Hessler is a jou318 rnalist who has lived in China most of his adult life as of this writing (2006). (You should also read his first book, River Town.) His genre is narrative non-fiction, and this book ties together the search and discovery of ancient Chinese artifacts with the unfolding lives of various people Hessler comes to know. He presents these threads in a way that led me to a vastly greater understanding of the history, geography and 20th century politics of China.

As the persecution of the Uighurs has become more prominent in the U.S. news, Hessler's friendship with Polat, a Uighur trader, particularly informative. Polat ends up as an asylum seeker in the U.S. in 2001:
"But asylum was the wild card of American immigration. Unlike refugees, who arrived in the United States under government auspices, candidates for asylum found their own way to the country. Their numbers were low: in 2001, only 20,303 people were granted asylum. (That year, the United States admitted a total of 1,064,318 legal immigrants.) It wasn't uncommon for asylum applicants to use bogus documents, or sneak across borders, or lie to U.S. immigration officials. None of these acts was held against a candidate who was deemed worthy. This created an odd moral environment: Polat's first act of American soil was to deceive officials, but nevertheless he could apply for asylum without worrying about the ramifications of his deception. And the asylum program was notorious for false stories - many Chinese applicants often cited the planned-birth policy, knowing that Americans were concerned about abortion." pp.237-238
This passage jumped out at me, having just read Dina Nayeri's 2019 "The Ungrateful Refugee", where she speaks at length about the need for refugees and asylum seekers to purposefully craft their stories, mingling truth with untruth as to tailor their narratives to fit what is the current vogue among accepted applications.

Second book from Hessler on China and second five-star I've given him. Dude gets writing on travel and culture better than nearly anybody I've encountered: thought-provoking, laugh-out-loud funny, varied, and able to put together seemingly disparate people, places, and ideas into strong narratives. Helps that China is the most fascinating place on Earth.

Fun little details & passages that stood out: In Sichuanese slang, "toothbrush" is a degrading adjective ("You are very toothbrush!") and if an athlete makes a bad play, Sichuanese fans yell "yangwei, yangwei, yangwei" ("Impotent, impotent, impotent!").
"In Chinese, I attempted a clear and concise explanation of the Electoral College. I should have known better; I have never been able to explain it in English. I've always believed that an excellent way to motivate American election reform would be to force each and every citizen to introduce the system to a Chinese classroom."
Hessler's relationship with writing and its "point": "The articles appeared in American newspapers, where the readers couldn't solve the problems and didn't have the background necessary to keep everything in context..." "There is a point at which even the best intentions become voyeurism."
The 9/11 chapter (Chinese pirates selling 9/11 footage alongside Hollywood movies!) and all the stuff about Willy ("I see you still have a problem with impotence!") are great, and as a linguistics nerd, I loved the quick history on the failed changing of the Chinese writing system.

Really great to read about China, kind of provides a starting guide from thousands of years ago but looking at how things have changed from people since 1949. Lots of stuff on archeology and history but done really well. The slices of life with people were my favourite but put a lot in context for me living here.

The individual profiles about people Hessler meets in China are the highlight here, especially in relation to his research on Chen Mengjia. These are beautifully written and often very moving.

On the other hand, Hessler’s attempts to contextualize these stories within Chinese history fall flat and detract from the stories themselves. His depiction of this context is too general, and I felt it conveyed stereotypes and verged on orientalism - this is particularly apparent in passages where he uses David N. Keightley’s work as a source.

A really great follow-up to reading “River Town”. Such a great insight into China’s past and present, and where those lines blur. I felt so connected to each of Hessler’s friends’ personal lives. Like, where are Polat and William Jefferson Foster today? The author is a talented writer, and although it gets a bit repetitive with the “in case you forgot where we last were” moments, this was an enjoyable book that I’m sure to read again someday, maybe when my own days in China are behind me.

“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 […] 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.”

What an exceptional piece of literature. Hessler’s background in and commitment to true journalism is what makes this book shine. Hessler does what most journalists fail to do today: he presents facts and observations about events and people he has befriended, and leaves it up to the reader to interpret greater meaning. While the book is mostly written from his point of view, it’s an objective observation; the opinions, passions, and convictions present in this book solely belong to the friends and acquaintances he acquired. There is something so matter-of-fact about his writing style that I really loved; it reminded me a bit of Steinbeck or McCarthy. He shows without telling. There is a simplicity and directness to his writing that allows the deeper meanings to unfold inside your mind. Most of all, you can see his passion for China, its culture and its people.

