《注定是异乡的命运》

葡萄牙人Tatiana大学毕业时为了追寻一段感情，来到澳门。十多年后，尽管将她带到这里的那段关系已经结束，但她还是慢慢爱上了这座城市，并在这里定居。来自于贵州的Amy小学也没读完，20岁不到跟着朋友去广东打工，却被朋友扔给了一个男人。她嫁给了他，生下了两个儿子。但生活的压力让那段本就“哪里谈什么爱情啊”的婚姻最终破裂。从此她做售货员、服务员，甚至泥水匠，打零工抚养孩子长大。直到遇到现在的澳门丈夫，来到这里。

赛音新作“异乡伊人”中两位主人公的经历很适合写成一个故事片剧本，但赛音却并没有在讲她们的故事。上述内容只存在于作品的视频和音频的口述部分，照片部分是一系列日常生活情景的细节。从整体来看，前者就像无声电影中的背景独白，而屏幕上投映的是片段式的、给人以想象空间的画面。其中有一张照片，“光头”（Amy对现在老公的称呼）开车带她即将驶入一段隧道。照片从后座向前拍摄，人物在画面里只露出了很小的一段轮廓。占据画面大部分的是车窗外特别日常的车流和道路。正前方是黑黢黢难辨深浅的、却必将要驶入的一段旅程，而我们当然看不到隧道那头的景象。当我们了解了Amy那颇为漂泊的生命经历之后，这本来平淡无奇的画面就具有了一种人生隐喻的色彩。而关于Tatiana的一幅照片里，一艘欧洲老式帆船的模型摆放在布满筹码的地图上，雄心勃勃扬帆远航的旅途里又何尝能预见多少偶然会最终将我们带到哪一片新的大陆。

照片永远是一个个时间的切片，等待着观看者用想象去锁定各种意义，并将他们连接起来。这个连接不在于事实的构建，而是在象征层面上实现对一系列瞬间的理解。所以在赛音的作品中，两位女性的故事经历是模糊的，但生命中所必然出现的静谧、寂寥、迷茫、犹疑的情绪却异常清晰。这些照片更像是对于一段旅程或者人生的回望，即便在回望中我们很难拼凑出一根情节的链条，但那一幕幕的片段就像时光的结晶，催生出叙述着和聆听者之间的共鸣。更进一步来说，因为照片叙事的这种象征性，题中“异乡”二字就具有了特殊的意义。在故事中，异乡是连接有着完全不同生命经历的两个女人的地方；而在象征中，它就是命运本身。因为不管是“异乡”还是“命运”，它们都只是意味着轨迹的交错，甚至无关是否真的相遇。

从她们的自述中可以发现，Tatiana对感情、对东方充满好奇，对生活充满热情。她在视频里她唱到“我睡着的时候梦着你，我醒来了，也想着你”。她曾经为这里的环境污染和文化冲突而困惑，她也留恋着葡萄牙的亲友和那里的生活。但今天她似乎更喜欢澳门的安全、文化多样性和食物，并且即将拿到她的澳门身份证。而Amy从离开故乡那一刻就好像一直是被命运推着走的。去广东是为了生计，嫁人是因为朋友弃她而去。她是因为那一刻连53块的流产费都拿不出，而有了第二个孩子。她对“脾气很坏的”光头的评价是“你说算好嘛也不算好，说不好嘛也还行”。在她的叙述里听不到对于曾经一段段已经告别了的生活有任何的留恋。她唱的是“曾经在幽幽暗暗中追问，才知道平平淡淡才是真……只有那无尽的长路陪着我。”

也许是因为性别，她们共同的宿命是，很大程度上她们都是因为感情和婚姻才被带到了这个“异乡”——这段新的生命历程。Tatiana说，“今天澳门就像我的家”。Amy早就脱去了旧照片中那套贵州的民族服装，终于摆脱了打零工的命运，可以有一份全职工作。而且因为“澳门人都有英文名字”，所以有了Amy。萨特说人，“问题不在于选择时代，而是在时代当中自我选择。”但那个自由的主体似乎并不容易。我们总是开始于“勇敢”的选择，最后落得“怯懦”的命运。就像那几件由宝石和钻石做成的首饰，被安放在半扇洗得干干净净的贝壳里，那本应该是珍珠的家乡。或者像那条在浸泡着筹码的鱼缸里的金鱼，沉默地向外张望。

