to leave struggling cities often do, and when they find a new home with educational and work opportunities, they stay there. Years later, I looked at my wedding party of six groomsmen and realized that every single one of them had, like me, grown up in a small Ohio town before leaving for Ohio State. To a man, all of them had found careers outside of their hometowns, and none of them had any interest in ever going back.
◆ had puzzled through those financial aid forms with Mamaw a few years earlier, arguing about whether to list her or Mom as my “parent/guardian.”
◆ Now I paid my own bills and earned As in every class I took at my state’s flagship university. I felt completely in control of my destiny in a way that I never had before.
几年前，我曾和姥姥一起费力地填那些助学金表格，争论是否该把姥姥或妈妈列为我的“父母/监护人”。
现在，我在本州旗舰大学每门课都拿A，自己付账单。我以前从未有过这种完全掌控自己命运的感觉。
◆ I took a job at the Ohio Statehouse, working for a remarkably kind senator from the Cincinnati area named Bob Schuler. He was a good man, and I liked his politics, so when constituents called and complained, I tried to explain his positions. I watched lobbyists come and go and overheard the senator and his staff debate whether a particular bill was good for his constituents, good for his state, or good for both.
我在俄亥俄州议会大厦找了一份工作，为来自辛辛那提地区的一位非常和善的参议员鲍勃·舒勒工作。他是个好人，我喜欢他的政治观点，所以当选民打电话抱怨时，我会试着解释他的立场。我看着说客们来来去去，无意中听到参议员和他的工作人员辩论某项法案是否有利于他的选民、有利于他的州，或者有利于两者。从内部观察政治进程让我以一种看有线电视新闻从未有过的方式欣赏它。
◆ I needed money and the financial freedom it provided, not rewarding work. That, I told myself, would come later.
我需要钱，以及钱能带来的财务自由，而不是有回报的工作。我告诉自己，回报要等以后再说。
◆ The lesson? Powerful people sometimes do things to help people like me without really understanding people like me.
讨论发薪日贷款利弊的议员们没有提到这种情况。教训是什么？有权势的人有时会做一些事情来帮助像我这样的人，而不真正了解像我这样的人。
◆ That feeling I had in college—that I had survived decades of chaos and heartbreak and finally come out on the other side—deepened.
我在大学里的那种感觉——经过几十年的混乱和心碎，我终于走出了困境——变得愈发强烈。
◆ Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him.
我的许多新朋友将这种对总统的看法归咎于种族歧视。但许多米德尔顿人觉得总统像个外星人，原因与肤色无关。回想一下，我的高中同学中没有一个人上过常春藤盟校。而贝拉克·奥巴马上过其中两所，而且都表现优异。他才华横溢、家财万贯，说起话来就像一位宪法学教授——当然，他确实是一位教授。他一点也不像我成长过程中所崇拜的人：他的口音——干净、完美、中性——是外国口音；他的资历令人印象深刻，甚至有些吓人；他在人口密集的大都市芝加哥生活；他举止自信，因为他知道现代美国的任人唯贤体制是为他量身定制的。当然，奥巴马凭借自己的能力克服了逆境——我们许多人都很熟悉这种逆境——但我们认识他的时候，他早已克服了逆境。
◆ President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we’re not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.
奥巴马总统上台时，我所在社区的很多人开始相信，现代美国的任人唯贤制度不是为他们而建立的。我们知道我们做得不好。我们每天都能看到：在明显遗漏死因的青少年讣告中（言外之意：吸毒过量），在让我们看着女儿浪费时间的游手好闲者身上。巴拉克·奥巴马击中了我们最深的不安全感。他是一个好父亲，而我们很多人不是。他穿着西装去工作，而我们穿着工作服，如果我们足够幸运，有工作可做的话。他的妻子告诉我们不应该给我们的孩子吃某些食物，我们讨厌她——不是因为我们认为她错了，而是因为我们知道她是对的。
◆ Social psychologists have shown that group belief is a powerful motivator in performance. When groups perceive that it’s in their interest to work hard and achieve things, members of that group outperform other similarly situated individuals. It’s obvious why: If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it’s hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all?
