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简介

2017年6月30日，美国联邦调查局宣布逮捕一名涉嫌绑架中国访问学者章莹颖的27岁男子，并表示相信章莹颖已经死亡。七年后的今天，我想用这篇文章纪念一个曾经鲜活而美好的灵魂。

2018年8月一个炎热的日子，侯霄霖站在位于北京西北部的一栋爬满藤蔓的红砖宿舍楼的二楼窗户下，抬头望着。“我通常就是站在这里来叫她下来的。”他说。章莹颖(1990-2017)于2017年5月在美国伊利诺伊州的一个公园被拍到。受访者供图侯晓林正在谈论他已故的女友章莹颖，她于2016年至2017年初住在这里。2017年4月，章莹颖赴伊利诺伊大学香槟分校攻读博士学位。6月9日，在她到达两个月后，她被布伦特·克里斯滕森绑架、并残忍杀害。

On a sweltering August day in 2018, Hou Xiaolin stood below a second-story window of a vine-covered redbrick dormitory building in northwestern Beijing and looked up.
“This is where I would come and call out to her,” he said.
Hou was speaking of his late girlfriend Zhang Yingying, who lived there from 2016 to 2017. In April 2017 Zhang, a research assistant for a scientist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, left for the US to study for a doctoral degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. There, on June 9, just two months after she arrived, she was abducted, raped and brutally killed by a man named Brendt Christensen.

布伦特·克里斯滕森

从那时起直到2019年7月凶手最终被判处终身监禁，侯霄霖经历了炼狱：他曾经在希望与绝望的交替中进行着大海捞针般的搜寻，又在开庭前忍受了无法忍受的漫长等待；在法庭上面对凶手时他不得不压抑住自己随时可能喷涌而出的愤怒；而在整个寻求正义的过程中，他时时感受到几乎要将他摧毁的无助与愤懑。这些都是他不曾想过的——曾经，他只想和她共度余生。 然而，在章莹颖去世一年多之后的那个2018年夏日的下午，侯霄霖望向楼上的脸上没有任何他正在经受着的痛苦的痕迹，惟有平静的柔和，那是一种经历风暴后的平静，是一种人在回忆微不足道的暖心细节时所无法不流露出的柔和。

“偶尔我会来这里给她收衣服。”侯小林指了指楼下两棵树之间绑着晾干的衣服。

From then until July 2019, when he was sentenced to life in prison, Hou had been through hell: he had gone on a needle-in-the-haystack search, clinging hopelessly to hope, had endured an unbearable wait, subdued all-consuming anger and prevailed over crippling frustration seeking justice for the woman he had planned to marry.
Yet on that summer afternoon in 2018, a little more than one year after Zhang’s death, any signs of the toll that a long, continuing legal battle had taken on Hou were absent from his face. There was only softness — the kind one exudes reminiscing on what may seem like trifling details of life but that are nevertheless somehow reassuring.
“Occasionally, I would come here to pick up clothes for her,” said Hou, pointing to laundry hanging from a clothesline tied between trees.

在摄像机另一侧聆听这一切的是施佳妍（Jiayan “Jenny” Shi）。她是美国西北大学（Northwestern University）新闻学院的硕士毕业生。从2017年7月到2019年9月，施佳妍与她的搭档孙仕凛一直在跟拍章莹颖的家人。

从美国到中国，300多个小时的拍摄记录了那些最初的希望，不断的失望，最后的绝望和绝望后的撕心裂肺的痛苦和思考。所有的努力最终变成了一部98分钟的纪录片《寻找盈盈》，获得了2020年3月西南偏南电影节评审团大奖。

Listening to this on the other side of a video camera was Shi Jiayan. With a master’s degree from the journali school of Northwestern University, Shi, with her partner Sun Shilin, followed Hou and members of Zhang’s family between July 2017 and September 2019, shooting 300 hours of footage that was eventually edited down to 98 minutes in a documentary titled Finding Yingying.
In March 2020, Finding Yingying, Shi’s debut feature documentary, was awarded the Special Jury Prize for Breakthrough Voice at the renowned South by Southwest (SXSW) Festival, an annual celebration of independent film and music in Austin, Texas.

