The American-born writer Peter Hessler’s book, Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China was published in 2006. Hessler’s book, Oracles Bones is a piece of non-fiction narrative literature about when his life as a foreign journalist in China between May 1999 and June 2002. A large portion of the book takes place in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001. The book is in many ways a sequel to Peter Hessler’s book entitled River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (Hessler 2006 459), which I have not read. Many of Hessler’s former students from his years in the Peace Corps appear in both books (Hessler 2006 459). Chapters 16 to Chapter 24 all take place in the background of September 11, 2001. The title of The Oracle Bones comes from the fact throughout Hessler’s book, there are chapters on Chinese archeology. Two recurring figures in the book are the archeologist Chen Mengjia (who died in 1966) and a Uyghur trader who immigrated to Washington D.C. from China. Mengja committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution. Mengja specializes in the Oracle Bones. Hessler wants to research Mengja’s life and death. The book includes a map, an “outline of Ancient Chinese History” (Hessler 2006 6-7), and an index. Similar to Peter Hessler’s book entitled Oracle Bones is an entertaining and insightful book about China between May 1999 and June 2002.
Works Cited:
Hessler, Peter. 2001. River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
Abdelfatah, Rund, Arablouei, Ramtin, York, Jamie, Kaplan-Levenson, Laine, Caine, Julie, Shah, Parth, Yvellez, Victor, & Schmitz, Rob. 2021. “Five Fingers Crush The Land,” National Public Radio-Throughline, May 13, Retrieved: May 8, 2023. (Who Are The Uyghur People? : Throughline : NPR).

This book, the second of a trilogy about Hessler's experiences in China, describes his time after his 2-year teaching stint in the provinces, wherein he becomes a somewhat reluctant journalist in Beijing. Like the first book, it is a fascinating exploration of modern China.

Extremely fascinating, even to non-Sinophiles. Not only does this book deeply illuminate China and Chinese culture to the Westerner, but it is also well written. Many threads and characters continue through to a satisfying end. It is not just a barrage of facts but a fascinating story of an American's encounter with China.

I ran into Hessler's narration on his teaching experience in Fuling two years ago. It was just an excerpt of his book in Chinese, translated by an unknown writer, published in a magazine named BOOK TOWN that cater to the taste of new intellectuals in China by imitating the style and design of NEW YORKER. I read it all through, non-stopped, which is rare for my reading style, and found myself somewhat lost in the delicacy and poetic nature of his writing. Also did I feel a sense of nostalgia and sincere sadness, flowing onwards like ripples of a silent brook, in no way exaggerating and overdue like most of the Westerner do when they touch on a topic of China. In a sensitive language like Chinese, this sadness is aesthetically expanded to an approportion that you just can't neglect. So I managed to buy the book RIVER TOWN and recommended it to many of my foreign friends. One of them, who is also an English teacher in China, kept it for the longest period of time and lent it to many friends of his, Chinese and Westerner alike. The book was terribly worn out the moment he gave it back to me. He told me that all of his Chinese friends love the book as much as I do, while his Western friends think it's nothing more than another bland story given in drab narration.
" Why would you think that way? I think it's marevelously composed." I asked.
He squinted back at me. "Well, not surprising, you're a Chinese."
"So what?"
"Well, no offense. For we who have been living long enough in China and know the land, his' just another normal story coming back to live. It might be appealing to those foreigners who always remain foreign to China, but not to us. We live this life day by day."He said with a pride faintly lingered by his lip.
I certainly was not that easily offended. And I doubted whether he really knows the land as he and his friends proudly proclaimed. Yet his words reminded me of the different perspectives between peoples of different cultures. Is it really because of his uncondescending sympathy that smooths out the reading process for his Chinese reader, turning it into an enjoyable journey, while in the eyes of Americans, his stories still unnecessarily contain familiar traces of arrogance and cultural bias against China?

In his new book "Oracle Bones: A Journey through Time in China", another New York Times Bestseller and National Book Award Finalist, Hessler makes an insightful observation:

"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."

