I really enjoyed Oracle Bones, and was a little sad when it was over. The style of this book is a little unlike most other books I’ve read. It’s like a combination memoir and history of China. Peter Hessler brings us along as he interacts with different people from 1999 to 2002, going into greater detail on various topics like the Cultural Revolution and the perceptions of different ethnic groups in China.

Peter Hessler first went to China as part of the Peace Corps, teaching English in the rural city of Fuling for two years. This book talks about some of his experiences after that time period where he was a reporter in Beijing. An overarching quest for the book is to find out more about oracle bones. These are primarily tortoise shells or ox shoulder blades that had words either written or carved into them. The material would then be heated until it cracked, at which point the cracks would then be interpreted. In order to learn more about these, he travels to a few different locations with either dig sites or museums, and speaks to curators of museums and other scholars with an expertise in the topic. One of the notable scholars was Chen Mengjia, who was an expert in oracle bones, but also expressed resistance to some of the changes promoted in the Cultural Revolution. He, for example, opposed changing the writing system to using an alphabet. Due to the increasing pressures and harassment by the government, he eventually committed suicide in 1966. The author used him to comment on Chinese society. “[Chinese journalist] ‘Scholars in this country are like that. It’s a very dark group of people – many of them did things that they shouldn’t have done. I’ve heard that after Chen Mengjia killed himself, scholars went through his office, reading his notes, and some of them later published his ideas as their own. There are many scholars who did things like that in the past, but they won’t admit it. The Chinese don’t like to examine themselves in this way. It’s rare for them to admit that they were wrong.” (388) One aspect of the book I enjoyed was that the author interviewed many people to get more color on a topic. Mengjia was hard to learn much about since he died so many years before, but Hessler found others that had worked with him and went to places he visited to see the things he had worked on. Hessler traveled to Anyang, a site where many of the bones were discovered, and viewed the sites, museums, and people associated with the excavation. Economic development has caused land to be dug up and many interesting archeological discoveries have resulted from this. It was interesting to get insight into all the different aspects. It seems like visiting a historic site as a journalist is a lot more interesting than doing it as a tourist.

While I enjoyed the parts on ancient history, I liked the parts on more recent history and Chinese culture even more. One source for this information was his correspondences with former students. He said he wrote over 100 letters to former students a year, which is pretty impressive. He was close with a few of them, and visited them on numerous occasions. One couple took the names William Jefferson Foster and Nancy Drew, and migrated to the coast in Zhejiang province to become teachers. It was hard moving up in the world and knowing that the people you knew were still in the same place they were. “And although he [William] still considered the possibility of someday returning to Sichuan, he knew in his heart that he would never really go home again. That world was gone – not because it had been destroyed like the Beijing courtyards, but rather because the countryside hadn’t changed enough. In a nation on the move, there was no reason for young people to stay in rural regions that couldn’t keep pace. Whenever Willy returned to Number Ten Village, the place felt deserted.” (214) It was interesting to hear the stories of how people from different areas were treated. Another student was Emily, who moved to Shenzhen, the “overnight city,” to work in a factory. She did not have the proper papers to go into the city proper (which had a wall around it), so she worked in the outskirts for longer hours and lower pay. The discussion of Shenzhen, a city that was rapidly built in an area that was previously a buffer between Hong Kong and the rest of China, was really interesting. That there were experimental areas where the government would test policies out seemed both very peculiar and interesting.

Ethnic minorities were discussed quite a bit as well. While most people in China are Han, there are over 50 notable minorities. Hessler makes friends with Polat, a member of the Uighur minority, while living in Beijing. Polat is a money changer, and has some interesting perspectives on the Chinese, feeling like an outsider. He eventually moves to Washington D.C., where Hessler visits him, and shares his insights on life in one of the rougher parts of town.

