Events in China, says Peter Hessler, are like splashes of foam on the surface of a great sea change



“Oracle Bones” is woven from the lives of a small handful of admirable characters: three former students from Mr Hessler's two years of teaching English in the small town high up the Yangzi river that formed the subject of “River Town”, and a Uighur intellectual and former teacher from western China with the pseudonym of Polat (“steel” in his native tongue) whom the author befriends in Beijing. In their different ways, the characters are all forced to make good in a shifting new world of hucksters and shysters.

Events in China, says Peter Hessler, are like splashes of foam on the surface of a great sea change

Sifting the sediments

Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present

May 18th 2006
From The Economist print edition

EVENTS in China, says Peter Hessler, are like splashes of foam on the surface of a great sea change. Even the significance of happenings that were hugely important at the time—the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, for example, or the angry anti-American protests after the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999—seems to become less certain over time. So how to understand things? Luckily for his readers, Mr Hessler, a former Peace Corps volunteer teacher and now Beijing correspondent of the New Yorker, has stepped off the treadmill of events-driven journalism to produce one of the most profoundly original books about China since, well, since his first book, “River Town”, which came out in 2001.

“Oracle Bones” is woven from the lives of a small handful of admirable characters: three former students from Mr Hessler's two years of teaching English in the small town high up the Yangzi river that formed the subject of “River Town”, and a Uighur intellectual and former teacher from western China with the pseudonym of Polat (“steel” in his native tongue) whom the author befriends in Beijing. In their different ways, the characters are all forced to make good in a shifting new world of hucksters and shysters.

The bright students from provincial Sichuan gamble their future and all its dreams on the east coast, along with tens of millions of other inland migrants. To head east in China is to cut yourself loose from all your moorings, and the experiences are often harsh. But at a personal level they are also liberating—a new idea in China. It helps, of course, to have that Chinese humour that is both bright and black in parts. Polat is a man on the fringes of life. Politically persecuted by the majority Han Chinese in his homeland in Xinjiang, he makes his living playing the margins at Yabaolu, Beijing's wholesale market that sells knock-off goods to hard-faced Russians. Polat looks at his fate—a jiade (fake, crap) life dealing in jiade goods—with wry self-detachment.

The essential fabric of the book is pinned down by vertical stakes: interspersed chapters that go deep into China's past—and literally underground, to the oracle bones on which China's earliest-known writing was found. The structure makes sense. Language and recorded memory are still vital weapons of political power in China, as they were 3,000 years ago. Just as China's rush to modernity seems to reflect an urge to break free from the heavy sediments of history, so the bulldozers and pickaxes of development uncover ever more of China's past. Strangely, the more that is unearthed, the less monolithic and more multi-faceted appears to be China's past, just like its present.

The past century of political upheaval was fought as much over ancient history as contemporary events, and the author goes to considerable effort to try and uncover what happened to some of the victims. Getting to the bottom of why the humane Chen Mengjia—a poet, oracle-bone scholar and spirited opponent of the Communists' simplification of the writing system—killed himself in 1966 takes Mr Hessler from the wastes of the central China plain to a nursing home in Virginia, where he meets a twinkling Chinese intellectual, a friend of Chen's, who suffered even more from political purges but now writes reviews for Voice of America. Everywhere, the book is shot through with sensitivity, insight and rollicking good humour too.

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