He goes on by commenting how both countries "coped so badly with failure":

"When things went wrong, people were startled by the chaos.....For cultures accustomed to controlling and organizing their world, it was deeply traumatic. And it was probably natural that in extreme crisis, the Americans took steps that undermined democracy and free dom, just as the Chinese had turned against their own history and culture."

Somebody else has picked this part out in her blog as her favorite part in the book. It surely can serve as a manifestation of equivalency, rationally as well as emotionally. Yet why do we care so much about being treated as equivalent? Why is that we feel reassured of our dignity everytime when a Westerner tell us that "we are the same"? Isn't that a fairly simple truth?

So contrary to those reiteration of big themes, I am more fascinated, as I always have been, by the daily details he painstakingly drafted down on his notebooks. God, he's so good at dealing with plain facts! To be honest, I've never felt drawn to non-fiction writing of any kind before, but Hessler's two works cast new light on this special writing styles. Facts can be arranged in such a dexterous way to suggest anything you want to suggest, opening up a brand new horizon to many possibilities of interpretation. The narrator's self is still present, but only seems to function in the least active sense; he's just there to record what happened, refrained from any aggressive intention of commenting. Yet what kind of facts he is presenting! And with what subtlety are all the readers unconciously guided by his hidden intentions!

Not in the bad way though. Rather, I consider this reconstruction of "the Chinese daily life through a Western eye" as quite truthful, and the most thrilling elements this reading journey can provide, as our daily life space is suddenly transformed into something artistically appealing, if not ridiculous. In the chapter "Sand", he tells in such a delicate way his experience of being interrogated by a local police that it even gives out the scent of Kafka's masterpiece "Castle".

And there are other moments of sudden revelation, most of which happened when his mind hops from a scene of reality to his past impression of words and letters:

"That link between generations was another type of virtual archaeology：the young men in Anyang, reading the earth cores; and the old exile in Taipei, reading the faxed maps and remembering the fields that he had abandoned so long ago."

"When you look at a photograph of a big family in the 1920s, and see the Qing-style gowns and the Western suits, the bright young faces and the proud old parents, you wonder what the hell happened to all that time and talent. 梦."

Sometimes he can be mildly sarcastic, which shows more about his wit than his conceit:

"In a country where so much was jiade-- knockoff brands, shoddy restorations of ancient structures, fresh paint on the facades of old buildings-- the film sets were real. Sometimes they lasted longer than the movies themselves."

He's extremely sensitive to characters and words, and is good at exploring connections among those randomly chosen events. He views things from all different perspectives. In other words, his viewpoint is shifting, switching from time to time, yet with good reason especially when one deals with a culture as self-assured as Chinese. By so doing, he's capable of breaking the stereotypes of understanding, uttering new idea to trite topics.

"That was true for all of them --- I never met a survivor whose response seemed foreign. The historical events were unimaginable, as if they had come from another world, but the people's reactions were perfectly understandable. Recovery, in all its varied forms, is simply a human instinct."

"Writing could obscure the truth and trap the living, and it could destroy as well as create. But the search for meaning had a dignity that transcended all of the flaws."

The above can count as one of the best comment I've ever heard on an individual suffering of Cultural Revolution. And it's from an American. Maybe it's not fair by mentioning the speaker's nationality, for it's not in anyway indicated in the words; He's not commenting this as an outsider. Rather, he's standing with the people that he writes about. He questions them, and questions himself. He comforts them, and he comforts himself. Maybe, it is by doing the former, that enables him to do the latter.

I lived in China from 1998 to 1999 and this book picks up at almost the exact day that I left the country. Throughout this book Hessler also goes to DC during the time that I lived there. Given the timing, we probably crossed paths once or twice. So, reading this non-fiction book not only brought me back to an area of inquiry (China Studies) to which I devoted my early academic life, but also to a really formative and nostalgic time in my life. When I picked this book up at a used book store in Seattle (more formation, more nostalgia) I didn’t realize that it is techincally book #2 in a trilogy of Hessler’s insights and experiences in China. I’m delighted to know there are two more for me to read. If I read non-fiction, it’s mostly about places. And the reason places are interesting to me are the people that create and inhabit them. Hessler does an amazing job describing the people of China and the larger entity that is China. This book looks at so many themes, social issues, and changes that I know about in a cursory way. He pulls all of the threads together and creates something infinitely readable and relatable (even if you’ve never been to China). I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about a place that we should all be curious and interested in. Sidebar: reading this book reminds me that I made the right choice to veer off of my China studies. My approach would have been academic and largely unapproachable to most people. I wouldn’t have been able to instill the same amount of wonder and curiosity in my readers as he was able to accomplish. His next book is about Egypt —somewhere I’m also fascinated by. I can’t wait to read it. (Book 22 of 2018)