施佳妍（右）和孙仕凛——两人在2017年7月至2019年8月期间跟随章莹颖的家人两年，拍摄了300小时的素材。受访者供图
“To the family, the search hasn’t come to an end and probably never will,” says Shi, 27, alluding to the fact that Zhang’s body, believed to be lying a few meters underground in a private landfill, is unlikely to be recovered.
“But to me, Yingying feels more like a friend than a victim, someone whose struggles, aspirations and self-doubt I share,” says Shi, who has lent her own voice to the documentary by reading out excerpts from Zhang’s diligently kept diary, words that anchor the movie emotionally and allow it to “forgo the whodunit trope and the lurid violence that characterizes the true crime genre”, to quote one critic.

“对莹颖的亲人们来说，寻找还没有结束，可能永远也不会结束。”施佳妍说。根据警方的推断，章的尸体在其被害几天后就在不知情的情况下被运送到了私人垃圾填埋场，并在那里和普通垃圾一起被处理掉了。“然而对我来说，她更像是一个朋友，而不单单是一个受害者，她曾经内心的挣扎、怀抱的理想和期许甚至是自我怀疑都让我产生了强烈的共鸣。”施继续说到。在记录片中，章的日记中的一些段落由施佳妍平静的语调读出，为整部片子铺上了一层情感的底色。用一位影评人的话来说，《寻找莹颖》“摒弃了凶案题材纪录片的套路和血腥暴力”。2017年5月，章莹颖在美国内布拉斯加州进行野外研究。受访者供图
“Life is too short to be ordinary (生命太短暂，不能甘于平凡)。” 章在2017年6月1日的最后一篇日记中用英文写道，那是在她去世前八天。2017年6月29日，章失踪20天后——彼时人们还不确定知道她已经遇害，伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校为她举办了一场音乐会上，在事发后匆匆从北京赶来美国的侯霄霖参加了这场音乐会，他在简短的发言中引用了爱人的这句话。

在另一篇日记中，张描述了她在美国期间一个人冒雨走在街上的情景…只有汽车飞驰而过，心想，‘车里一定很暖和……’”

“Life is too short to be ordinary,” wrote Zhang in her final diary entry on June 1, eight days before her death.
On June 29, 2017, that sentence was cited by Hou at a concert held in Zhang’s name at UIUC, where the 26-year-old had been doing field research on crop photosynthesis.
Describing her venturing-out amidst a downpour during her brief stay at UIUC, another, earlier entry is drenched in loneliness: “As cars were whizzing by, I was thinking: it must be very warm inside there…”
2017年6月12日，在章莹颖失踪三天后，警方在停车场的监控录像上发现了她此前的行踪，录像显示她在校园内上了一辆黑色的土星阿斯特拉轿车。

“现在我们知道这辆车属于克里斯滕森。事实上，那天早上他试图诱骗另一名年轻女子上车。目的未达到后，遇到站在路边的莹莹，谎称自己是警察。”石嘉宇说。“那天莹莹本来要去见一个租房中介，时间比较紧，不想迟到。情急之下，她相信了克里斯腾森的搭便车。”

On June 12, 2017, three days after Zhang was reported missing by Miao Guofang and Liyan, two of her fellow researchers in UIUC’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Studies, police located security camera footage from a parking garage that showed her getting into a black Saturn Astra on the university campus.
“Now we know that Christensen, who had failed in his attempt to lure another young lady into his car that same morning, was disguising himself as a cop,” Shi says. “Moreover, Yingying was already running late for an appointment she made with a rental manager. She didn’t want to be late.”

施佳妍和孙仕凛是在一个手机聊天群里