Destined for a Foreign Land

Text: Shi Hantao

Upon graduation from university, Tatiana, a Portuguese woman, came to Macao to pursue a relationship. More than a decade later, the relationship has ended but she gradually fell in love with the city and settled here. The story of Amy, from Guizhou, is more complicated: Without even completing elementary school, at 20 she followed a friend to work in Guangdong, but the friend failed her, and she ended up married, having two baby boys. Hard living pressures eventually broke up that marriage, which she described as "talking about love was a luxury". As a divorcee, she had been a salesperson, waiter, and even a plasterer, accepting odd jobs just to raise her children, until she met her current husband and came to Macao.

The experience of the two protagonists in Saiyin's new project Women in a Foreign Land is good stuff for a feature script, but the artist is not telling their stories. The above content is only shown in the narratives of her video and audio works. On the other hand, photos provide details of a series of daily life scenarios. On the whole, video and audio work like a background monologue in a silent movie, while the screening photos feature episodes that stimulate audience’s imagination, noteworthily a photo of Bald (a nickname Amy gave to her current husband) driving her almost into a tunnel. The shot was taken from the back seat, with the subjects only in silhouette. Most of the picture is filled by the traffic flow and roadsides. Right ahead is a dark journey that seems unpredictable and inevitable, and we certainly cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel. This inherently plain picture looks like a metaphor for Amy's wandering life experience. In a photo with Tatiana, a model of an old European sailboat is set on a map full of gambling chips, suggesting that when sailing off on an ambitious voyage, chances may eventually lead us to a new continent.

Photos are just moments in time, and it's up to viewers to use imagination to give them meanings and interconnect them. This connection is not about constructing facts, but understanding the series of instances in a symbolic dimension. In Saiyin's works, the two women's stories are vague, but show extremely clear-cut emotions as quietness, loneliness, confusion and doubt, which are unavoidable in life. These photos resemble more a retrospective journey or life itself, even though it is difficult for us to find threads for the plots in the retrospection. The episodes are like a crystallization of time, creating a resonance between narrator and listener. Furthermore, the symbolic nature of the photographic narrative gives a special meaning to the "foreign land" in the title, that is, a place that connects the two women with completely different life experiences, but which in a symbolic sense is destiny itself. Because whether it is "foreign land" or "destiny", they just mean the crossover of trajectories, even if they do not really meet.

From their self-narration, we can see that Tatiana is curious about love and the East, and is passionate about life. In the video she sings "I dreamed of you while asleep, and even after waking up I thought of you". She was puzzled by the environmental pollution and cultural conflicts in the city, and she felt nostalgic of her relatives, friends and those old days in Portugal. But today she seems to prefer Macao's security, and cultural and food diversity, and soon she’ll get her Macao ID card. By contrast, it seems Amy has been pushed by destiny from the moment she left her hometown. She went to Guangdong to make a living, yet got married (to a guy she did not love) because her friend abandoned her. She had a second child just because at the time she couldn't even afford the abortion fee of 53 yuan. Her evaluation of her "bad-tempered" Bald is "you cannot say he’s good because he’s not good; but he’s still okay." In her narrative, we don’t feel at all her nostalgia for the life sequences that she had lived through. She sings, "I used to ask in the gloom, and now I know a simple life is a true life... Only the endless long road awaits me."

Perhaps because of their gender, their common destiny is that, to a large extent, they were brought to this "foreign land", i.e. this new life journey, because of relationships and marriage. Tatiana said, "Macao is like my home today." Amy has long shaken off her old image in Guizhou ethnic costumes, and she has finally got rid of odd jobs, now working full-time. And because "all Macao people have an English name", she chose Amy. Sartre said, "I am my choices…if faced with inevitable circumstances, we still choose how we are in those circumstances." However it seems that subject of freedom is not easy. We always start with being "heroic" and end up being "coward", just like other two pictures in Saiyin’s work, when jewelry made of precious stones and diamonds is mis-placed in a clean shell, which is supposed to be the home to pearls, or, just like the goldfish in a fish tank with soaked gambling chips that looks out in silence.