9755

Sitting at dinner with good friends a few months ago, we delved into what books we’d been reading. Always trust a Librarian: Deb enthused about Oracle Bones–her comments a tad vague perhaps: “it’s about oracle bones and yet about modern China”. That seemed a little oxymoronic (and intriguing) to me. Having spent many years studying both Ancient an Modern Chinese, I have always been curious about the Middle Kingdom and the possibility of a trip next summer underscored my interest in dipping back into things Chinese.

I can’t imagine a better way of doing so that Peter Hessler’s book: as complex with various themes and different subplots, the book describes a number of different people Peter came to know during his Post Peace Corps life as a magazine correspondent in China.

Prepare to encounter as many people as you might in a novel by Tolstoy (one of the chubby ones)–many revolving around the history of the study and translation of oracle bones–those enigmatic scrawls on bones that were “cracked” to determine prognostications in the pre-Zhou Shang Dynasty of China.

Three primary story lines weave through the book: the challenges his high school students face as they graduate from a Provincial school and try to make their way in the world The second narrative line follows the life and fortune of a Uyghur money changer who emigrates to the United States. The overarching narrative, however, touches on various facets of the history of discovery and study of oracle bones, a story that seems to weave more and more around the life and tragic death of Chen Mengjia (陳夢家) a charismatic and brilliant poet, archaeologist and scholar.

chen_mengjia

Much as J.S. Bach weaves contrapuntal melodies together, Hessler jostles these three discrete stories throughout the book–the common thread being Peter’s own professional and personal growth over the period encompassed by the writing, and more starkly, the political theater of China herself: the cataclysmic historical events of the last two centuries, the recent decades of economic expansion and the cat and mouse game of politics.

Most expository writing–and even fiction–tends to be more linear in its presentation. This sort of tour-de-force narrative juggling may be off-putting to some: I found it enlightening. And fun.

Hessler’s students struggled mightily trying to get ahead in a 3rd world economy. Polat, the fictional name of the very real Uygher money-changer comes to America and confronts our very own internal 3rd world nation of immigrants. The world of Oracle Bone scholars is blighted by political intrigue and petty jealousies. But rather optimistically, the people of all three realms seem to lurch ahead by book’s end. The young teaching couple have made enough money to get pregnant. Emily finds her metier working with handicapped students. Polat finally moves out of the slum. The traitorous scholar regrets the published condemnation as a young man of the honest scholar that hastened his demise–first politically and then suicide.

These optimistic glimmerings are the exception: I was horrified at the extent that most people in China (not Taiwan and Hong Kong perhaps) seem to have relished the damage done to America on 9-11. I was distressed at the incredible cynicism displayed by our “government” towards the Uygher independence movement–branding them as terrorists when they emphatically distanced themselves from the Taliban and Al Qaeda–simply to placate Red China and get their support for a stupid resolution in the Security Council. The crushing indifference of the Chinese Government to the individual is palpable throughout–especially in the fantastic hutong destruction passages. America, alas, doesn’t fare much better: our obsessive, greedy capitalism is a nasty match for the ambitious Chinese dictators. Hessler does a deft job of revealing the shortcomings of both behemoths as he shuttlecocks back and forth.

The day to day tedium, corruption and pettiness of provincial life in China didn’t surprise me as much as the constant victimization by crime and real physical danger subjected to immigrants in America evinced by Polat’s experience. Die of tedium and lies in a dictatorship, or be slashed or shot in our “free” country–some choice! Of course, Trump is successfully wedding both these options in a new America of lies AND violence: thank you Republican party and Bernie Sanders, for pushing upon us the worser of two evils.

