【经济学人】婚房 | 2016.11.26 | 总第755期

MAY 25th was an auspicious day for Jia Jinglong. It was his birthday by the lunar calendar, and in 2013 it was also the date of his forthcoming wedding to Li Lanlan. They had been going out for four years, a long time; but he was a shy boy, who had not wanted to go to college and didn’t read or write much, and who would blush whenever he spoke to a girl.

5月25日，对贾敬龙来说是个幸运的日子，这一天既是他的农历生日，也是2013年里他和李兰兰即将举行婚礼的日子。他们恋爱已有四年之久；他很腼腆，从未想过要上大学，读的书也不多，也不大识字，和女孩子说话还会脸红。

• Auspicious [ɔː'spɪʃəs] 吉利的，吉祥的

The wedding was to happen in his family house in North Gaoying village in Hebei province, near Beijing. “Village” no longer seemed the right word; the small houses were being rapidly swallowed up by the city of Shijiangzhuang, whose towers rose up to the sky at the end of the village streets, while the thump of pile-driving drowned out the birds. Nonetheless Mr Jia loved his spacious house. He and his father had built it only six years before; it was full of windows, not all of which looked out on the encroaching cranes. It had three storeys. His parents lived on the ground floor; his two Tibetan mastiffs were on the top; and the second storey, his part, was the wedding house. It was already filled with more than 100 plants, as well as bundles of straw which kept him, and them, warm. Around the village he was the number-one guy for plants, he said. He grew begonias, aloe vera and every kind of cactus: ball cactus, crab cactus, lithops. Sometimes he gave them away to neighbours. “Anybody’s kid who has an itchy neck knows to come to me for cactus,” he told the court before his sentencing. By then, however, the judges had stopped listening.

婚礼将在河北省北高营村的老家举行，这里距北京很近。这里已不能再被称作“村庄”；它很快就要被石家庄市吞并，村庄街道的尽头矗立着好几座直指苍穹的塔，鸟的声音在打桩的声音里没了踪影。尽管这样，贾敬龙仍旧爱着他宽敞的房子。这是他和他父亲在六年前盖的，房子上留了好多窗户，但并不是全部窗户都面向正在作业的起重机。这座房子共有三层，他的父母住在一楼，他的两只藏獒在顶楼，二楼作为他的婚房用。屋子里有100多株植物，还放着好几捆稻草，这些稻草起到了保暖的作用。他说他是村子里最喜欢植物的人。他养了秋海棠，芦荟和各种仙人掌:仙人球、蟹爪兰、生石花。有的时候他还会送给邻居一些。判决下来以前，他在法庭上说，“谁家的孩子要是脖子发痒，都会跑来找我要仙人掌，”。然而，法官当时已不再听下去了。

• Pile-driving ：打桩

• Begonias [bɪ'gəʊnɪə]： 秋海棠

贾敬龙

To make his house ready for the wedding, he went to endless trouble. He changed his job at the pharmaceutical factory from the day to the night shift, so that he could spend the days refurbishing. On his knees, with hands callused from hard work, he carefully wiped out dust with a damp rag from cracks in the floors. After repainting he bought new furniture and hung up red decorations, the colour of Chinese weddings. Most of them he had made himself (he liked to sew, especially cross-stitch). Pride of place went to a framed red-backed collage of 0.01yuan coins, collected for years, arranged to form the characters “I love my home.”

为了布置婚房，贾敬龙挨了不少苦头，他把在制药厂的工作由白班调到了夜班，这样他就有时间翻新自己的房子。他跪在地板上，布满老茧的手拿着湿抹布认真地擦拭着地板缝隙里的灰尘。房子粉刷完以后，他又购置了新家具，挂了一些中国人结婚用的红色装饰物。这些东西几乎都是他亲手做的（他喜欢缝纫，最爱十字绣）。他对房子有的骄傲都凝聚在了一幅红色拼贴画上，画里有用多枚一分钱硬币拼成的“我爱我家”字样，他花了好多年才把这些硬币凑齐。

• Pharmaceutical factory

• [,fɑːmə'suːtɪk(ə)l]：制药厂

• Callus ['kæləs]：结老茧

Men in black sedans

He knew that a shadow hung over it. In 2010 his father, Jia Tongqing, had signed a demolition order. It had been forced out of him by local party officials; if he didn’t sign, Tongqing was told, his aged mother’s request for a pension would be rejected. So it was done, and his parents had moved to the cramped high-rise flat they had been given by the government. No cash compensation came. The pattern of forced demolition and relocation, with developers and officials in corrupt cahoots together, is common all over booming China, and for the most part stoically accepted. But this particular doomed house was their only son’s home, too—his wedding house—and he did not agree, and would not move.

