Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China

An excellent followup to River Town. I learned a great deal. What stuck with me the most was Hessler's friend Pollat (I am unsure of the spelling as it was an audio book). I had no idea Uighurs existed until I read this book, nor was I aware of their plight. It's some eye opening stuff. As well, the jiadu (sp?) culture with the money lending and such.

I learned about starch and its different uses.

REVIEW IS WIP

Peter Hessler is a young writer living in Beijing. His background (and the subject of his previous book) is an English teacher in the Peace Corps. He maintains contact with his previous students, many of whom have left the small towns and migrated into the newly growing cities for the economic opportunities in the Chinese Open and Reform economy of the late 1990's. He is an aspiring journalist making his way in whatever opportunities present themselves.

Written in narrative nonfiction, he recounts his experiences of his students from a small rural community, living in a booming Beijing economy and the stresses of society growing at a rapid pace. One of the most interesting subjects in his book an Uighur, of Western China, a political outsider, but native son of the territory of China. Hessler is able to build an insider story of persecution and the paranoia that grows from one being threatened within one's society. Often times the stories are funny and wildly ironic or terrifying to illustrate the chaos of bureaucracy or mob rule as China works to build an image to the outside world yet maintain order within it's borders.

The subjects in his stories reflect the political lives of those born in the past 100 years. Hessler does a wonderful job developing the story of China today while informing you of it's sociological and political history since 1500 BC.

This was the book I needed to read to begin to form a framework to understand current political activity in Asia. The political movement of the Uighur's, Kuomintang, the political leaders of the 20th century and their relations with Japan, North Korea and Taiwan are all addressed in elementary historical perspective of the modern world stage.

Yes, I've spent the better part of a month reading this..

And yes, it is completely THAT awesome.

By now, this has become a historic piece rather than a portrayal of contemporary China

I bought this book during my first trip to China.
One sentence convinced me to buy it, and it plainly described the landscapes I witnessed through the window of the Hong Kong- Beijing train: "a peasant, a field, a road, a village".
Add "appartment complexes" to that, and that was it: the author saw the China I saw, and offered his interpretation. Exactly what I needed during this trip of discovery!

How wrong I was.

After a few chapters, discomfort began to set in. No, the China he described wasn't the China I knew. Something was off in his descriptions. And yet, it wasn't a bad book... I just didn't want it to influence my first impressions of the country.

I decided to give it a rest and read it after my trip.

After finishing it, I stay convinced in one thing: the China the author describes (roughly 1998-2002) is vastly different to the 2016 country I visited.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, thanks to China's incredible dynamism, "Oracle Bones", has become more of a historic piece than a description of contemporary China.

And its focus on the past couldn't be clearer, than when the author describes China's old Republican generation. His description of cosmopolitan, idealistic and forgotten old men and women are all the more melancholic when one realizes that by now, all of them must be gone...

This is a rich, in depth and fascinating book for anyone who wishes to better understand China's History and Society.
However, do not take it as a contemporary piece, but rather as a description of the country's past decade: it may help you understand where it stands now.

It sure helped me.

In Oracle Bones, you see Peter Hessler's ambition to be a good writer, an observer and a Chinese expert. While reading the book, I always try to picture how Hessler's life was like back in 2001 when he was tracking the past and the present in a country of floating lives while living in a foreign country.
The book is less personal and amusing than other books of his, but it's still worth reading.
It was heartbreaking to read the story of Chen Mengjia and Zhao Luorui, whose life was damaged due to opposing simplifying Chinese writing. I like how Hessler organizes all the materials to put together the story, from Mr. Zhao's courtyard to Chen Mengjia's brother, complemented by interviews with Wu Ningkun, it slowly revealed the story of an archaeologist and a literature translator, their research, personality, and how they got drawn into the vortex of politics. All the pieces and emotion accumulate in the end, and the moment you realize their fight for preserving traditional culture meant nothing but leading to their life tragedy, it feels daunting and lingering. I also added A Single Tear to my reading list after reading this.

And after finishing Orcale Bones, I'm now a completionist of Peter Hessler's writing on China, all in 4 months in 2024. It feels like a time travel.
After putting down this book, I tried to trace different character's life in his four books, Emily (who was named 'Anne' in River Town), Willy, Anry from Fuling, Vincent and Serena from Sichuan University (I accidentally ran into Serena's writing in another column while reading Other Rivers, and the moment I realized the writer was Serena, I almost screamed!!!). All the characters are very vivid and show the generational change of Chinese people. Peter Hessler is an excellent writer and a humble observer, and I feel grateful to be able to see China through his eyes over the course of 20 years, I wish I could read his writing on China again in the future.

After going to China last year (and starting to study Chinese), I've really yearned to understand more of its history and how Chinese people think about themselves and the rest of the world. This book alternates between a few different stories: the origins of oracle bones (and the hard-to-verify history of the archaeologist who made huge strides in this field), a Uighur who is granted asylum in the United States, and some of Hessler's former students (two English teachers, and a couple that works in a factory setting). This book covers a lot of ground, from China's reaction to 9/11, to the inception of Shenzhen, to the modernization of Chinese language and the controversies that lie within these changes. China is an incredibly complex place with half its foot in its traditions and the other half in the Western world, and this book really illustrates that struggle.