But I digress…

Hessler is a master of New Yorkerese (much of the book appeared in that magazine first), a style of writing I rather like. One of the first things I did after finishing the last page was to look for a copy of his FIRST book to purchase–always a good sign for a new writer: this is one we need to follow up on!

感觉是何伟写中国最好的一本书，彼时的何伟已经结束在涪陵教书的生涯，转而在北京成为一个自由撰稿人，对差异习以为常，却仍保留审视的视角。在这本书里，何伟试图通过甲骨文这一古文密码，来讨论中国人数千年来的文化认同，毫无疑问地失败了。因为在中国人孜孜不倦挖掘自己古历史宣扬自己祖先崇拜的时候，同时也在塑造自己正确的集体记忆，发生在当下的、二十年前的往事，甚至不被承认，更何谈记得。这是转型中的中国，政府与人民充满矛盾，激烈的反抗在历史的河流中听不见声响，而在这近年来发生的事情里，又不断与悠久的历史传统产生震荡。这是千年来的文化延续，同时也是中国人如何重建与探索更深边界的故事。何伟在观察后所感到的困惑同样也是我的困惑，在千年的历史中，何为中国，何为中国人，而我们又将如何定义我们自己，在曲折前行中流浪与追寻。而写作与记叙，便是我们不断追问后给自己留下的答案与诠释。无比讽刺的是，对于二十年前中国的侧面，我依旧只能通过一个外国人的视角去了解，而此书在中国大陆甚至无法出版。

Oracle Bones is the book about the lives of ordinary Chinese people in the decades of great changes within the country. Peter Hessler is an expert on Chinese culture and language, who has been living in China for years. His first job there was as an English teacher in a small Sichuanese town (his first book is about life in that town). In this book, he's just got his new job – journalist in Beijing. He follows daily lives of ordinary citizens and how current global news (NATO bombing of Belgrade, Beijing bid for hosting the Olympics, 9/11 attacks and so on) and economic changes affect them.

Main characters in this book are: his former students William (now a teacher in city of Wenzhou) and Emily (now a worker in Shenzhen), Polat (member of Uyghur minority - „fixer“ and black market money changer) and Chen Mengjia (scholar of oracle bones who killed himself). We follow their lives, their struggles, hopes and dreams. Through their lives we got to see modern China with booming economy, rural, forgotten, remote towns in China, the history of the country and more. The freelance work allows the author to travel extensively to many parts of China, and to witness many historic events, which are all depicted in this book.

This book is great way to get a glimpse into this magnificent country. As I've lived in China (not in the same period though) reading this book was like going back there. I'd recommend this book for anyone interested in China.

I LOVE his writing. This book, like his other book River Town is a joy to read, and I tore through this. This book examines modern China from the point of view of many of its everyday citizens, especially those marginalized, while simultaneously exploring the previous generation's experiences through the pursuit of an archaelogical mystery. The most interesting things about this book were: the Chinese perspective on September 11th (or at least the perspective of an American who is in China during that time and receives information about the attacks through DVD bootlegs that patch together news footage with Hollywood movies), and the amazing comparisons between the U.S. and China that he makes near the end of the book. Reading books like this makes me want to BE a writer, just so I could bring something so interesting into the world (a minor obsession with Chinese culture helps).

Hessler's portrait of China is humbling, especially reading it as a Singaporean Chinese. We have many preconceptions of how materialistic or coarse the mainland Chinese are: the book does not deny it, but emphasizes a very different side of China. In the chapter on Shenzhen, in particular, when he profiles a former factory worker turned talk show host who sticks to her moral guns, and becomes an inspiration for many blue collar factory girls, in sharp contrast to the white collar Chinese novelist who chooses to embrace the emphemeral, heady pleasures of the sleep-around socialite. I like it too that he chooses certain academics to track down; again its a very different, far more idealistic, side of China that we read about in the press, with either the economic and financial outperformance or the human rights and safety violations. Style-wise, his New Yorker writing background is all over the book's magazine feature-type pacing.

