I just read this before going to China. This is a must read if you plan on going to China and want to know what to expect, or if you want to know current China and how the distant and recent past has shaped China today.

Hessler went to China in 1996 as a Peace Corps volunteer to teach English. And he stayed, becoming a newspaper reporter, then magazine writer, and now a non-fiction author. Hessler recently published the introductory and concluding articles in the National Geographic Special Edition on China. That NG is excellent as well.

If you only have time to read one book on China, this should be it.

Peter Hessler has such a gentle way of blending stories of Chinese history (both ancient and modern) with personal experiences. This book is a rich mix of stories that span China's geography and history. I especially loved the interviews with old archaeologists and linguists. I think it is so valuable to capture those stories and opinions before they are lost forever.

The author truly immersed himself in the Chinese experience, living the life and speaking the language. Like any great journalist, he has an immense interest in and love of people. He reveals much about a country that's still largely a mystery to me by revealing a few of the interesting individuals he's known. The run in with the Chinese police is a great story!

I love books like this. Written with love, stories on stories. And it makes you reflect on your own life too. While I was reading this, I thought: Wow, Hessler lived in China in such an amazing time, from 1995 to 2006 (when this book was published). There were no smartphones yet, let alone WeChat, and the country was still developing insanely fast, a process that has now slowed down. People, especially twenty-somethings, where still discovering their place in the world, or more specifically; in China.

And it’s easy to envy Hessler. But then I thought about how such big changes only become clear after a decade or two. And it reminded me to appreciate living in China now. Like Hessler, I'm also meeting lots of Chinese people, and because like Hessler, I can talk Chinese now, I can also get to know the stories they hold.

The book isn’t contemporary, and yet Hessler’s China is also my China, with its ‘jiade’ and ‘chai nar’, leaving your hometown, and money before babies. Hessler is a great noticer, sensitive to people and what they say, how they say it, and connect that to bigger themes. He is also a long-form journalist, and sometimes this gets in the way. Too much reporting and facts packed together, and the parallel of archeology and especially Chen Mengjia or Polat never really ends anywhere.

But still, this is a book that is great not just if you’re interested in China, but humans in general.

Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China (2006) by Peter Hessler begins with Hessler’s life on May 8, 1999 and ends in June 2002 but also spans centuries in historical China, where the story ranges and revolves around ancient oracle bones and the archeologist Chen Mengjia and his wife, Lucy Chao, among many other scholars and laymen.

Oracle Bones is by far a better book than Hessler’s first called River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. Hessler seems to have matured in the five years between the two publications, and Oracle Bones takes on a deeper power that concerns itself more with the Chinese and their history than Hessler’s imperialist observations and interactions with them, as he was accustomed to do in River Town.

In Oracle Bones, a more restrained and curious Hessler steps out of the way to reveal the souls of the people who he speaks with in his quest to uncover the truth behind what happened to Chen Mengjia, a poet and lover of oracle bones.

Hessler reminds readers that the Chinese do not speak in such a way common to most Americans and that gathering the truth to certain situations which happened during the Cultural Revolution may be more difficult than one might expect, simply for cultural reasons and more complexly for the pain that is caused by the act of remembering:

“In China, people often speak circuitously when confronted with an uncomfortable memory. The narrative emerges loosely, like string falling slack onto the floor; the listener has to imagine how everything connects. Sometimes the most important details are omitted entirely. But when the Chinese do decide to speak openly, their directness can be overpowering. Often, there is no visible emotion: just the simple straight words” (p 433).

And when Hessler, doing some real reporting for a change, is able to get people beyond their defensiveness or avoidance tactics is when the story opens up more clearly about Chen Mengjia and the past that led the great scholar to commit suicide in 1966.

The climax of the book comes when Hessler tracks down Professor Li Xueqin, then almost seventy, in his office at Tsinghua University to ask him about the heavy criticism the professor published in 1957 to publicly shame Chen Mengjia decades ago during the Cultural Revolution and how this article could have been one factor of many leading to Mengjia’s suicide. What comes next is a true representation of the human condition in all its splendor and in all its agony:

“I didn’t want to do it,” tells Professor Li Xueqin, former assistant to Chen Mengjia and the director of the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project initiated in 1995, “There was no problem with the scholarly points that I made in the other parts of the essay. But the personal criticism was something that I didn’t want to write. After that essay was published, I rarely saw Chen Mengjia. But occasionally in the early 1960s, I encountered him at the Institute of Archaeology, and whenever that happened, I didn’t feel comfortable speaking to him. I just couldn’t hold a conversation, because my heart felt bad. I always regretted that article...