他知道房子一直笼罩在阴影中，在2010年，他的父亲贾同庆签下了拆迁协议。这份协议是当地村委会强迫签订的。他们对贾同庆说，如果不签，就拒绝其老母亲的养老金请求，所以贾同庆照做了。贾敬龙的父母搬进了政府安排的狭窄高层公寓里，他们拿不到任何补偿金。在开发商和政府人员的同流合污下，这种强制拆迁和再安置的模式在蓬勃发展的中国里是极其普遍的，而大多数人对此都选择了隐忍。但是这座已被判定的房子，也是独子贾敬龙的家——他的婚房——贾敬龙不同意拆迁，也不愿意搬出去。

• Demolition [demə'lɪʃn]： 拆迁

•  Compensation [kɒmpen'seɪʃ(ə)n]：补偿金

So when the black sedans drew up outside, 18 days before the wedding, and thugs with axes and sticks got out and began to throw bricks at the windows, he furiously resisted. He climbed on the roof of the second storey, waving a big red national flag, but no one listened. He was dragged out and beaten up. The house was smashed to rubble, with everything in it, all the plants he loved; his mastiffs were taken away. He told the court later that the pain tore and pierced him like a knife. And the worst of it was that, in two months, Lanlan called off the wedding. After all, her prospective husband now had no house to give her.

在婚期的前18天，一辆黑色轿车逼近，暴徒手里拿着斧头和棍棒从车里走出来，他们开始向贾敬龙家的窗户扔砖头，对此贾敬龙激烈反抗着，他爬到二楼的屋顶上，挥动着一片大大的红色国旗，但是没有人理会他。他被拖了出来，暴打一顿。房子的墙壁破败不堪，所有的东西都还在屋里，他所爱的花草也在里边；然而他的藏獒被带走了。他后来告诉法官，那种痛就像一把刀刺穿他，让他撕心裂肺。最糟糕的是，在在两个月都不到的时间里，兰兰取消了婚约，因为她这个未婚夫已经没有房子给她了。

• Rubble ['rʌb(ə)l]：（被摧毁的建筑物或墙壁的）碎石，碎砖

He wrote appeal after appeal for proper compensation, but got no answer. So in October 2014 he began to arm himself. Personal firearms being forbidden, he bought three nail-guns and began to fiddle with them. One did the job for him: in February 2015 he managed to shoot the local party chief, He Jianhua, in the back of the head at close range at a New Year party in the village. For this he was sentenced to death in the People’s Intermediate Court. His sentence was upheld this year in the Supreme People’s Court, China’s highest.

为了得到合理的补偿金，他申诉了一次又一次，但都没有得到回复。所以在2014年10月，他开始决定武装他自己。私人拥有枪支是被禁止的，他买了三把射钉枪，并对它们进行改造。他终于等到机会了：2015年1月，在村里的新年会上，他成功地在近距离内开枪射中了党支部书记---何建华的后脑勺。贾敬龙也因此被中级人民法院判处死刑。在今年，他的判决也得到了中国最高人民法院的同意。

• Uphold： 支持（upheld为其过去分词）

Plenty of protests were made on his behalf. Two party newspapers came out for him, as well as 12 distinguished lawyers. Most netizens of Weibo supported him. There were extenuating circumstances for the murder, not least the collapse of the wedding. Besides, Mr Jia had come to symbolise the plight of the unheeded little man in China, powerless before high-ups and unable to get justice. (“If the people had any choice in life,” he said, “I would not have taken this dead-end path.”) The courts were implacable, however. This was a long-planned murder of an official not especially to blame for the demolition; and all that online pressure to soften the law simply set a dangerous precedent.

好多人站到贾敬龙这边，为他提出抗议。有两份党报和12名著名的律师也站在他这边。大多数的微博用户也声援贾敬龙。他们认为贾敬龙所犯的罪情有可原，尤其是在他的婚礼因此而遭到破坏的情况下。另外，贾敬龙的苦难也成了那些不受重视的中国草根的一个缩影，他们在有权有势的人面前无能为力，不能得到应有的正义。（“如果人们能够有选择，”他说，“那我也不会走投无路了。”）然而法律是无情的，这是一场蓄谋已久的谋杀，并不是为了追究拆迁的问题；所有来自网上的压力也只是想要法律温和一点，开个先例而已。

• Set a dangerous precedent

• ['presɪd(ə)nt]  开个先例

His sentence might possibly have been commuted if he had turned himself in immediately after the murder, as he had meant to. But as he fled the scene in his car, he called Lanlan first to tell her what he had done. She was now married to another man and had a baby; but he still referred to her as his girlfriend, and had sent her 1,100 yuan in a red envelope for her wedding. While he talked to the woman who should have shared the house with him, He’s friends violently bumped his car; and it was in their custody that the nurseryman of North Gaoying village arrived at the police station, and sealed his fate.

期待您的翻译，您可以将翻译留言到文章底部，第二天会有详细解析哦。但是他却开车逃离现场，贾敬龙给兰兰打了电话，告诉她刚刚发生的事。兰兰已经嫁给别的男人，还生了个孩子；但是贾敬龙仍把兰兰当作自己女朋友，在她结婚时送了1100元的红包。当他正和这个本该和自己生活在同一屋檐下的女人聊天时，他的朋友冲了过来，在他们的扣押这下，这位北高营村的花圃园丁被送到了派出所，他的命运由此而定。

• Commuted [kə'mjuːt]：减刑

• In their custody ['kʌstədɪ]：在他们扣押之下

翻译 ▍栏目四第一组

审核 ▍Mo

编辑 ▍澜意

若你想跟着M社一起练翻译，请点击M社邀请函~