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

by Peter Hessler (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Hessler, who first wrote about China in his 2001 bestseller, River Town, a portrait of his Peace Corps years in Fuling, continues his conflicted affair with that complex country in a second book that reflects the maturity of time and experience. Having lived in China for a decade now, fluent in Mandarin and working as a correspondent in Beijing, Hessler displays impressive knowledge, research and personal encounters as he brings the country's peoples, foibles and history into sharp focus. He frames his narrative with short chapters about Chinese artifacts: the underground city being excavated at Anyang; the oracle bones of the title ("inscriptions on shell and bone" considered the earliest known writing in East Asia); and he pays particular attention to how language affects culture, often using Chinese characters and symbols to make a point.A talented writer and journalist, Hessler has courage—he's undercover at the Falun Gong demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and in the middle of anti-American protests in Nanjing after the Chinese embassy bombings in Belgrade—and a sense of humor (the Nanjing rioters attack a statue of Ronald McDonald since Nanjing has no embassies). The tales of his Fuling students' adventures in the new China's boom towns; the Uighur trader, an ethnic minority from China's western border, who gets asylum after entering the U.S. with jiade (false) documents; the oracle bones scholar Chen Mengjia, who committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution—all add a seductive element of human interest.There's little information available in China, we learn, but Hessler gets the stories that no one talks about and delivers them in a personal study that informs, entertains and mesmerizes. Everyone in the Western world should read this book. (May)
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From The Washington Post
Near the beginning of Peter Hessler's new book about China, Oracle Bones, an archaeology team drills small holes in a field in Anyang, looking for the walls of an ancient settlement. Every core sample they remove is examined for signs of buried structures or artifacts that will help the archaeologists understand what's beneath the surface. "The dirt plugs reflect the meaning of what lies below," Hessler writes. "They are like words that can be recognized at a glance."

Hessler's book is like a collection of those core samples. He starts at the boundaries -- a trader from China's far west, a worker in the southern city of Shenzhen, a visit to the northeast border with North Korea -- and works his way in. Like artifacts discovered by an archaeologist, Hessler's tales are fragments that acquire meaning when taken together: a migrant worker, a dynamic teacher from an illiterate family, a black-market money trader from the Uighur ethnic minority, an aging man who fights a losing legal battle to save his historic courtyard house, a movie star on location in a remote part of Xinjiang province. Only gradually does the reader gain an understanding of the people trying to find their way in this vast country at a time of almost unfathomable change.

Hessler is the New Yorker's first accredited correspondent in China since before the communist revolution. He went to China to work in the Peace Corps and published a book about that experience called River Town. Some of his former students appear again in Oracle Bones, offering unusual insights into the yearnings and frustrations of the country's young adults.

One of the book's main pleasures is its language; Hessler writes clearly and sympathetically. Of the English teacher who broke the spines of dictionaries with heavy use, he says: "He still kept the old books lined up on his shelf, the way a good infielder never throws away a worn-out glove." Of the view from a tower on the Great Wall, where he camped overnight during one of China's notorious dust storms, Hessler writes: "From the tower, I watched it come in. Clouds of brown hung low to the ground, like the tendrils of a living thing that crept into the valley."

Unfortunately, like any excavation, the book sometimes lacks direction. At one point, he takes a gratuitous shot at Beijing-based newspaper journalists. (His disparaging description of foreign correspondents bears little resemblance to what I saw when I worked there and even less to what I've read about since.)

But for the most part, Hessler moves engagingly back and forth between narratives and characters, including a Uighur money-changer in Beijing who eventually receives political asylum in the United States and winds up delivering food for a D.C. Asian restaurant. His former students also prove invaluable in explaining today's China. One takes a job in a factory in Shenzhen, a one-time agricultural area that has been exploding with industrial growth since the early 1990s. Through her, he describes the underside of China's economic miracle: lecherous managers, late-night radio advice chats and petty rivalries among workers.

Perhaps Hessler's most compelling character is one who has been dead for 40 years. Born in 1911, Chen Mengjia was publishing popular poetry by age 18 under the name Wanderer. "I crushed my chest and pulled out a string of songs," he wrote. During the Japanese occupation, he joined the resistance. Later he became a professor, and a Rockefeller Foundation grant took him to America, accompanied by his brilliant wife, an expert on Henry James. In America, Chen studied Chinese bronzes in U.S. collections. He and his wife returned to China just as the communists took over. Soon, his erudite book on Chinese bronzes was published under the title Our Country's Shang and Zhou Bronzes Looted by American Imperialists. Communist China turned out to be an inhospitable place for a person so attached to the past. In 1957, Chen was labeled a rightist for opposing government attempts to simplify the Chinese language's gloriously rococo characters. In 1966, he committed suicide.

One of Chen's interests was oracle bones, which come to fascinate Hessler too. Made of cattle shoulder blades or turtle undershells, the oracle bones were heated until they cracked, making a sound that supposedly captured voices from departed ancestors. The cracks were then interpreted by diviners or the king himself.