“I think that people understood. Much later, after he was dead, I still had contact with his friends, and occasionally I saw his wife. None of them ever attacked me. I think they understood what had happened, but I still felt bad. Mei banfa. There was nothing I could do about that…

“Throughout the interview, I have been writing, and now Professor Li looks at my notebook.

“I would prefer that you not write about this in the New Yorker,” Professor Li says, now a very old man, “It’s a personal problem. I’d rather you just wrote about the chronology project and those things that we talked about earlier.

“I say that I won’t write about it unless I can explain everything fully.

“It’s hard to understand, apart from the fact that it was a horrible period,” Professor Li explains to Hessler. “By the time the Cultural Revolution happened, if people criticized you, then you truly believed that you were wrong. I was also criticized at that time, and I believed the things that people said. Everybody was like that; it was a type of social psychology. There were so many enemies—everybody was an enemy, it seemed” (p 391).

And this has been one aspect of the human condition that has always fascinated me as a writer; it is often difficult for me to grasp the fact for how little people sell their morals down the river, for how little people give away their souls to save their skins, for how little people trade their lives to easily destroy another.

Hessler leaves the interview with Professor Li Xueqin and reflects on the professor’s mood and comments, which came unexpectedly:

“On my way to Tsinghua, I had told myself that it was necessary to take the professor by surprise, because otherwise this detail of the past might disappear. But it would have felt better if the man had become defensive or angry; it was much worse to see the regret. The author of that criticism had been twenty-four years old” (p 392).

And the story of Chen Mengjia reaches a level of sorrow also quite unexpected for the reader as Chen MengXiong, Mengjia’s little brother, speaks of the disgrace which led to Mengjia’s suicide,

“That night was the first time Mengjia tried to kill himself. He took sleeping pills, but he didn’t die. They took him to the hospital. The next day I heard the news, and I went to his home. There were Big Character posters on the door, criticizing Mengjia. I entered and realized that the courtyard was already occupied by Red Guards. They were using it as a kind of neighborhood base. And I was captured immediately. ‘Good,’ they said. ‘Zi tou luowang. You’ve cast yourself into the net.’

“Mengjia’s wife was there, too, and they seated her and me on chairs in the courtyard. The first thing they did was shave off half our hair. At that time, it was called the Yin-Yang Head, and it was a common punishment. After that, they took off their leather belts and started beating us” (p 434).

The fate of Chen Mengjia and the oracle bones, albeit one of the more fascinating ones, is but one story in a myriad of others set throughout as overlapping narratives.

Hessler also dives into juxtaposing issues that language creates, especially with so many cultures using so many languages. What is reality, then, if language creates reality? A very good question when set against an historical event like the Cultural Revolution in China.

“It’s this huge amount of data,” explains Imre Galambos, a foreign linguist in Beijing, “There’s this philosopher who had a lot of influence on me, Ernst Cassirer. He wrote this book called Language and Myth.

“Basically, his idea is that language itself creates reality. For example, in order to have words like nouns, you have to have concepts. When you form concepts, that’s when you’re creating stuff—it’s a creative process. You pick out certain things from the environment, and you give them labels, and you create this reality around you. When you’re a kid, you’re not just learning how to speak; you’re learning how to perceive a reality. It’s almost like a computer language, an internal code that makes you able to think” (p 444).

By the end of Hessler’s quest through time and China, he has captured a sense of this “internal code” which helps to create an unbiased honesty as he reflects on the similarities between China and the United States:

“My journey between China and the United States came to feel the same way—a blurring of old boundaries and distinctions. When I first lived in China, I was mostly struck by the 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.

“In both nations, people tended to be optimistic, sometimes to a fault. They worked hard—business success came naturally, and so did materialism. They were deeply patriotic, but it was a patriotism based on faith rather than experience: relatively few people had spent much time abroad, but they still loved their country deeply. When they did leave, they tended to be bad travelers—quick to complain, slow to adjust. Their first question about a foreign country was usually: What do you think of us? 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” (p 439-440).

As I wrote in the beginning, Hessler has matured since 2001 that came with the publication of River Town and 9/11. Hessler, as both reporter and writer, has learned control and a sense of balance of his material, much like a sculptor shaping his malleable material more for the material’s gain than the artist’s own in order to show the fullness of art and reality.

“That was the nature of writing,” explains Hessler, “and you had to find ways to balance it. And I always remembered that there was at least one faith that connected the teacher and the writer. Whenever a person studied another language, and went to another place—or even imagined it—there was a chance that he would gain a new perspective. He might misinterpret information, and the material might confuse him; I had seen that happen time and time again. But if there were patience and determination and honesty, then a glimpse outside might help somebody become more comfortable with his place in the world” (p 426).