I liked that most of the history in this book was disseminated through storytelling, but at times I yearned for a bit more backstory. Either way, I'm now a fan of this author and plan to read more.

Even if you're not interested in reading about China, there are some real zingers here that will help understand how Chinese people think the way they do (because guess what? Americans are guilty of it too):

"When I first lived in China, I was mostly struck by differences, but over time the similarities became more obvious. Americans and Chinese shared a number of characteristics: they were pragmatic and informal, and they had an easy sense of humor..... Both China and the United States were geographically isolated, and their cultures were so powerful that it was hard for people to imagine other perspectives."

My favourite among Peter Hessler’s three books so far (the first two being “river town” and “The Buried”). Compared to “river town” the author’s writing style has matured. Compared to “the burried”, the interleaving narratives among modern time, archeological discoveries and evolution of Chinese characters are more synergetic. This is partly because the archeologists and scholars who studied these artifacts are native Chinese unlike those in “the burried” who are mostly westerners, partly due to continuity in Chinese history, which contrasts sharply with that of Egypt. Like his other books, the authors put stories of individuals at the front and center — in this case, stories of his former students, a uyghur trader who successfully sought asylum in US, and a Chinese scholar who committed suicide during the cultural revolution. The historical backdrops are significant — the open and reform in China, 9/11 in US, but they serve primarily as contexts to appreciate each individual’s stories.

The ambivalence some readers express regarding this very enjoyable book may be due to uncertainty as to its genre. It's not exactly a work of scholarship (although many scholars living and martyred appear within the pages), or even of journalism (although that label also comes close to the mark). Peter Hessler mentions being uncomfortable with certain aspects of journalism, including the convention that writers avoid appearing in their own stories or explaining their reporting techniques. He does both, while also showing the challenges of being a foreign correspondent in a place like China, and the danger of creating a meaningless product. To me the book feels most like a memoir, although a unifying narrative arc is not obvious. There are narrative threads, of course: concerning not just the author but also Polat and Emily (two of his most interesting contacts in China). I was quite taken by his own challenges (surviving on a freelancer's uncertain income, offering friendship across a significant cultural divide, avoiding arrest for having witnessed police brutality -- or having innocently wandered into a village during a local election). For context he weaves in background regarding both ancient history and recent trends in Chinese society. He provides the Chinese perspective of notable events such as the embassy bombing and the spy plane accident. He even delves at some length into the standoff over Taiwan and China's long-festering problem with "East Turkestan terrorists," aka Uighurs. It may be disjointed, but it works.

I don't see a need to categorize the book in order to enjoy it.

But then, I am predisposed to like just about any first-person treatment of China. This one joins the list of accounts by other Westerners, e.g., David Kidd, Mark Salzman, Rosemary Mahoney, and Bess Spero Li, among others by native Chinese that I've also enjoyed (Nien Cheng, Zhu Xiao Di, Zhang Boli). I've also been through numerous quasi-fictional treatments, such as this one. Oracle Bones may be my favorite of all the above.

Obviously, I have a longstanding interest in China. I like its culture/architecture/music/language/food (its government not so much). OTOH, in my experience the place is stimulating but not very comfortable (what with oppressively hot summers and brutally cold winters, terrible pollution, etc.), and most transactions are tedious and frustrating. That latter problem becomes evident when, for example, Hessler tries to get a correction made to his government-issued Chinese language business card. At my current stage of life just reading about all that is preferable, and his descriptions are as engaging as any I've seen.

I do still have my memories, though, and they added to the value I took from this. Emily and other young folks appearing in these pages are migrants from the interior to recently developed factory towns in the Southeast. My enjoyment of their stories was enhanced by having met people just like them.

Hessler has a unique and enjoyable voice and focus in depicting, for example, China's grim accumulation of problematic anniversaries, and the proliferation of jiade stuff (i.e., knockoff imitations) as well as people's philosophical acceptance of same. At one point he even reports on a pair of unsuspecting fellow American journalists, hinting they're no less exotic than the Chinese! As a full-time wordsmith, I liked his fixation on "Special English," to which I think he consciously reverts sometimes for fun. I also appreciated his commentary on the origins of certain 字 (speculative though those origins may be). I was delighted by his "eye-bee-leaf" analogy for explaining the evolution of written 中文, and his illustration of the disdain scholars have for the simplified characters ("For a traditionally educated Chinese, writing simplified characters is like walking thru the Kwik-mart 2 by sumthing").

Despite abrupt transitions, it all hangs together naturally. I'm very glad to have read it.

Oh, regarding memoir, having written one of my own, I also very much approve of his observation near the end, when he mentions the writings of an aged survivor of China's very difficult twentieth century: "His memoir hadn't been a best seller, but he had put the past in order. For any writer, that's a fundamental motivation ..." It was for me.

And one last thought regarding journalism: On checking the author's Facebook page I followed a link to the November 21, 2016, issue of The New Yorker, where he and numerous others had written short items about the recent Presidential election. I was an avid reader of that magazine for decades, appreciative of its literary quality, but finally gave up because of its increasingly obvious political slant. I dreaded what I might find in the above issue (and took care to avoid the other writers' contributions). But in focusing only on the perspectives of voters he'd interviewed, and withholding value judgments, Hessler deploys the same objective observation that brings the Chinese to life in Oracle Bones. I call that good journalism. Peter Hessler's other titles are going on my to-read list right now.