That said, I would disagree on a couple points on Chinese culture, but those are small quibbles with a highly readable, entertaining and educational book that brings together old and new China, and the best travelogue I've read this whole year.

Very fascinating to read about China around 2000.
Didn’t really enjoy/understand/fully appreciate the oracle bones story that tied it all together, but very much appreciated and enjoyed the anecdotal tales of Hessler’s travels around China, as always. He is funny and straightforward in a charming way
The way he describes how he is received in small towns around China is still similar to some of my experiences today
I appreciated the very human and real stories. People and cultures are not always consistent and everyone is just trying to live…

Notable stories
* visiting the Yalu River and China-north korea border
* Falun Gong and protests in Beijing
* rule breaking tendencies in china
* his friendship with Polat, the Uyghur who came to the US as a refugee
* working as a journalist in china

Quotes

The police had followed a similar line of questioning, and it was beginning to annoy me. As we replayed the event, it passed through layers of insecurity: first and foremost, people were ashamed that a foreigner had been robbed in their city. But after that unfortunate fact had to be admitted, it seemed even more shameful that the foreigner had caught the thief. Only a criminal of unusual ineptitude would be beaten by a foreigner at two in the morning, and so there must have been something seriously wrong with him. The police had offered various excuses. He must have been a drunk, or a cripple, or a migrant who was desperately poor. Dandong, the police emphasized, was a modern, orderly city, with a growing tourist industry. It wasn’t the sort of place where a foreigner woke up in the middle of the night with a common thief in his room. Nobody seemed to take seriously another possibility: that the man was a North Korean refugee. The police had assured me that there were few refugees along this part of the border, because Sinuiju, the North Korean city across the river, wasn’t as poor as the rest of the country. People in Sinuiju ate twice a day, according to Dandong residents who had relatives there. But farther east, where the combination of famine and mindless economic policies had been particularly brutal, an estimated seventy thousand North Koreans were fleeing to China every year. It seemed likely that at least a handful of them had made their way to Dandong. This possibility bothered me: If the locals wanted the thief to be disabled, I preferred him to be perfectly fit. I wanted him to be experienced, savvy, and fleet of foot—a worthy adversary. I wanted him to be Chinese, not North Korean. It disturbed me to think that I had viciously punched a man who might have been starving.

I had always liked traveling to small cities like Dandong, which had few foreign visitors. Locals were eager to talk—from their perspective, there was something momentous about a simple conversation with an American. And often these discussions reminded me of China’s complex relationship with the outside world. It wasn’t unusual for people to speak about war or conflict with a sense of inevitability, and they fully believed that the United States and other countries deliberately bullied China. But at the same time, people were incredibly friendly to foreigners, and they spoke enthusiastically of international trade links. Initially, these contradictions had mystified me—I thought that eventually I would figure out what the people really believed. But over time I realized that conflicting ideas could exist simultaneously, even in the mind of a single person. The news of a distant bombing might trigger one response, while a conversation with a Chinese-speaking foreigner sparked something else. The sheer complexity of the modern landscape had a lot to do with it. If you visited a bridge that had been bombed out by Americans, restored by Chinese, and then rented out to small-scale entrepreneurs who sold Titanic ice cream bars, it wasn’t surprising that people reacted to the outside world in illogical ways.

If they had money, they could cross. My hotel ran tours that started at around two hundred dollars, and passports weren’t required; a Chinese identity card was adequate. It was easier for a Chinese citizen to visit North Korea than Hong Kong, which had officially returned to the Motherland two years earlier. The Chinese government had established unusually lax rules in Dandong because it was pretty sure that anybody who crossed the Yalu River would want to come back.

The guide explained that the Chinese tourists should be careful to show respect when they visited North Korean memorials, and they should avoid taking photographs of people laboring. The North Koreans are proud people, and the Chinese need to remember this. Also, when visiting the Demilitarized Zone, it was important that the Chinese not shout “Hello!” at any American soldiers on the other side.