And it is a place in the world which so many people strive to achieve each and every day, their personal struggle for identity, and yet it can be described as a singular reality—a tiny dot in the vastness of uncountable dots.

But with patience, determination and honesty there is no question in my mind that the world will become a better place than it was yesterday—after all, our sun is but one tiny dot in the heavens, but without it we would all perish.

“The historical events were unimaginable,” Hessler writes of China and its history, “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” (p 456).

And Hessler closes with a reflection on the human condition and the three Fates, as if these three sisters (China, Hong Kong, Taiwan—who is to say for sure?) had been guiding him through his quest to understand the impossible events which took place so many decades ago in China.

Hessler is outside a retirement home in Reston, Virginia where he had just met Wu Ningkun, the author of A Single Tear, and he is waiting for a bus when he meets the three old women:

“‘I asked the women what they had thought of the memoir.

“‘I liked it,’ said one.

“‘He had a hard life,’ said the Midwest.

“‘Especially when they threw him into a labor camp,’ said New York.

“The bus pulled up; the door hissed open. Suddenly the image was clear: three elderly sisters, spinning, weaving, snipping. I paused, unsure how to end the conversation.

“‘You better get on that bus,’ said New York, and I did” (p 457).

Hessler’s Oracle Bones is far better than his previous book River Town and this is why I invite you to explore more about China and the Cultural Revolution and the oracle bones by reading Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China.

Who knows? You might one day find yourself stepping onto a bus headed into the future. Stranger things have happened, haven’t they?

This was really good, but I didn't like it as much as River Town, hence the one less star. Although that's kind of unfair b/c this is really different from River Town.

On his website, Hessler offers this breakdown of his China trilogy:

> With each book, Hessler focused on a different theme. River Town, which is set entirely in Fuling, examines geography and sense of place. Oracle Bones, which ranges between contemporary events and ancient archaeology, is concerned with history and time. And Country Driving is about economics and development, focusing on communities that are being radically transformed by China’s urbanization.

And indeed Oracle Bones crafts a sense of the Chinese relationship to history, where River Town crafts a sense of the Chinese relationship to geography.

But really, these books should be read as a trilogy. They share Hessler's writing style -- his nuance, his humor, his dedication to exploring the lives of average people. It's all writing at an extremely high level, and this read has further solidified Hessler as my favorite author of narrative nonfiction today.

That said, I felt Oracle Bones leaned more heavily on others' stories than on Hessler's own experience, especially when contrasted with River Town. He drew primarily from (1) Polat the Uighur immigrant, or (2) his students -- Emily, Shirley, William Jefferson Foster, or (3) the generation of intellectuals who endured the Cultural Revolution -- Lucy Chao, Chen Mengjing, Shih Chang-ju, Old Man Zhao.

This isn't a bad thing, since the stories (of the Cultural Revolution especially) were nuanced and moving. But on the whole the writing felt less personal.

Stray observations:

The story Polat and the Uighurs is, of course, all the more tragic in hindsight today. I found interesting Hessler's note that Uighurs were not particularly religious traditionally, and that Islam was initially spread intentionally by the CCP to try curbing separatism.

Appreciated as well Hessler's note that the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward did not attract nearly as much attention as the Cultural Revolution, in no small part because the victims of the latter were the elites while the victims of the former were illiterate.

> Adam, these stories are the ones that touch me deepest and make deepest impression on me. All of them are true.

I picked this up (the audio version) because I had enjoyed Hessler's "River Town," describing his experiences as an English teacher in China, and have also admired his stories in The New Yorker. This is a rather ambitious undertaking, blending a series of articles about his experiences as a Beijing-based journalist between 1999 and 2002 with chapters (referred to as "artifacts") delving into Chinese history, most particularly the history of its language. Some of the sections set in the present time discuss the activities of some of Hessler's former students as they make their way in China's booming economy. Others discuss a Uighur man, called Polat in the book, who was befriended by Hessler and who eventually leaves China for the United States.

I found the sections about Polat and the former students to be the most compelling parts of the book. It is easy to sympathize with the students as they try to get by and achieve some of their dreams in a fairly repressive country. Polat's story is fascinating, as he finds himself on the margins in both China and the US due to his status as a member of a Muslim minority who has the misfortune to arrive in the US just in time for 9/11. The other chapters varied in terms of interest and I think that some could have been left out of the book. Hessler is a good writer, though, and he knows how to tell a story in an interesting way. At times I thought that the book read like a collection of magazine pieces, with the historical sections and the chapters about the students and Polat inserted to create continuity. It became more unified as it went along, however.