◆ Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.
◆ What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.
◆ My dad, for example, has never disparaged hard work, but he mistrusts some of the most obvious paths to upward mobility. When he found out that I had decided to go to Yale Law, he asked whether, on my applications, I had “pretended to be black or liberal.” This is how low the cultural expectations of working-class white Americans have fallen. We should hardly be surprised that as attitudes like this one spread, the number of people willing to work for a better life diminishes.
Chapter 12
◆ I didn’t know the dean of my college at Ohio State. It’s a big place. I’m sure she is a lovely person, and the form was clearly little more than a formality. But I just couldn’t ask. I had never met this person, never taken a class with her, and, most of all, didn’t trust her. Whatever virtues she possessed as a person, she was, in the abstract, an outsider.
◆ I could not put my fate in the hands of someone I didn’t know. I tried to talk myself into it. I even printed the form and drove it to campus. But when the time came, I crumpled it up and tossed it in the garbage. There would be no Stanford Law for J.D.
◆ I was sufficiently committed to going to Yale Law that I was willing to accept the two hundred thousand dollars or so in debt that I knew I’d accrue. Yet the financial aid package Yale offered exceeded my wildest dreams. In my first year, it was nearly a full ride. That wasn’t because of anything I’d done or earned—it was because I was one of the poorest kids in school. Yale offered tens of thousands in need-based aid. It was the first time being so broke paid so well. Yale wasn’t just my dream school, it was also the cheapest option on the table.
◆ Not everything came easy. I always fancied myself a decent writer, but when I turned in a sloppy writing assignment to a famously stern professor, he handed it back with some extraordinarily critical commentary. “Not good at all,” he scribbled on one page. On another, he circled a large paragraph and wrote in the margin, “This is a vomit of sentences masquerading as a paragraph. Fix.”
◆ At Yale Law School, I felt like my spaceship had crashed in Oz. People would say with a straight face that a surgeon mother and engineer father were middle-class. In Middletown, $160,000 is an unfathomable salary; at Yale Law School, students expect to earn that amount in the first year after law school. Many of them are already worried that it won’t be enough.
◆ I’m not sure what motivated this change. Part of it is that I stopped being ashamed: My parents’ mistakes were not my fault, so I had no reason to hide them. But I was concerned most of all that no one understood my grandparents’ outsize role in my life. Few of even my closest friends understood how utterly hopeless my life would have been without Mamaw and Papaw. So maybe I just wanted to give credit where credit is due.
◆ Yet there’s something else. As I realized how different I was from my classmates at Yale, I grew to appreciate how similar I was to the people back home. Most important, I became acutely aware of the inner conflict born of my recent success.
◆ This wasn’t one of my prouder moments, but it highlights the inner conflict inspired by rapid upward mobility: I had lied to a stranger to avoid feeling like a traitor. There are lessons to draw here, among them what I’ve noted already: that one consequence of isolation is seeing standard metrics of success as not just unattainable but as the property of people not like us. Mamaw always fought that attitude in me, and for the most part, she was successful.
这不是我引以为豪的时刻之一，但它突显了快速向上流动引发的内心冲突：为了避免感觉自己像叛徒，我对一个陌生人撒了谎。这里可以吸取一些教训，包括我已经注意到的：孤立的一个后果是，不仅把成功的标准视为无法企及的，而且视为与我们不同的人的财产。外祖母一直在与我内心的这种态度作斗争，在很大程度上，她是成功的。
◆ Another lesson is that it’s not just our own communities that reinforce the outsider attitude, it’s the places and people that upward mobility connects us with—like my professor who suggested that Yale Law School shouldn’t accept applicants from non-prestigious state schools. There’s no way to quantify how these attitudes affect the working class. We do know that working-class Americans aren’t just less likely to climb the economic ladder, they’re also more likely to fall off even after they’ve reached the top. I imagine that the discomfort they feel at leaving behind much of their identity plays at least a small role in this problem. One way our upper class can promote upward mobility, then, is not only by pushing wise public policies but by opening their hearts and minds to the newcomers who don’t quite belong.