I thought the comments on China were interesting. This was a time of uncertainty and change for China, as it transitioned from a more Communist country to one embracing more free markets and from a developing country to one of the world’s powers. While freedoms were increasing, there were still more limits on freedom than many other countries. “Scholars often talked about the shift toward the rule of law, and I sensed that someday, after the changes in China had settled, it would seem like a progression that had moved logically from one point to another. But to live in the middle of this process felt entirely different. I could eat a meal in Hollywood [a Beijing neighborhood], surrounded by prostitutes, black marketers, and illegal money changers; and then I’d bicycle for fifteen minutes and watch somebody get arrested for raising his arms over his head [as part of Falun Gong].” (128) In Beijing, he met an older man who was fighting to save his historic house from being torn down to make way for cheap apartments. It was interesting to see the conflicts between the priorities of different people. “Idly, I re-created the former hamlet in my mind: in 1976, the Party secretary refinishes his home. He covers the walls with the subscription-only newspaper – a subtle sign of the man’s privilege. That same year, after the house is completed, Chairman Mao dies. The reforms begin. Seven years later, the other residents are improving their homes, papering them with the headlines of the changing economy. Some peasants go to the city in the off-season, earning extra money through construction; farming becomes less appealing. By the 1990s, they are leaving for good. First the young, then the middle-aged. The last ones are the elderly, who still remember the color of local life: which officials had authority, which people had more land, which families had lived there the longest. All of those details steadily slip down the hillside, swallowed by the bigger village, the township, the county seat, the city, the nation…That was modern China – in ten years a place was ripe for archaeology.” (278) In his travels for work, he went to a movie set in the more desolate western part of China. He got to get more perspective on the land and people as well as the film industry. “One young director told me that the Film Bureau officials reminded him of his grandparents – aging authority figures that he patronized. After half a century, many features of Communism had become like that: the Party had power without respect, and it was tolerated rather than feared. The film bureaus oppression was often passive-aggressive; silence was a potent weapon.” (347) One of the actors commented on the whirlwind pace of change. “[Jiang Wen - actor] 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.” (349)

The part that was the most interesting for me were the contrasts between cultures. Hessler spent most of his time in China, traveling around to different places like Dandong and Shenzhen, while being based out of Beijing. He traveled to the U.S. a few times as well, giving him recent reminders of the differences between the locations. In his travels, he spoke with numerous people, both people of note like famous professors or radio talk show hosts, but also everyday people. It seemed like it must have been a very interesting time for him. He learned a lot about the different perceptions from his talks with all the people he encountered. One big issue was that of Taiwan. “Sometimes, people mentioned the Taiwan issue, and they fixated on the 1839-1842 Opium War and the historical mistreatment of China by foreign powers. A few Chinese told me that America was a nation without history, which resulted in the lack of a moral core.” (21) I also thought the perception of the United States was also interesting. I’m always curious what other people think about us. “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 sheer complexity of the modern landscape had a lot to do with it. If you visited a bridge [in Dandong between China and North Korea] 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.” (68) “In China, people who had never been to America tended to take extreme views, and often both sides were equally inaccurate. I met many Chinese who believed that America was evil incarnate, but I also met others who had complete faith in the wealth, opportunity, and freedom of the United States…America was an idea, not a place.” (116) While the perceptions were interesting, the differences in what people valued were also interesting to learn about. “In Fuling, my students had recognized some beauty in the written word that wasn’t apparent to a Westerner like me. And in Beijing, I sensed that I saw something in the old city that wasn’t obvious to most locals. Ever since childhood, like any Westerner, I had learned that the past was embodied in ancient buildings – pyramids, palaces, coliseums, cathedrals. Ionic, Doric, gothic, baroque – words I could recall from junior-high lessons. To me, that was antiquity, but the Chinese seemed to find their past elsewhere.” (185)

He did a lot of reflecting, which I also enjoyed. “As a teacher, I had taken information from far away – American culture, English literature – and introduced it to a classroom of living Chinese students. But a writer’s work moved in the opposite direction. I started with living people and then created stories that were published in a distant country. Often, the human subjects of my articles couldn’t even understand the language in which they were written. From my perspective, the publishing world was so remote that it seemed half real. Once a year, I visited editors in New York and I rarely heard anything from readers of the magazine. Usually, I wrote only two or three articles a year, which was adequate to live simply in a country like China. The fee for a single published word in the New Yorker – more than two dollars – was enough to buy lunch in Beijing. With one long sentence, I could eat for a week.” (425) I also liked his summation of some of the commonalities between China and the United States. “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 of 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 archeological 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 the reason why each country coped so badly with failure…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.” (440)

Overall, I really liked the structure of the book, the characters of the book, how the history of China was woven into the book, and the snapshot of China at that point in time as well. All the pieces were interwoven very well, and it was very enjoyable. It didn’t feel like most books that I read that wrap things up, or have a climax in the story, but it’s just like you’re along for the ride for a few years as Hessler goes on adventures, meeting interesting people, and learning about the history behind the sights he sees. I was a little hesitant to finish, because I didn’t want the ride to end. I’m excited that he has two other books about his time in China, and hopefully can get to them soon. I wish he had a book that was published in the last year or two to give a snapshot of what China is like now, because 15 years of rapid change have resulted in a country that is quite a bit different in some ways than the one he traveled around at that time. It’s a great snapshot of a time and place, though.