One day, I asked: “Would you rather have a long life with the normal ups and downs, or an extremely happy life that ends after only another twenty years?” Nearly everybody took the first option. That didn’t turn out to be much of a dilemma in rural China; several students pointed out that their families were so poor that they couldn’t afford to die in two decades, regardless of how joyful they were. I probably learned the most from the activity: after that, I was more careful about adapting American ideas about the pursuit of happiness to a Sichuanese classroom.

The protest ended without incident, but a line had been crossed. For the first time, the nation’s leaders realized how well organized Falun Gong had become. In the weeks that followed, the government responded with the sort of silence that was always a bad sign in China. Beijing newspapers didn’t publish a word about the protest; nothing appeared on the television news. There was no debate, no public discourse, no commentary of any sort. For weeks the city waited.

At the personal level, it was easier to figure out. Most simply, it was natural for individuals in China to break the law. There were endless regulations, and many of them were unreasonable; the country changed so quickly that even rational rules slipped out of date. Virtually every Chinese citizen whom I came to know well was doing something technically illegal, although usually the infraction was so minor that they didn’t have to worry. It might be a sketchy apartment registration or a small business that bought its products from unlicensed wholesalers. Sometimes, it was comic: late at night, there were always people out walking their dogs in Beijing, because the official dog registration was ridiculously expensive. The dogs were usually ratlike Pekingese, led by sleepy owners who snapped to alertness if they saw a cop. They were guerillas walking toy dogs. Regardless of what kind of problem an individual had, it was his problem, and only he could do something about it. Without the sense of a rational system, people rarely felt connected to the troubles of others. The crackdown on Falun Gong should have been disturbing to most Chinese—the group had done nothing worse than make a series of minor political miscalculations that had added up. But few average people expressed sympathy for the believers, because they couldn’t imagine how that issue could be connected to their own relationship with the law. In part, this was cultural—the Chinese had never stressed strong community bonds; the family and other more immediate groups were the ones that mattered most. But the lack of a rational legal climate also encouraged people to focus strictly on their own problems. A foreigner inevitably felt even more isolated. I lived in the same environment as everybody else—the blurred laws, the necessary infractions—but I had even less stake in the system. Regardless of how much sympathy I might have for a protestor on the Square, I still viewed him through a screen, because there was no chance that I would ever be in that situation. I wasn’t going to get beaten to death by the police or sent to a labor camp. The worst the government could do was kick me out of the country. Sometimes it bothered me, because my own Chinese life seemed a parody of certain things that I observed. But in the midst of events it was rare to find time for thoughtfulness; usually, I just had to get things done. That was one connection that I had with many citizens—all of us were coldly pragmatic.

If they examined me closely, they’d find other sketchy details: I didn’t have a legal job, and I wasn’t registered in my apartment. I spent a lot of time in Yabaolu, hanging out with Uighurs and middlemen. I had filed a police report after getting robbed on the North Korean border. Four years ago, the United States government had sent me to China as a member of the Peace Corps, an organization that had been founded during the height of the cold war. I assumed that the authorities knew everything—but that was different from knowing everything at once. This was only guesswork, but my sense had always been that the government was much better at acquiring information than analyzing it. Whenever I imagined their files, I thought of something infinitely bigger than those in the Wall Street Journal bureau, and organized according to some system that was far more whimsical than the alphabet. My journalist visa might be recorded in one place; my business visa in another; my bogus apartment registration was somewhere else. But if I happened to attract attention, it might all come together at once.

“The pressure is higher here, because of the freedom,” she said. “Your individual ideas are more important, because people don’t know about your private life. It’s not like the interior, where your family will tell you what to do. It’s freedom, but that kind of freedom creates pressure.”

In the past, central Beijing had been characterized by neighborhoods known as hutong. The word originally came from a Mongolian term for “water well,” and it had come to describe alleyways flanked by courtyard homes. By the end of the 1990s, the hutong were fast disappearing, but there wasn’t a word for what replaced them. The pace of development was so intense that speed was always the first priority, and most new buildings were completely undistinguished: quickly designed, cheaply built, badly finished. They looked temporary, like awkward new neighbors who don’t fit in and probably won’t stay for long. In a floating city, I led a floating life. I lived in an apartment where nothing had happened, in a city that was best defined by what no longer existed. Finally, after a year of being unmoored, I decided to search for a home with some stability. Beijing had recently passed a law protecting twenty-five hutong districts, and I found an apartment in one of these sections: Ju’er Hutong. It wasn’t a legal address for foreign journalists, but I figured that I could dodge the cops whenever an anniversary rolled around. I was willing to do almost anything to live in a part of old Beijing that wouldn’t be demolished.