◆ Though we sing the praises of social mobility, it has its downsides. The term necessarily implies a sort of movement—to a theoretically better life, yes, but also away from something. And you can’t always control the parts of your old life from which you drift.
Chapter 13
◆ At these types of events, you have to strike a balance between shy and overbearing. You don’t want to annoy the partners, but you don’t want them to leave without shaking your hand. I tried to be myself; I’ve always considered myself gregarious but not oppressive. But I was so impressed by the environment that “being myself” meant staring slack-jawed at the fineries of the restaurant and wondering how much they cost.
◆ It was at this meal, on the first of five grueling days of interviews, that I began to understand that I was seeing the inner workings of a system that lay hidden to most of my kind. Our career office had emphasized the importance of sounding natural and being someone the interviewers wouldn’t mind sitting with on an airplane. It made perfect sense—after all, who wants to work with an asshole?—but it seemed an odd emphasis for what felt like the most important moment of a young career. Our interviews weren’t so much about grades or résumés, we were told; thanks to a Yale Law pedigree, one foot was already in the door. The interviews were about passing a social test—a test of belonging, of holding your own in a corporate boardroom, of making connections with potential future clients.
◆ The problem is, virtually everyone who plays by those rules fails. That week of interviews showed me that successful people are playing an entirely different game. They don’t flood the job market with résumés, hoping that some employer will grace them with an interview. They network. They email a friend of a friend to make sure their name gets the look it deserves. They have their uncles call old college buddies. They have their school’s career service office set up interviews months in advance on their behalf. They have parents tell them how to dress, what to say, and whom to schmooze.
◆ That doesn’t mean the strength of your résumé or interview performance is irrelevant. Those things certainly matter. But there is enormous value in what economists call social capital. It’s a professor’s term, but the concept is pretty simple: The networks of people and institutions around us have real economic value. They connect us to the right people, ensure that we have opportunities, and impart valuable information. Without them, we’re going it alone.
◆ Apparently having the right network is better than both.
◆ At Yale, networking power is like the air we breathe—so pervasive that it’s easy to miss. Toward the end of our first year, most of us were studying for The Yale Law Journal writing competition. The Journal publishes lengthy pieces of legal analysis, mostly for an academic audience. The articles read like radiator manuals—dry, formulaic, and partially written in another language. (A sampling: “Despite grading’s great promise, we show that the regulatory design, implementation, and practice suffer from serious flaws: jurisdictions fudge more than nudge.”) Kidding aside, Journal membership is serious business. It is the single most significant extracurricular activity for legal employers, some of whom hire only from the publication’s editorial board.
◆ There were official channels of information. But they telegraphed conflicting messages. Yale prides itself on being a low-stress, noncompetitive law school. Unfortunately, that ethos sometimes manifests itself in confused messaging. No one seemed to know what value the credential actually held. We were told that the Journal was a huge career boost but that it wasn’t that important, that we shouldn’t stress about it but that it was a prerequisite for certain types of jobs. This was undoubtedly true: For many career paths and interests, Journal membership was merely wasted time. But I didn’t know which career paths that applied to. And I was unsure how to find out.
◆ Whether I made it isn’t the point. What mattered was that, with a professor’s help, I had closed the information gap. It was like I’d learned to see.
◆ That was when I learned the value of real social capital. I don’t mean to suggest that my professor picked up the phone and told the judge he had to give me an interview. Before she did that, my professor told me that she wanted to talk to me very seriously. She turned downright somber: “I don’t think you’re doing this for the right reasons. I think you’re doing this for the credential, which is fine, but the credential doesn’t actually serve your career goals. If you don’t want to be a high-powered Supreme Court litigator, you shouldn’t care that much about this job.”