I recommend this book to people who are interested in other cultures and places and have an interest in learning about both the recent and ancient past.

About 10 1/2 years after first reading this book as well as the other two books about China that Peter Hessler has written, I have returned to the books to listen to them in the audible format while also following along with the Kindle version. I find I do not have much recollection of these books from over 10 years ago. My daughter who I adopted from China at the age of 3 1/2 years old is going to be 18 in April. She has not displayed much interest in her Chinese homeland but she is most aware of her Chinese appearance. In her years in school she has experienced some harassment because of her experience and yet she maintains a very strong desire to support her appearance.

The author was an independent journalist in China writing for US publications predominantly the New Yorker. He apparently did not have to write more than four or five stories a year in order to earn enough money to live in China. For some reason the material he elected to cover in this particular book overall did not excite or interest me in every case. He is interested in archaeology and historic exploration in China. He covers a number of people in the book in some depth and that is probably the most interesting aspect of the book for me.

I am tempted to reduce this book from the previous four stars to three stars but I think I will leave it as is since I believe the forest stars gives the adequate suggestion that I did not find this book as enjoyable as the prior River Town which I gave five stars. I cannot give a simple explanation for that difference other than the topics in this book seemed more complex and more related to history rather than the current life of individuals in China.

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Hessler’s personal experience in China as a foreigner fluent in Chinese is necessarily anecdotal. But fascinating to me, the father of a seven year old girl adopted from Aksu, Xinjiang province. He has immersed himself in the Chinese culture, not as a sociologist, but as a sensitive person. He considers himself a journalist but he is not dispassionate or impersonal about his subjects. Factual information is scattered throughout the narrative without distracting from the very readable story.

LATER: I can't help but like Peter Hessler. He considers himself a foreign correspondent but for much of the book, especially the last half, he is an investigative journalist with an ability to dig for the truth and to personalize his subjects. He has an ability to get inside his material without being totally subjective. He is not an invisible narrator; you are looking over his shoulder and benefiting from his experience.

He covers a very wide range of topics. He covers the issues of the Uighur minority in China as well as related to the political asylum obtained by a Uighur in the U.S. He examines China's past through archeology as well as personal encounters with Chinese with roots in the past century of upheaval. He tells of Chinese westerns with insight about the movie business in China, from major productions to pirated DVDs. We learn about the role of Chinese written language -- characters -- in the past and present, given its unique history of thousands of years as well as its more recent political implications. He covers the events of September 11, 2001 from his personal perspective as well as a Chinese one.

He observes that "sometimes the more information you have, the less you know. And there is the point at which even the best intentions become voyeurism." He is sensitive to the pitfalls of his craft.

I have now read all three of his books written over more than a decade. He has changed and China has changed tremendously. The hook for me is that I am the father of a daughter adopted from China. My experience about China is, like Peter Hessler's, very personal.

The stories of the author’s former English language students who took such names as William Jefferson Foster, Nancy Drew and Emily Bronte are interesting and funny. The author does a great job of presenting the unique perspectives of the various Chinese people he encounters without being patronizing or judgmental, although he often puts a very funny spin on them.

I’ve always thought of China as a social monolith but that’s clearly not the case and it was interesting to me to know why I was so wrong. The story of Polat, the author’s Uighur friend, underscored the differences and struggles of the ethnic and religious minorities in China whom I never even knew existed.

Interwoven throughout the modern day stories of the author’s friends and associates is the mysterious tale of Chen Mengjia which builds slowly and completely through the Artifact chapters interspersed throughout the book. At first these chapters seem disparate but they ultimately come together beautifully.

The author’s story of the burglary and its aftermath in the first third of the book is genuinely the funniest passage I’ve ever read.

This book is the second in a trilogy and I’m reluctant to read the others because I enjoyed this one so much. Maybe it would have been better to read the first book (River Town) but it didn’t detract from my enjoyment of this book.

Update - I read River Town (the first in the series) and it’s excellent and worth reading first.

From the tiny photo on the back cover of "Oracle Bones", Peter Hassler looks like a friend of mine, A., when I was at the university.

