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January 22, 2018
Hugo 读报时间

Passage 1

What I’ve Learned from My 4-Year-Old
By Viet Thanh Nguyen January 20, 2018 words: 1,060
LOS ANGELES — A bathroom at 4:45 a.m. is quiet. I try to wake at this time, three hours before my 4-
year-old son does, so I can write, even in a hotel bathroom. I have not checked email, Twitter or
Instagram, and last year I got off Facebook.
I have not regretted it. Facebook was constant stimulation, distraction and turmoil — constant noise —
and what I have longed for the past year was peace and calm. I want these things so that I could listen
and write, but also so I could be a better son, father, husband and human being, which are all just as
difficult, if not more than so, than being a better writer.
I had been gentle with my 82-year-old father during Christmas, but as I prepared to leave his house, I
snapped at him when I felt that he had nagged me one too many times. I immediately regretted it. All he
wanted was for me to listen to him.
That regret was surely on my mind when I took a walk after dinner later that night with my wife and son,
and a man pushing a shopping cart loaded with his belongings asked me for the box of leftovers I had in
my hand. I hesitated. It had half a pizza that my son would surely demand as soon as it was bedtime, but
I gave it to the man, along with $2. My wife observed that I would not normally do such a thing.
But I had been doing such things whenever my son was with me, rolling down the window of my car when
he was in his Batman car seat behind me, so I could give an old man on the median a dollar. I wanted to
teach my son a lesson about generosity, and I wanted to be, in his eyes, a kind person.

He is cognizant and curious about morality and ethics, at the level of preschool behaviors, parent-child
negotiations, apocalyptic superhero conflicts and science fiction wars. As most parents would, I have tried
to teach him about giving, sharing, listening and empathy. And yet in my own life, away from his gaze, I
have sometimes failed in all those respects.
My own ambitions and the dreadfulness of our political world consume and distract me. I taught my son
the face and name of the man who is president, along with a few negative words for him. That was wrong.
Not just for the sake of the person who is president, and for all the people who voted for him, but for my
own sake. To call someone else stupid is to release anger, bitterness and vitriol into my own bloodstream,
poisoning me. I need only to read the Twitter feed of Donald Trump to see this happening.
Let that not happen to me, that I become like him. Let me empathize with him, so that I can understand
him and feel for him as a human being, even as I oppose him in almost all matters.
A meal I shared with a Vietnamese-American Buddhist monk provoked some of this thinking. At the end of
our meal, we closed our eyes and meditated, focused on our breathing, on the passage of air over our
upper lips, on the stillness within ourselves.