At first I did not find the "artifacts" all that interesting. China has a long history and I felt like Hessler was trying to cover more ground than could reasonably be discussed in a book of this length. As he went on, these sections became more readable as he focused on the activities of a small number of oracle bones scholars, and one in particular. It then became clear that he was trying to make a statement about history and the results of attempts by authoritarian rulers to control or erase history, particularly as it relates to particular individuals. He eventually succeeds in putting together a powerful narrative, though it seemed like it took a long time to get there. But perhaps that is appropriate, as he painstakingly unpeeled layers of shrouded history to learn the truth about a particular scholar. As was the case with Daniel Mendelssohn's "The Lost," focusing on the lives of a few individuals is perhaps the best way to shine light on historical events affecting massive numbers of people, such as the Holocaust or the Cultural Revolution. This book isn't as good as "The Lost," but still well worth reading.

What did the turn of the 21st century mean for China, after a long century of self-doubt and violent revolutions amidst the most brutal wars in human history? And what prospect did the world have with China becoming an essential player in global economy and politics? Any attempt to answer these questions has to grapple with not only the vast space China occupies, but also the multiplicity of times that complicates a given space with overlapping layers of stories to tell.

Rather than a study of oracle bones per se, the book of the eponymous title turns the discipline of archeology into a portal through which to observe and connect lives and memories in 20th-century China that seem unrelated to each other. Multiple timelines and life trajectories that cannot fit in one narrative or category find their willful convergence in Peter Hessler’s journalistic adventure.

A Uighur set his business in Beijing’s black market of currency exchange and later sought asylum status in the US just before 9/11. A few college-educated migrants tested agency and fortune in coastal cities of Wenzhou (Zhejiang) and Shenzhen (Guangdong) — the former city competed for the name of “Milan of Asia,” whereas the latter, China’s most successful Special Economic Zone and dubbed the “overnight city,” kicked off China’s most radical, state-sanctioned economic reform post-Tiananmen. A linguist, poet, and oracle bone expert, resisting reforms of Chinese characters in the Mao years, endured the anti-rightist campaign in 1957 but committed suicide in 1966 when the Cultural Revolution broke out. The transnational posthumous honoring of his scholarship remained independent of government, which included his widow, a translator known for her translation of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a Henan-born Taiwanese archeologist, a regretful Tsinghua professor in Beijing, and the Chinese American writer who wrote his survival of the Cultural Revolution into A Single Tear (on my TBR list), etc.

These lives bear little resemblance. The question would be: Is their inherent connectedness that constructs and reconstructs what it means to be Chinese? Or is there an inherent Chineseness that conditioned their connectedness, if without giving explicit evidence? Their commonality and connection can be as random as the peasants’ discovery of millennia-old burial site when digging the land for construction purpose. Yet, it is also an inevitable event in which the buried get unearthed and the “deep time” of underground systems outplays the quick cycles of human activity above ground. Rather than actual, overt connection, it is the resonance between these lives, some long gone, some still extending, that matters. The once dispersed resonance in a slower and less networked world is condensed into China’s accelerated actualization of its global ambition.

As the socialist revolution lost momentum, China time collapsed into capitalist time that is calibrated most powerfully by the US. Although the Cold War enthusiasm to curb Communism remains strong, both countries know capitalism is the shared goal for which democracy must be compromised, albeit in different rhetorics. The commonly acknowledged technique to achieve that goal is the War on Terror, which endows the state to exclude, disenfranchise, and annihilate certain populations in the name of peace, stability, and development. Mutually enhancing, the rivalry and commonality between China and the US gift an inexhaustible engine to capitalism’s dominance. This is where we are, in the time-space of the 21st century.

I enjoyed the China of today and the China of yesterday as described in Peter Hessler's experiences. So many terrible things happened to good people, back in the day...I think of the extermination of the Jews and people who supported them...for what? Is China really changing with Opening and Reform? Can People from the West get a true picture? I think Peter Hessler's book takes on a journey of real Chinese people...people who live the life and the politics and the culture. Something that was said by Galambos about Chinese culture being so old and ingrained by the books of the ancient Chinese are read and learned...while we of the west identify with the movies..."you know when they....". That really hit home to me. The Chinese have so much history...it's so hard for me to fathom!!! But by reading, I gain a little understanding, bit by bit.

3.5 stars.