I have read many books about China in the 20th and 21st Centuries, and this is by far the best book I have read that was written by a non-Chinese. If you are interested in learning more about China, especially in how it contrasts with American culture, then I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

I'm almost sheepish to confess not having read this all the way through before, despite knowing passages of it very well. I certainly was always eager to read Hessler's work in the New Yorker back in those days, the 2000s; he is such an engaging and wide-ranging writer on China, a humane voice with the capacity to deal with all the moral and cultural contradictions of his subject. And Oracle Bones was often around -- there were copies of it at the Wenbei building, up at Tsinghua University, where we IUPers struggled with our tones and dreamed of our own China essays. And copies down at HomeShop, the now-defunct artist space, and more copies in all the quaint bookstores of the Andingmen neighborhood. It was a book to flip through, excerpt from, but somehow never to read all the way through, sprawling and disconnected as the various chapters and portraits were.

At least until I came across the audio-version this past summer. Audio knows nothing of skimming and flipping through; it's a remarkably linear approach to a book.

Which, was good, because I finally got more of a sense of the logic of Oracle Bones -- it is sprawling, but it's also a distinct and valuable portrait of China in an era now rapidly fading in our memories, roughly 1998 to the early 2000s, the days when China responded to 9-11, won its shot at the Olympics, and kept pumping at its economy. Back then, a young man like Hessler could bum around on a business visa, hiking without a passport, never registering when he went to new cities -- of course, all impossible now, in the post-COVID-19 era. These was also days when some of the great Chinese humanists of the 20th century were still alive and willing to be interviewed by a student of history -- Hessler has valuable conversations with Shih Chang-ru, Zhou Youguang, and Li Xueqin, as well as David N. Keightley, Victor Mair (what a character!), and John De Francis. He hit on a great theme with these interviews, tracing out the ghost of an oracle bones scholar called Chen Mengjia, whose immense contribution to the study of the Chinese civilization did not protect him from criticism during the tumultuous years of Maoist political movements.

Hessler threads these conversations with the old guard and meditation on China's past with even greater attention on on the post-70s and earliest of the post-80s generation, which was just hitting its stride in the early 2000s, often full of hope and internationalism, as Hessler documents through his friend Willy. This was a period of break-neck growth in Shenzhen, where contractors hardly finished a project before moving on to the next, as Hessler documents. It was also the time when Xinjiang Uighurs were restive in the face of a powerful hegemon, but the hammer hadn't descended on them like it would over the next twenty years -- it's chilling to think what might have happened to Hessler's friend Polat, and Polat's family in that hapless western region, in the years since publication.

Arguably, it's all too much for a book. And yet it did come together. It's heartwarming that the book made it onto the New York Times bestseller lists, meaning presumably many people gained a deeper understanding of China through Hessler's stories. And 15 years later, reading Oracle Bones brings up nostalgia for that stage of China on march, now passing on to some new, and fearful stage. Hessler closes his book with a look at Lucy Chao's Chinese translation of Whitman's Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, back-translating from her Chinese to a new English. For some reason -- sentimental me -- this brought tears to my eyes, and does again as I type out the lines:

tI, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,
tTaking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,
tA reminiscence sing. (Original)

t我，痛苦和欢乐的歌手，今世和来世的统一者/ 所有暗示都接受了下来，加以利用，但又飞速地越过了这些/ 歌唱一件往事 (Lucy Chao)

tI, the singer of painful and joyous songs, the uniter of this life and the next,
tReceiving all silent signs, using them all, but then leaping across them at full speed,
tSing of the past. (Hessler Rendition of Chao)

What an outstanding work. Highly recommended for anyone with interest in China and/or current world events. Peter Hessler deftly blends sharing his own informed observations with allowing Chinese voices to speak for themselves.

Peter Hessler switches back and forth between past and present. I dont care too much about the archeological works and the origin of chinese writing or deceased Chinese scholars.

I was hoping the author would explore more of everyday chinese in a changing and contemporary China, what their lives were, how changes affect them, and how it fits into a larger picture to understand the living soul of a changing China.

I think the book is very inconsistent. There is no narrative that engages with the reader.

Perhaps a better book is Age of Ambition, Factory Girls, or China Road.