◆ Most important, it allowed me to accept my place at this unfamiliar institution—it was okay to chart my own path and okay to put a girl above some shortsighted ambition. My professor gave me permission to be me.
Chapter 14
◆ But there were signs that things weren’t going so well, particularly in my relationship with Usha. We’d been dating for only a few months when she stumbled upon an analogy that described me perfectly. I was, she said, a turtle. “Whenever something bad happens—even a hint of disagreement—you withdraw completely. It’s like you have a shell that you hide in.”
◆ It was true. I had no idea how to deal with relationship problems, so I chose not to deal with them at all. I could scream at her when she did something I didn’t like, but that seemed mean. Or I could withdraw and get away. Those were the proverbial arrows in my quiver, and I had nothing else. The thought of fighting with her reduced me to a morass of the qualities I thought I hadn’t inherited from my family: stress, sadness, fear, anxiety. It was all there, and it was intense.
◆ So I tried to get away, but Usha wouldn’t let me. I tried to break everything off multiple times, but she told me that was stupid unless I didn’t care about her. So I’d scream and I’d yell. I’d do all of the hateful things that my mother had done. And then I’d feel guilty and desperately afraid. For so much of my life, I’d made Mom out to be a kind of villain. And now I was acting like her. Nothing compares to the fear that you’re becoming the monster in your closet.
◆ I turned the corner, and after a few steps I saw Usha sitting on the steps of Ford’s Theatre. She had run after me, worried about me being alone. I realized then that I had a problem—that I must confront whatever it was that had, for generations, caused those in my family to hurt those whom they loved. I apologized profusely to Usha. I expected her to tell me to go fuck myself, that it would take days to make up for what I’d done, that I was a terrible person. A sincere apology is a surrender, and when someone surrenders, you go in for the kill. But Usha wasn’t interested in that. She calmly told me through her tears that it was never acceptable to run away, that she was worried, and that I had to learn how to talk to her. And then she gave me a hug and told me that she accepted my apology and was glad I was okay. That was the end of it.
◆ Unfortunately, the fight-or-flight response is a destructive constant companion. As Dr. Nadine Burke Harris put it, the response is great “if you’re in a forest and there’s a bear. The problem is when that bear comes home from the bar every night.” When that happens, the Harvard researchers found, the sector of the brain that deals with highly stressful situations takes over. “Significant stress in early childhood,” they write, “. . . result[s] in a hyperresponsive or chronically activated physiologic stress response, along with increased potential for fear and anxiety.” For kids like me, the part of the brain that deals with stress and conflict is always activated—the switch flipped indefinitely. We are constantly ready to fight or flee, because there is constant exposure to the bear, whether that bear is an alcoholic dad or an unhinged mom. We become hardwired for conflict. And that wiring remains, even when there’s no more conflict to be had.
◆ a “growing body of literature suggests that children who experience multiple transitions in family structure may fare worse developmentally than children raised in stable two-parent families and perhaps even than children raised in stable, single-parent families.”
◆ I thought a lot about myself, about the emotional triggers I’d learned over eighteen years of living at home. I realized that I mistrusted apologies, as they were often used to convince you to lower your guard. It was an “I’m sorry” that convinced me to take that fateful car ride with Mom more than a decade earlier. And I began to understand why I used words as weapons: That’s what everyone around me did; I did it to survive. Disagreements were war, and you played to win the game.
◆ A few weeks into my second year of law school, I hadn’t spoken to Mom in many months, longer than at any point in my life. I realized that of all the emotions I felt toward my mother—love, pity, forgiveness, anger, hatred, and dozens of others—I had never tried sympathy. I had never tried to understand my mom. At my most empathetic, I figured she suffered from some terrible genetic defect, and I hoped I hadn’t inherited it. As I increasingly saw Mom’s behavior in myself, I tried to understand her.
