2007.04.30: April 30, 2007: Headlines: Figures: COS - China: Writing - China: New York Times: Jonathon Spence reviews Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones
Peace Corps Online:
Directory:
China:
Special Report: China RPCV and Author Peter Hessler:
2007.04.30: April 30, 2007: Headlines: Figures: COS - China: Writing - China: New York Times: Jonathon Spence reviews Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones
Jonathon Spence reviews Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones
Hessler offers unexpected views of the West. Particularly chilling is a vivid portrait of hostility to the United States, in part due to the Belgrade bombing and the downing of an American spy plane two years later, that spilled out in the days after 9/11, when China was flooded with doctored DVD's of the wrecked twin towers and the damaged Pentagon, interspersed with clips from miscellaneous Hollywood disaster films and vignettes of American leaders uttering random, often unintelligible, pronouncements. Author Peter Hessler served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in China.
Jonathon Spence reviews Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones
Letters From China
Review by JONATHAN SPENCE
Published: April 30, 2006
[Excerpt]
HOW can one catch today's China in words? It is a country in constant motion, defying the laws of economic gravity, reaching out insistently around the world for raw materials to fuel its growth, eating up its land and its past, enticing outsiders to help it achieve new levels of wealth and power, opening up class fissures that were thought to be closed, testing the limits of rapid urban growth while giving its people chances for self-exploration and intellectual transformation they have not known for over half a century.
Fortunately, Peter Hessler has not been dismayed by the challenge. Instead, after teaching English and freelancing as a journalist, he decided to give up the world of deadlines and throw himself into this boisterous hurly-burly of noise and images as the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker. Serenely confident, he has a marvelous sense of the intonations and gestures that give life to the moment; he knows when to join in the action and when simply to wait for things to happen. Today's China could have been made for him. If you don't believe me, dip into the chapters in "Oracle Bones" called "Starch" and "Wonton Western," which focus on the worlds of industry in Manchuria and film-making on the edge of the Tarim Basin. You will be hooked.
Hessler must have spent a good deal of mental energy developing a structure for his book, determined to strike an aesthetic balance between the personal lives of the individual Chinese whose stories he tells and the physical and historical spaces they inhabit. He achieved this by constructing a narrative scaffolding some readers may initially find distracting. But rest assured: everything soon falls into place.
What you might call the horizontal level is provided by 24 chapters covering Hessler's experiences in China from May 1999 (when the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was bombed by American planes during NATO's intervention in the Balkans) to June 2002 (when Hessler, on a return trip to the United States, visited two elderly Chinese scholars at a retirement home in Reston, Va.). Intersecting these modern chapters are 13 others, the vertical shafts that Hessler calls "Artifacts" since each is related to events deep in China's past — or to those who excavate and study that past.
The "oracle bones" of Hessler's title, found in profusion in and around the ancient city of Anyang, date from the second millennium B.C. and are incised with divination texts written in the first known form of what we now call Chinese. When the diviners applied searing heat to the bones — many were in fact the flat lower carapace of tortoises — the surfaces cracked, yielding patterns that predicted the chance of success for a given enterprise. Though the inscriptions are often brief and fragmentary, they are a source of passionate interest to scholars, both Chinese and Western. They also provide a rich metaphor for the search for meaning in China's past — and for prognostications about its future. In these separate "Archives" chapters, Hessler plays elaborate and intriguing games with the possibilities of the bones: with the scholars who have excavated and interpreted them and with the Chinese written language as it developed from these beginnings.
Elsewhere, Hessler offers unexpected views of the West. Particularly chilling is a vivid portrait of hostility to the United States, in part due to the Belgrade bombing and the downing of an American spy plane two years later, that spilled out in the days after 9/11, when China was flooded with doctored DVD's of the wrecked twin towers and the damaged Pentagon, interspersed with clips from miscellaneous Hollywood disaster films and vignettes of American leaders uttering random, often unintelligible, pronouncements.
A good part of the modern story line is provided by the coming-of-age of three of Hessler's Chinese students from his language-teaching days in Sichuan Province in the late 1990's (the subject of his first book, "River Town"), conveyed through their letters and their occasional meetings. Written in an English that is idiomatic and frank with just occasional slips of usage or spelling, the students' letters are entrancing and genuinely moving. ("My parents and relatives all wanted to introduce girlfriends to me," one of his former student wrote. "So they introduced one and one, but the one and one passed me and didn't become my wife.") The students provide an absorbing view of the difficulties faced by young Chinese from remote provinces as they try to find decent jobs in the sweatshops and the sleazily managed schools of boom areas like Shenzhen or Wenzhou. Their new world is fiercely competitive: through their eyes, Hessler shows us the difficulties of maintaining honesty in the cutthroat system of present-day China. Their stories also contain intriguing subsidiary characters like the radio-show call-in hostesses, often from rural backgrounds themselves, whose sympathy and common-sense advice play a crucial role in boosting the morale of hundreds of thousands of migrants.