I honestly wasn't too drawn in to the main story line of the Oracle Bones. I was far more interested in the other persons that featured in the book (emily, jefferson and polat). One thing I took away from the book, was Peter's profound impact on his former Fuling students. It must be incredibly gratifying to have exposed these college kids to new ideas and encourage their intellectual freedom.

Some sections that were memorable:
- The Shenzhen radio host and the novelist, I wish I could find the name of the book and read what Shenzhen looked like from the POV of a young white collar working woman in the late 90's
- The whole Polat story. Really fascinating and his experiences in the US were interesting (but dude! Stop. getting. parking. tickets!!!)
- How Chinese folk felt about 9/11 immediately afterwards, and those video tapes of the crash
- The actor/director making a movie in XinJiang, that was a great section. His views on Mao were interesting:

“I agree that the Chinese people have been victims,” he said. “But we have our own faults; we need to look hard at a mirror and think about why we became victims. You can’t simply point to others and say that they’re evil—you can’t point at Lin Biao, or Jiang Qing, or the Japanese. That’s too simple.”

He rubbed his scraggly black beard. He wore old sweatpants and Nike sneakers; his eyes looked tired.

“Think of China as a field,” he continued. He gestured with one hand, as if he were planting a neat row of rice in the hotel room carpet. “The Kuomintang, the Communist Party, Lin Biao, Jiang Qing—all of them are seeds in the earth. They grow in different ways; some grow well and others do not. Some become bad. When the Japanese arrived, you could safely say that they were already bad—they were fascists. But why did they get worse after they got here? We Chinese need to talk about this, because so many bad things got worse and worse.

“What most people say is so simple—‘they’re devils, we’re victims.’ But this history is the same as an individual’s life. I’ve had friends say that I should work in the Film Bureau, because then that institution would become more tolerant. I tell them that it would only make me a worse person. If you have a guard at the gate, then the guard becomes oppressive. It doesn’t have anything to do with the person; it’s the system, the environment.”

He told me that many Chinese needed psychological help. “People should spend more time looking inside themselves,” he said. “A person and history are the same—by that, I mean that a personal history is enormous. An individual can be even more complicated than a society. But there isn’t any time for the Chinese to examine themselves like that. Everybody is too busy; there’s not enough quiet for reflection. In the distant past, the country was peaceful and stable, but now it changes so fast. Certainly that’s been the case since Reform and Opening, but to some degree the past two hundred years have been like that. We don’t know where we are. We haven’t found our road. In the early part of the twentieth century, the Chinese tried; some of them tried to find it in our own traditions, while others looked outside the country. This debate is still going on.”

He continued: “Chairman Mao is a perfect example. He often said that he didn’t like Chinese history, and the Communists initially succeeded because they were untraditional. But Mao used traditional Chinese language to oppose the old things, and he became a traditional emperor. It’s not as if he decided to do this; he just didn’t know any other alternatives. He’s a tragic figure—the most tragic in Chinese history. He’s like a seed that grows big, but in a twisted way, because the seed can’t overcome the soil.”

I asked the actor what could be done about that.

“You have to change the soil,” Jiang Wen said.”

Another thoughtful quote was by the author himself:

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. In both nations, people tended to be optimistic, sometimes to a fault. They worked hard—business success came naturally, and so did materialism. They were deeply patriotic, but it was a patriotism based on faith rather than experience: relatively few people had spent much time abroad, but they still loved their country deeply. When they did leave, they tended to be bad travelers—quick to complain, slow to adjust. Their first question about a foreign country was usually: What do they think of us? 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.

But each nation held together remarkably well. They encompassed a huge range of territory, ethnic groups, and languages, and no strictly military or political force could have achieved this for long. Instead, certain ideas brought people together. When the Han Chinese talked about culture and history, it reminded me of the way Americans talked about democracy and freedom. These were fundamental values, but they also had some quality of faith, because if you actually investigated—if you poked around an archaeological site in Gansu, or an election in Florida—then you saw the element of disorder that lay just beneath the surface. Some of the power of each nation was narrative: they smoothed over the irregularities, creating good stories about themselves.

That was one reason why each country coped so badly with failure. When things went wrong, people were startled by the chaos—the outlandish impact of some boats carrying opium or a few men armed with box cutters. 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 freedom, just as the Chinese had turned against their own history and culture.

Truly fascinating. I avoided this one for the longest time due to its popularity (yes, I'm one of those people), but now I see that was a stupid thing to do. This is an original and beautifully written work of nonfiction. Highly recommended to anyone interested in contemporary China.