Tracing Chen's story takes Hessler to the United States, Taiwan, Anyang, Shanghai and Beijing. He interviews aging archaeologists and the small fraternity of oracle-bone experts. In doing so, he unearths moving stories of the betrayal and pain that China's intellectuals endured from the communist victory through Mao's vicious Cultural Revolution. The intellectuals who survived are defined by this past, unlike most of the other characters in the book, who seem unmoored from China's history.

The oracle bones, of course, are metaphors for the loosely connected tales Hessler himself has assembled here; read together, they help us divine something essential about the nature of China today.

Reviewed by Steven Mufson
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: HarperCollins; First Edition edition (April 25, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060826584
• ISBN-13: 978-0060826581
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #106,659 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

77 of 88 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Lacks the Empathy and Intimacy of River Town, May 5, 2006

By	Steve Koss (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

In 2001, Peter Hessler introduced us to the Yangtze River town of Fuling. Hessler had traveled there in the mid-1990's as one of the first Peace Corps volunteers admitted to China, and he arrived naive, wide-eyed, uneducated about Chinese language and culture, and generally lost. In his first book, RIVER TOWN, he recounted his two years teaching English at a small college to young people studying to be English teachers in China. Hessler led us through his cultural awakening to Chinese life, academic bureaucracy and the constant infusion of Communist Party ideology, and the awakening of his students' lives to adulthood and the possibilities of the outside world. As Hessler jogs around the countryside (only foreigners jog in China) and gradually learns to read and speak Chinese language, he opens the world of interior China to his readers. By all accounts, RIVER TOWN is a master work, a personal and intimate account of both the author's education as well as that of his students, made all the more poignant by the fact that most of Hessler's Fuling is now underwater thanks to the enormous reservoir that rose behind the gates of the Three Gorges Dam.

Now comes ORACLE BONES. No longer the starry-eyed China neophyte, Hessler has graduated to the grimy world of journalism. Whether serving as an aricle clipper in Beijing for the New York Times, freelancing for the Boston Globe or Wall Street Journal or National Geographic, or penning feature stories for The New Yorker, Hessler is now on the endless prowl for "the sellable angle." As he travels the country looking for stories about the Rape of Nanking, the entrepreneurial success of Wenzhou businessmen, the money-trading Uighurs of Xinjiang Province, or the death of Beijing hutongs, he accumulates contacts and disparate story lines, bits and pieces of the old and new China. Along the way, external events impinge on his life and on China - the accidental American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, 9/11, the airplane incident over Hainan Island -- but they pass like snowfalls, leaving only a general impression of a winter.

Without much to connect these stories, Hessler zeroes in on the discovery and study of oracle bones, bits of turtle shell discovered in Anyang that represent some of China's earliest written language and may also provide insight into one of China's early but little understood dynasties, the Shang. A series of interludes that Hessler labels "Artifacts" tell the story of the oracle bones: their discovery, their removal to Taiwan by Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang, and their study and analysis by (mostly) Chinese scholars, many of whom suffered unfortunate and even tragic repercussions during the Cultural Revolution as a result of their work and their positions with respect to Chinese history and language.

Unfortunately, the end result simply doesn't work very well. ORACLE BONES alternates between personal stories of four of his former Fuling students' young adult lives (including a married couple with the remarkable adopted English names William Jefferson Foster and Nancy Drew), featurettes about a Uighur emigrant to America named Polat, the Chinese movie star Jiang Wen, and the Changchun Corn Industry Development Zone, brief riffs on external and political events, and, of course, the archaeological and socio-anthropological story of the oracle bones. At its best, the book traces the lives of Hessler's former students as they struggle to find their place in the Chinese economy. Their stories are touching and informative, but regrettably underdrawn. At the other end of the scale, the discourses on Chinese language structures and the politics of traditional versus simplified Chinese characters are likely to be a tedious slog for all but the most die-hard Sinophiles. In between, bits and pieces of the story are intriguing and even colorful; Hessler's story of Jiang Wen, for example, is fascinating and well told.

Still, the whole is less than the sum of its 458 pages of parts. ORACLE BONES feels as scattered as a field of artifacts; Hessler's own insecurities about this may have been inadvertently revealed in the Index, where names like Emily and Nancy Drew are followed by the explanatory note "(author's former student)." Remarkably, the author's own name is not only included in the Index (a first in my experience), but it is actually followed by "(author)," as if we (or he) might not be sure. Worse, like all artifacts and human remains, almost everything feels distant and cold and dead. It is hardly surprising that the New York Times chose the famed China historian Jonathan Spence to review this book - it is as much a history book as a contemporary description of China.

Hessler's writing is professionally reportorial but (with the exception of his former students' voices) detached, lacking the warmth and intimacy that Hessler so beautifully demonstrated in RIVER TOWN. Perhaps it is a consequence of Hessler's own experiences - no longer the China neophyte fascinated by everything he sees and learns, now it's all just business. One would hope that Mr. Hessler will return to his "China roots" in Fuling, tracing the arc of his former students's lives and the new Fuling that had to be rebuilt on higher ground. That story, and the web of wanderings and travels and experiences that would go with it, would tell a far warmer and more evocative story of where China is going today and tomorrow.