Also, for whatever reason Hessler spent several chapters talking about a Uygur named Polat who hates Chinese people and want independence from china and support "East Republic of Turkistan".

Hessler even goes so far as to follow Polats journey to the Unites States.

These chapters are completely irrelevant. It doesn't contribute to a reader's understanding of the everyday Chinese that make up Chinese society.

Overall, the book is mediocre.

This book seems informal, without pre-set plan or structure. The author seems to wander around, hanging out with ordinary people. He follows a number of friendships over several years, switching back and forth between people and places. And slowly I realized this is the finest sort of journalism I've seen. The loose net of stories explores China from dozens of viewpoints--of Uighur traders, migrant teachers, aging archaeologists, factory girls. Gradually themes of investigation arise--into the fate of an archeologist who died in the Cultural Revolution, or the story of China's script. There's no central theme. Just a world of lives and experiences spread across China, captured with unpretentious art.

Vividly detailed and incredibly insightful, Hessler weaves a seamless narrative between China's ancient past and its very evident present. He relates in very plain terms his time in living in China and the massive amounts of change that have occurred across the country and their effects on the people of the country. It is a long read but a must for anyone visiting or merely interested in China.

Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler’s second effort, or Part II, as it were, of his China trilogy, chronicles, mainly, the lives of various Chinese people, from archeologists and intellectuals to the author’s friends and former students. Many of the narratives seem to be more detailed and more rewarding versions of his newspaper and magazine articles. Themes and “characters” recur and are given a sort of chronological treatment. The glue that binds the book together, the oracle bones, is also a sort of loose symbol for the volume in total. The oracle bones convey meaning; their messages and the stories surrounding the people who excavate, study, and try to make sense of them attempt to tell us something about Chinese culture. The people Hessler writes about, and the yarns pertaining to his effort to do so, also try to tell us something about Chinese culture.

Oracle Bones is a long book, about 470 pages of text. Some of the topics are interesting; others are not. But what was not interesting to me would be interesting to someone else. What’s important is that the subjects were interesting to the author. That’s what a good writer does: he writes for himself. If others like it, fine; if not, that’s fine, too. Readers like me are going to criticize no matter what you do, so you may as well scribble about your own interests.

And Hessler is a good writer. His sentences are crisp, his paragraphs economical. His writing is better than in his first book, River Town, even if River Town is a better, or at least more coherent, story. (I suppose it’s fair to clarify that whereas River Town is a story, Oracle Bones is a series of vignettes.) In any event, it’s always interesting, to me at least, to plot an author’s development.

And Peter deserves credit in general. In the sea of China experts, i.e. know-it-all expatriates who write thousands of words in poorly-formed blogs and internet forums, he got off his duff and wrote, seriously, about his experiences in China and what he learned from them. He dug deeply, he researched, he became a journalist, and he travelled extensively (sometimes at considerable risk) to talk to people and record what they had to say. He got published, and his China trilogy continues to sell. Hessler proved that there’s always room for one more voice, provided that voice is reasoned, informed, and intelligent. He’s got much more to say than Henry Kissinger, for instance. He’s got much more to say than a lot of China writers.

That said, I wish the book were a bit more passionate. In places, I found Hessler’s style a little too, well, journalistic. He removes himself from the stories, but in the places where he inserts himself, i.e. expresses his opinion, or shows his frustration (as he does with the “struggle session” he faced after being detained for camping on the Great Wall, or, so the authorities thought, reporting illegally on a village election) it’s quite satisfying. But again, this is a matter of personal taste.

A recurring comment about Hessler’s writing is that he is so very sympathetic toward Chinese people, but I don’t see this as being the case, especially in this book. As there is in any China book worth its salt, there are heaps of send-ups and bucketfuls of criticism, though they are rendered in a flat, ironical fashion. I don’t see Hessler as being eminently empathetic; at one point he describes himself as coldly pragmatic – a journalist getting his scoop.

Oracle Bones did what it was supposed to; it made me want to read his third book, Country Driving. I’m curious as to whether there is (and I hope there isn’t) as much detachment in that book as there is in this one.

In total, a very good read. China at the microcosmic level is infinitely more rewarding than books on China’s dynastic history or soporific tomes on, say, the history of Chinese diplomacy. And, among the dozens of intriguing and memorable stories, there are excellent tips for would-be journalists and aspiring writers. Oracle Bones works as a starting-point for neophytes or a refresher for old China hands. I recommend it.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World