◆ Papaw’s rare breakdown strikes at the heart of an important question for hillbillies like me: How much of our lives, good and bad, should we credit to our personal decisions, and how much is just the inheritance of our culture, our families, and our parents who have failed their children? How much is Mom’s life her own fault? Where does blame stop and sympathy begin?
Chapter 15
◆ People sometimes ask whether I think there’s anything we can do to “solve” the problems of my community. I know what they’re looking for: a magical public policy solution or an innovative government program. But these problems of family, faith, and culture aren’t like a Rubik’s Cube, and I don’t think that solutions (as most understand the term) really exist. A good friend, who worked for a time in the White House and cares deeply about the plight of the working class, once told me, “The best way to look at this might be to recognize that you probably can’t fix these things. They’ll always be around. But maybe you can put your thumb on the scale a little for the people at the margins.”
人们有时会问我，我是否认为我们可以做些什么来“解决”我所在社区的问题。我知道他们在寻找什么：一种神奇的公共政策解决方案，或者一个创新的政府项目。但是，家庭、信仰和文化这些问题不像一个魔方，我不认为真的存在解决方案（大多数人理解这个词的含义）。一位在白宫工作过一段时间的好朋友，非常关心工薪阶层的困境，他曾经告诉我，“看待这个问题最好的方式可能是认识到，你可能无法解决这些问题。它们会一直存在。但是，也许你可以稍微向边缘人群倾斜一下。”
◆ There were many thumbs put on my scale. When I look back at my life, what jumps out is how many variables had to fall in place in order to give me a chance.
◆ Part of the problem is how state laws define the family. For families like mine—and for many black and Hispanic families—grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles play an outsize role. Child services often cut them out of the picture, as they did in my case. Some states require occupational licensing for foster parents—just like nurses and doctors—even when the would-be foster parent is a grandmother or another close family member. In other words, our country’s social services weren’t made for hillbilly families, and they often make a bad problem worse.
◆ Recently, I sat down with a group of teachers from my alma mater, Middletown High. All of them expressed the worry, in one form or another, that society devoted too many resources too late in the game. “It’s like our politicians think college is the only way,” one teacher told me. “For many, it’s great. But a lot of our kids have no realistic shot of getting a college degree.” Another said: “The violence and the fighting, it’s all they’ve seen from a very young age. One of my students lost her baby like she’d lost her car keys—had no idea where it went. Two weeks later, her child turned up in New York City with the father, a drug dealer, and some of his family.” Short of a miracle, we all know what kind of life awaits that poor baby. Yet there’s precious little to support her now, when an intervention might help.
◆ There’re fewer emotional and financial resources when the only people in a neighborhood are low-income. You just can’t lump them together, because then you have a bigger pool of hopelessness.
◆ I’ve learned that the very traits that enabled my survival during childhood inhibit my success as an adult. I see conflict and I run away or prepare for battle. This makes little sense in my current relationships, but without that attitude, my childhood homes would have consumed me.
◆ Pajamas? Poor people don’t wear pajamas. We fall asleep in our underwear or blue jeans. To this day, I find the very notion of pajamas an unnecessary elite indulgence, like caviar or electric ice cube makers.
◆ As I shop, I’m reminded that wherever I fell on the American socioeconomic ladder as a child, others occupy much lower rungs: children who cannot depend on the generosity of grandparents for Christmas gifts; parents whose financial situations are so dire that they rely on criminal conduct—rather than payday loans—to put today’s hot toys under the tree. This is a very useful exercise. As scarcity has given way to plenty in my own life, these moments of retail reflection force me to consider just how lucky I am.
◆ Just a few months after we saw each other last, Brian’s mom died unexpectedly. He hadn’t lived with her in years, so outsiders might imagine that her death was easier to bear. Those folks are wrong. People like Brian and me don’t lose contact with our parents because we don’t care; we lose contact with them to survive. We never stop loving, and we never lose hope that our loved ones will change. Rather, we are forced, either by wisdom or by the law, to take the path of self-preservation.
Collected by Fang Wang