56 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully drawn, May 6, 2006

By	Seth Faison (Princeton, NJ) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a deeply engaging book about China. The title refers to the objects, animal shell and bone, that bear tiny inscriptions that count as the oldest record of writing in Asia, and as China's most ancient history.They are shards, really, offering small clues to what life was like more than 3,000 years ago. They are all that remain, the only artifacts that did not disintegrate over time, as bamboo, wood and paper inevitably did.

Listening attentively to archaeologists who weigh these oracle bones, Peter Hessler then conveys their sense of wonder and lets it inform his own exploration of contemporary China. In fact, Hessler uses archaeology as scaffolding for this adroit narrative. The search for clues, the buried nature of history, the attempts by rulers to instill order, the chaos that actually reigns are the dynamics of life in China today, just as they have been for centuries.

Hessler quotes a historian who wrote that although China has "a far longer past than the West ... the past and history are not the same thing. Here in China's past there was no narrative but only stories." Hessler clearly agrees. And he goes beyond the usual ways of evaluating so complex a culture. Instead, his focus wanders intelligently and settles into corners of China that we don't ordinarily read about. He writes with quiet power, which glues stories into a coherent whole. He sifts the morass of China's society and winnows it to the stories that resonate.

If "River Town" was a compelling account of his experience teaching English in a small city in central Sichuan province, in "Oracle Bones," he expands his horizon, mulling China's past as he examines its present. He hangs out with a money changer from Xinjiang, and his portrayal of their friendship is a gusty way to open the book. He travels the country as a freelance writer, visiting archaeological sites for National Geographic. He keeps in touch with former students, whose tales are starkly revealing. He works for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, clipping news stories about China from other newspapers and living in a back alley where Westerners usually cannot stay legally. Residency rules, like so much else in China, are in flux.

China's emerging economic power has prompted many Western writers to employ fantastical or alarmist views of the country as a gold mine or a fire-breathing dragon, neither of them realistic. Hessler's writing is refreshingly free of breathless superlatives. He admits being a lousy deadline journalist, preferring to look past the daily trivia that makes headlines for the deeper phenomena and to make note of the accidental nature of history."The past is under construction," Hessler writes. "It lies under houses, beneath highways, below building sites. Usually it reappears by chance - somebody digs, something turns up. In the end, luck discovers most artifacts in China."

His narrative is littered with intriguing observations and answers to his incisive questions. Tea drinking, for instance, is often assumed to be as old as China itself. Yet Hessler discovers that Chinese people thought of tea as a drink for barbarians until the Tang Dynasty. Hessler reveals little about himself. He seems to thrive on what he calls the "floating life" of a writer, observing contemporary China with detachment. The power of his storytelling would be even stronger if his own personality emerged in it. Yet Hessler has achieved something quite special in "Oracle Bones," conveying the idiosyncrasies of China in a way that makes its people palpably human and distinctly memorable.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A terrific view of China from a point of view of a yanguezhi, July 23, 2006

By	P. Wung "Engineering is my vocation, volleyba... (Tipp City, OH USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

It is a bit disconcerting for a person of Chinese descent to learn about himself and his culture from a yanguezhi (foreign devil). Yet this is exactly what happened when I read Oracle Bones.

This is an extremely fine book, full of subtle observations and exquisite narratives of matters great and small. Like Pankaj Mishra's An End to Suffering, Peter Hessler attempts many things in this moveable feast. This is a travel journal, a small peek at how Hessler was able to parlay a stint in the Peace Corp teaching English in China to a freelance gig writing for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and The New Yorker. Mostly this is a expansive look and humanistic rumination on how the globalization of the free market has touched the lives of common people of China, as exemplified by a number of Hessler's English students. Hessler used the story of his Uighur friend Polat to give us a view of every day street life in Beijing as well as the life of an oppressed asylum seeker in the US.

This style can easily become clumsy and ponderous, but Hessler does a masterful job of keeping the narrative interesting and colorful enough to lead the reader along through the turbulence of the serial form without losing each of the intricate interweaving threads.

The key to Hessler's success with this form is his usage of the archeological history of the Oracle Bones in China as the rhythm section to his narrative. Much like a steady drum beat in a good song, the rhythm soon overtakes much of the decorative accompaniment and dominates the song. The story of the archeology serves as a solid counterpoint for Hessler's riffing on globalization, on the ever-changing business environment in China, and on the peculiar yet inscrutable reactions of the Chinese government to all these changes. As the story evolves, the story of the Oracle Bones and the scholar who deciphered them comes around to dominate the narrative. The story wends itself around all the previous threads and makes the juxtaposing lines of inquiry reasonable. The story of the scholar, his wife, his family, and his wife's family, and his various colleagues - friends or foe- is transcendental in its universality. The latter part of the book, majority of which is devoted to the story of the Oracle Bone scholar has the impact of a fine mystery novel and it gives the reader the punch in the gut that one rarely gets when reading a travelogue or a book of history, or an autobiographical portrait.

This book was thoroughly enjoyable; it was concomitantly informative and soothing to the soul. The writing was superb, rhythmic, and transformational in its structure and meaning.