In the end, so much depends on circumstance—what happens to be found, how the find happens to be perceived. A person’s relationship to an artifact can be shaped by nationalism or regionalism. Perspective is critical: if one believes that he stands at the center, then diffusion seems natural. But a culture looks completely different if you approach it from the outside and then work your way back in.

We walked to his apartment, and he laughed when I took off my coat. “Your shirt’s the same as mine,” he said. I looked down and realized that we had dressed identically: olive-green Caterpillar-brand denim shirts. “Did you buy that in Yabaolu?” he asked. “Yes. In that new market in Chaoyangmenwai.” “It’s jiade,” he said, laughing. “Same as mine. How much did you pay?” That was a question that had no good answer in China; the moment anybody asked, you knew you had gotten ripped off. “Maybe seventy yuan,” I said, hopelessly. “I paid forty,” Polat said. “They probably charged you more because you’re a foreigner.”

Twice in China, the police nabbed me while exiting a public toilet. In Fujian province, I was in the middle of a reporting trip that hadn’t uncovered anything sensitive; in Gansu, I had simply wandered unknowingly into a county that happened to be closed to foreigners. These detentions were not satisfying for anybody. Ideally, there was an atmosphere of mutual antagonism: the journalist pursued the truth; the cops upheld the laws of the People’s Republic. But it was hard to get inspired about a foreigner who was caught pissing in a town that was closed to outsiders. The worst part was watching the stages of recognition. In the beginning, the police were often excited, and the interrogation moved briskly. After a while, though, it dawned on them that this foreigner simply had no clue what he was doing. Sometimes, by the end, I recognized pity in their eyes.

On the street a light rain was falling. Now I realized why Professor Shih hadn’t recalled the year of his marriage as promptly as the dates of the found artifacts. That was Chinese history: things you remembered and things you tried to forget. His son turned to me while we waited for a cab.

Many customers were lawyers working late; they came down, bleary-eyed, fumbling with wallets and purses. None of them looked at us twice. It would have been a lot for them to process if they had known all the baggage that accompanied their General Tao Chicken. That name was a misspelling of General Tso, or Zuo Tongtang, the brilliant and ruthless Qing general who had expanded the Chinese empire. Under Zuo’s command, in 1884, Xinjiang had become a Chinese province; and now Uighurs were delivering his namesake chicken in the American capital. General Tso and Colonel Sanders: great chicken imperialists. Don’t eat Kentucky, Don’t eat Xinjiang.

That was the same decade that Chen Mengxiong, past the age of seventy, finally joined the Communist Party. He did not become a member out of faith; he joined simply because, in the Ministry of Geology, he had reached a level that required membership. Otherwise he wouldn’t be allowed to attend certain meetings. Like so many Chinese nowadays, Chen Mengxiong’s true politics are those of the pragmatist. When you look at a photograph of a big family in the 1920s, and see the Qing-style gowns and the Western suits, the bright young faces and the proud old parents, you wonder what the hell happened to all that time and talent.

This book comprises three individual writings.

1. The History of China - its customs, socio-political changes, myths, and religion. A dive into the people and the culture those people have preserved or tried to preserve and this part of the book does complete justice to the culture.

2. Author's journey through China -> "The motorcycle diaries" -Esque book, documenting the author's interaction with life in china, his struggles, his observations, and his thought process living in that state. A wonderfully written section, that lets you see the world from the author's perspective and allows you to appreciate the effort journalists put in.

3. Comparison between America and china -> By its very nature, America has a habit of creeping up into most of the stories throughout world and this one was not so different and this aspect devalues the book in total, and gives you an Americanized view of China rather than a historical perspective