One day, around 10 years ago, I met this fellow out of our "Media and communication" department and I told him that he should have tried doing some internship in order to get the 5 credits he missed before getting his degree.

I remember how he originally wanted to take part to some sort of seminar on semiotics or something and I insisted that it was a waste of time.
"Oh come on! - I told A. - Do something practical, instead. Why don't you look for a radio, a magazine, a local tv having an internship programme through the department?".

I was working for a radio in those days and started deserting most of the university lectures due to my reporting all over the town. I wanted my friends to enjoy something similar rather than getting bored over useless theory.
A. listened carefully to me but didn't seem quite sure on taking my words for granted.

A few months later I met A. again at the headquarters of Romano Prodi, a former Italian PM who was campaigning again against Berlusconi. My friend was carrying a big camera and - just like me - had a press pass around his neck. "You see? I followed your tip - he told me - it's just that they needed cameramen rather than reporters but I took the opportunity nonetheless".

Six years later I do write some daily articles from the UK for an Italian newspaper, but get my living thanks to another job which is not related to journalism. My friend A. did so much better. He became the anchorman of prime time news on a regional channel, the host of a popular radio programme and delivered some features for a national television. And he's quite good in what he does.

Well, things are pleasantly unexpected sometimes.

Peter Hessler has a similar but far more successful story to tell.
He left the US and Missouri when he was still freshly-faced, freshly-graduated at Princeton and 20 something. At that time, young Hessler had only published an extended etnography work on a tiny place named Sikeston somewhere in the States and spent some time in Oxford, UK as an English literature student. As a journalist he was a nobody.

Then, comes the unexpected step. As the same Hessler in this book tells us, he joined the Peace Corps and went to China as a volunteer.
After some months spent teaching English and learning Mandarin in a small town along the shores of mighty river Yangtze in which he was one of the only two foreigners, (he wrote a book about that) Hessler came back to the US.

As in his homecountry, the still freshly-faced but far more experienced was not able to find the job he looked for, he returned to China.

And in all but friendly Bejing, Hessler had more luck than in the US. Working as a humble clipper "the last one they had" for the Wall Street Journal he got money enough for renting a room of his own, wandering around the Chinese capital and spending a lot of time chatting with people in cheap restaurants and cafes.

Sometimes he did some trekking in the countryside brought his own tent and slept outdoors. Sometimes he did some random translation job. Sometimes he looked for an interesting story to cover as a freelance: at first failing quite miserably in this last respect.

I am insisting so much on the author of "Oracle Bones" because this book has very much to do with Peter Hessler. He's all but shy in talking about himself, his successes and his failures, but never intrusive. He doesn't definitely show off.
Still it's from Hessler personal life in Bejing that I learned many interesting things on how China as a nation changed from 2000 onwards.

"Oracle Bones" is a fascinating reading on two levels: in telling how Hessler made it in becoming a famous freelance reporter and in showing many things that happened when PH was writing around, the people he met, the stories he jumped into, the troubles he had with the police and so on.

All tied up with the mail and paper correspondence Hessler kept with some of his former students who seem all very confident and at ease while writing to him about their adult lives. One starts to like and sympathize with these Chinese people who - unlucky choice - are all introduced with their English nicknames.

Albeit a few unfortunate stylistic choices, this is an author who has a great passion, respect and care for China in all of its aspects and is eager to talk Mandarin with common people rather than with politicians or entrepreneurs. Hessler poses many questions to himself and is considerate enough to investigate over Chinese history.

It's "artifacts" the recurrent term here (even too much). Hessler looks for artifacts wherever he goes from Manchuria to Taiwan passing through Sichuan and Nanking. It's artifacts that matter because they can always teach you something about the people who made them and about those who discovered or preserved them during difficult times such as the so called Cultural Revolution.

After reading "Oracle Bones" I can say I learned many things I didn't know about China and I do trust the author who told me about them here.
Unlike his wife Leslie T.Chang who was a bit clumsy in mixing up her point of view and family history with the personal stories of Chinese workers in "Factory Girls", Peter Hessler is very much at ease with the subject he chose and never loses the grip on its audience.

The fact that Hessler himself has now relocated (with formerly miss Chang) to Cairo and is currently becoming fluent in Arabic in order to report from the Middle East is just another unexpected step.
I wish I knew how to make it. Unfortunately, I'm hopeless with foreign languages.
Oh well, I will let Peter come first!