Links to Related Topics (Tags):
Headlines: April, 2007; RPCV Peter Hessler (China); Figures; Peace Corps China; Directory of China RPCVs; Messages and Announcements for China RPCVs; Writing - China; Peace Corps Library; Peace Corps Countries of Service; Peace Corps History; Bulletin Board; Peace Corps Headlines
When this story was posted in May 2007, this was on the front page of PCOL:
Peace Corps Online The Independent News Forum serving Returned Peace Corps Volunteers
 | PCOL serves half million
PCOL's readership for April exceeded 525,000 visitors - a 50% increase over last year. This year also saw the advent of a new web site: Peace Corps News that together with the Peace Corps Library and History of the Peace Corps serve 17,000 RPCVs, Staff, and Friends of the Peace Corps every day. Thanks for making PCOL your source of news for the Peace Corps community. Read more. |
 | Suspect confesses in murder of PCV
Search parties in the Philippines discovered the body of Peace Corps Volunteer Julia Campbell near Barangay Batad, Banaue town on April 17. Director Tschetter expressed his sorrow at learning the news. “Julia was a proud member of the Peace Corps family, and she contributed greatly to the lives of Filipino citizens in Donsol, Sorsogon, where she served,” he said. Latest: Suspect Juan Duntugan admits to killing Campbell. Leave your thoughts and condolences . |
 | Warren Wiggins: Architect of the Peace Corps
Warren Wiggins, who died at 84 on April 13, became one of the architects of the Peace Corps in 1961 when his paper, "A Towering Task," landed in the lap of Sargent Shriver, just as Shriver was trying to figure out how to turn the Peace Corps into a working federal department. Shriver was electrified by the treatise, which urged the agency to act boldly. Read Mr. Wiggins' obituary and biography, take an opportunity to read the original document that shaped the Peace Corps' mission, and read John Coyne's special issue commemorating "A Towering Task." |
 | Chris Dodd's Vision for the Peace Corps
Senator Chris Dodd (RPCV Dominican Republic) spoke at the ceremony for this year's Shriver Award and elaborated on issues he raised at Ron Tschetter's hearings. Dodd plans to introduce legislation that may include: setting aside a portion of Peace Corps' budget as seed money for demonstration projects and third goal activities (after adjusting the annual budget upward to accommodate the added expense), more volunteer input into Peace Corps operations, removing medical, healthcare and tax impediments that discourage older volunteers, providing more transparency in the medical screening and appeals process, a more comprehensive health safety net for recently-returned volunteers, and authorizing volunteers to accept, under certain circumstances, private donations to support their development projects. He plans to circulate draft legislation for review to members of the Peace Corps community and welcomes RPCV comments. |
 | He served with honor
One year ago, Staff Sgt. Robert J. Paul (RPCV Kenya) carried on an ongoing dialog on this website on the military and the peace corps and his role as a member of a Civil Affairs Team in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have just received a report that Sargeant Paul has been killed by a car bomb in Kabul. Words cannot express our feeling of loss for this tremendous injury to the entire RPCV community. Most of us didn't know him personally but we knew him from his words. Our thoughts go out to his family and friends. He was one of ours and he served with honor. |
 | Peace Corps' Screening and Medical Clearance
The purpose of Peace Corps' screening and medical clearance process is to ensure safe accommodation for applicants and minimize undue risk exposure for volunteers to allow PCVS to complete their service without compromising their entry health status. To further these goals, PCOL has obtained a copy of the Peace Corps Screening Guidelines Manual through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and has posted it in the "Peace Corps Library." Applicants and Medical Professionals (especially those who have already served as volunteers) are urged to review the guidelines and leave their comments and suggestions. Then read the story of one RPCV's journey through medical screening and his suggestions for changes to the process. |
 | The Peace Corps is "fashionable" again
The LA Times says that "the Peace Corps is booming again and "It's hard to know exactly what's behind the resurgence." PCOL Comment: Since the founding of the Peace Corps 45 years ago, Americans have answered Kennedy's call: "Ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man." Over 182,000 have served. Another 200,000 have applied and been unable to serve because of lack of Congressional funding. The Peace Corps has never gone out of fashion. It's Congress that hasn't been keeping pace. |
 | PCOL readership increases 100%
Monthly readership on "Peace Corps Online" has increased in the past twelve months to 350,000 visitors - over eleven thousand every day - a 100% increase since this time last year. Thanks again, RPCVs and Friends of the Peace Corps, for making PCOL your source of information for the Peace Corps community. And thanks for supporting the Peace Corps Library and History of the Peace Corps. Stay tuned, the best is yet to come. |
 | History of the Peace Corps
PCOL is proud to announce that Phase One of the "History of the Peace Corps" is now available online. This installment includes over 5,000 pages of primary source documents from the archives of the Peace Corps including every issue of "Peace Corps News," "Peace Corps Times," "Peace Corps Volunteer," "Action Update," and every annual report of the Peace Corps to Congress since 1961. "Ask Not" is an ongoing project. Read how you can help. |
Read the stories and leave your comments.
Some postings on Peace Corps Online are provided to the individual members of this group without permission of the copyright owner for the non-profit purposes of criticism, comment, education, scholarship, and research under the "Fair Use" provisions of U.S. Government copyright laws and they may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner. Peace Corps Online does not vouch for the accuracy of the content of the postings, which is the sole responsibility of the copyright holder.
Story Source: New York Times
This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; Figures; COS - China; Writing - China
PCOL37648
22
