Finding Joanne and Mona

寻找乔安妮和莫娜

When Jobs was thirty-one, a year after his ouster from Apple, his mother Clara, who was a smoker, was stricken with lung cancer. He spent time by her deathbed, talking to her in ways he had rarely done in the past and asking some questions he had refrained from raising before. “When you and Dad got married, were you a virgin?” he asked. It was hard for her to talk, but she forced a smile. That’s when she told him that she had been married before, to a man who never made it back from the war. She also filled in some of the details of how she and Paul Jobs had come to adopt him.

乔布斯的母亲克拉拉是一个吸烟者。他31岁时，也就是在他离开苹果公司一年之后，母亲患上了肺癌。在她弥留之际，他陪在她的病床边，用以往少有的方式跟她聊天，问了一些一直压在心底的问题。“跟爸爸结婚的时候，你是处女吗？”他问道。她虽然难以启齿，却还是努力地给了他一个微笑。她这才告诉他，之前她结过婚，她的前夫上了战场就再没回来。她还透露了一些她和保罗·乔布斯如何领养他的细节。

Soon after that, Jobs succeeded in tracking down the woman who had put him up for adoption. His quiet quest to find her had begun in the early 1980s, when he hired a detective who had failed to come up with anything. Then Jobs noticed the name of a San Francisco doctor on his birth certificate. “He was in the phone book, so I gave him a call,” Jobs recalled. The doctor was no help. He claimed that his records had been destroyed in a fire. That was not true. In fact, right after Jobs called, the doctor wrote a letter, sealed it in an envelope, and wrote on it, “To be delivered to Steve Jobs on my death.” When he died a short time later, his widow sent the letter to Jobs. In it, the doctor explained that his mother had been an unmarried graduate student from Wisconsin named Joanne Schieble.

大概就是在那个时候，乔布斯找到了他生母的下落。从20世纪80年代初开始，他就聘用了一个侦探，开始悄悄地寻找他的生母，但什么线索都没有找到。后来乔布斯注意到他出生证上一个旧金山医生的名字。“他的姓名在电话簿上可以查到，所以我给他打了个电话。”乔布斯回忆说。那个医生没帮上忙。他声称他的记录在一场火灾中全部烧毁了。不过那不是真的。事实上，就在接到乔布斯的电话后，这个医生写了一封信，装在信封里封好，上面写着“我死后交给史蒂夫·乔布斯”。不久后他就去世了，他的遗孀把这封信寄给了乔布斯。信中，医生说他的母亲是来自威斯康星州一个未婚的研究生，名字叫乔安妮·席贝尔。

It took another few weeks and the work of another detective to track her down. After giving him up, Joanne had married his biological father, Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, and they had another child, Mona. Jandali abandoned them five years later, and Joanne married a colorful ice-skating instructor, George Simpson. That marriage didn’t last long either, and in 1970 she began a meandering journey that took her and Mona (both of them now using the last name Simpson) to Los Angeles.

乔布斯聘请了另一位侦探，几个月后找到了她的下落。在把乔布斯送人后，乔安妮还是嫁给了乔布斯的生父阿卜杜勒法塔赫·约翰·钱德里，他们后来又生了一个孩子，叫莫娜。钱德里5年后拋弃了她们，乔安妮又嫁给了一个滑冰教练乔治·辛普森（GeorgeSimpson）。那场婚姻也没能长久，1970年她开始帯着莫娜四处流浪（她们俩现在都用的是辛普森的姓），后来到了洛杉矶。

Jobs had been reluctant to let Paul and Clara, whom he considered his real parents, know about his search for his birth mother. With a sensitivity that was unusual for him, and which showed the deep affection he felt for his parents, he worried that they might be offended. So he never contacted Joanne Simpson until after Clara Jobs died in early 1986. “I never wanted them to feel like I didn’t consider them my parents, because they were totally my parents,” he recalled. “I loved them so much that I never wanted them to know of my search, and I even had reporters keep it quiet when any of them found out.” When Clara died, he decided to tell Paul Jobs, who was perfectly comfortable and said he didn’t mind at all if Steve made contact with his biological mother.

乔布斯一直犹豫要不要让保罗和克拉拉——他心目中“真正的”父母——知道他在寻找自己的生母。他担心他们不髙兴，这种敏感对他来说实属少见，从中也可以看出他对养父母的感情之深。所以直到1986年初克拉拉·乔布斯去世，他才与乔安妮·辛普森取得联系。“我绝不希望让他们感觉我不把他们当成父母，因为他们彻头彻尾就是我的父母，”他回忆说，“我是那么爱他们，因此我不想让他们知道我在寻找生母，甚至当有记者发现真相时我也会让那些人守口如瓶。”克拉拉去世后，他决定告诉保罗·乔布斯。他父亲觉得完全可以接受，并说不介意史蒂夫跟他的生母取得联系。

So one day Jobs called Joanne Simpson, said who he was, and arranged to come down to Los Angeles to meet her. He later claimed it was mainly out of curiosity. “I believe in environment more than heredity in determining your traits, but still you have to wonder a little about your biological roots,” he said. He also wanted to reassure Joanne that what she had done was all right. “I wanted to meet my biological mother mostly to see if she was okay and to thank her, because I’m glad I didn’t end up as an abortion. She was twenty-three and she went through a lot to have me.”

这样，史蒂夫某天给乔安妮·辛普森打了电话，说了自己是谁，并安排去洛杉矶跟她见面。后来他说这主要是出于好奇心：“我相信环境比遗传对你的影响更大，但你还是会对你的血缘有点儿好奇。”他还想安慰乔安妮她当初把他送给别人领养是没问题的。“我想见我的生母，主要是为了看看她过得好不好，我还要感谢她，因为我很髙兴我没有被堕胎。她当时23岁，为了把我生下来她承受了很多。”

Joanne was overcome with emotion when Jobs arrived at her Los Angeles house. She knew he was famous and rich, but she wasn’t exactly sure why. She immediately began to pour out her emotions. She had been pressured to sign the papers putting him up for adoption, she said, and did so only when told that he was happy in the house of his new parents. She had always missed him and suffered about what she had done. She apologized over and over, even as Jobs kept reassuring her that he understood, and that things had turned out just fine.

当乔布斯来到她在洛杉矶的家时，乔安妮激动不已。她知道他很出名很富有，但她不太清楚是因为什么。她的感情顿时奔涌而出。她说她当时承受了很大压力才在他的领养文件上签字，而且她是在被告知他会在新的父母家非常幸福才签字的。她一直很想念他，并为她所做的事情感到痛苦。她反反复复地道歉，即使乔布斯一直安慰她说他能够理解，而且事情的结果还好。