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

From the acclaimed author of River Town comes a rare portrait, both intimate and epic, of twenty-first-century China as it opens its doors to the outside world.

A century ago, outsiders saw China's a place where nothing ever changes. Today the country has become one of the most dynamic regions on earth. That sense of time — the contrast between past and present, and the rhythms that emerge in a vast, ever-evolving country — is brilliantly illuminated by Peter Hessler in Oracle Bones, a book that explores the human side of China's transformation.

Hessler tells the story of modern-day China and its growing links to the Western world as seen through the lives of a handful of ordinary people. In addition to the author, an American writer living in Beijing, the narrative follows Polat, a member of a forgotten ethnic minority, who moves to the United States in searchof freedom; William Jefferson Foster, who grew up in an illiterate family and becomes a teacher; Emily, a migrant factory worker in a city without a past; and Chen Mengjia, a scholar of oracle-bone inscriptions, the earliest known writing in East Asia, and a man whosetragic story has been lost since the Cultural Revolution. All are migrants, emigrants, or wanderers who find themselves far from home, their lives dramatically changed by historical forces they are struggling to understand.

Peter Hessler excavates the past and puts a remarkable human face on the history he uncovers. In a narrative that gracefully moves between the ancient and the present, the East and the West, Hessler captures the soul of a country that is undergoing a momentous change before our eyes.

"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." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"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,'... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) 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.

Steven Mufson covers energy for The Washington Post. He was the paper's Beijing correspondent from 1994 to 1998." Reviewed by Steven Mufson, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"One of the book's main pleasures is its language; Hessler writes clearly and sympathetically." Washington Post

"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." Los Angeles Times

"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." New York Times

"Looking to the past for a hint of what's to come remains a good way of understanding China. Oracle Bones is an excellent place to start." USA Today

"Oracle Bones melds the multiple personalities and tangled story lines into a kaleidoscopic vision of a country surging toward an uncertain future....The book demands patience but rewards it well." San Francisco Chronicle

"Mr. Hessler's experiences in China from 1999-2002, contains so many storylines and subplots that it could almost have been written as several separate books. Still, the author weaves together these different elements to create a page-turner with great insight into Chinese society." Wall Street Journal

"It is a stunning book, populated by a cast of hundreds but told through the minds of five key characters....Hessler is a near-perfect intermediary." Portland Oregonian

"This is an important and informative work offering a unique perspective on where China may be headed." Booklist

"Hessler introduces debates on the nature of the Chinese language and the scholars who have carried on the debate." Library Journal

From the acclaimed author of "River Town" comes a rare portrait, both intimate and epic, of 21st-century China as it opens its doors to the outside world.

Peter Hessler is the Beijing correspondent for the New Yorker and a contributor to National Geographic.