Oracle Bones (2006)
Peter Hessler (1969)
491 pages
Perhaps the most effective way to develop a deep understanding of another country is to live and work there for an extended period. By joining one’s neighbors and friends in their quotidian lives, one can begin to appreciate both the idiosyncrasies of a country’s culture and the impact and weight of its particular history on its people.
Just such understandings inform journalist Peter Hessler’s recollections in Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present. In what he refers to as a work of “narrative non-fiction,” Hessler transforms his experiences living and working in China into an exploration of its present day cultural and political realities, and their origins in Chinese history – connecting them to both ancient and more recent events. And, reflecting what constitutes perhaps the second most important benefit of visiting a foreign country, he also turns his gaze back to his own homeland, coming to see cultural and political aspects of the US in a new light.
The book opens in May 1999, with Hessler living in Beijing after having spent two years in the Peace Corps teaching English at a school in the Chinese heartland. It covers the period through June 2002, during which time he supported himself as a clipper for American news bureaus, cutting out and filing articles of interest from foreign newspapers. Beyond his day job, however, he wrote free-lance articles, often inspired by people he met as a result of his penchant for spending much of his free time walking the streets, in Beijing as well as during his travels around China.
Particularly engaging are the letters from former students in his English classes that he weaves into his telling. Allowing their voices to color his commentary animates his prose, while also providing a convincing credibility to his observations about daily life in China. Over the years, several of them travel to the richer, coastal cities in search of work, following a path of internal immigration so common in China in recent decades. What Hessler hears from them and observes directly when he visits some of them in their new lives, offers insight into the broader challenges China has faced with this migration.
Already in his Author’s Note, Hessler hints at another topic he covers, noting that he has “used real names with one exception”: a pseudonym for a Uighur he befriends in Beijing. Through this friend, Hessler parses the history of the continuing problems for the Uighur population in China. Such an approach can run the risk of resulting in a biased, anecdotal account, but Hessler, while clearly having a point of view, seems intent on providing a largely objective account of the situation. And, by exploring the topic through the lens of a particular person caught up in it, he achieves a much more intimate portrait of the conflict than a dry history and analysis could.
While this variety of perspectives on modern China form the backbone of Hessler’s narrative, roughly halfway through the book he describes a chance encounter that triggers an additional narrative path for him, one that illuminates the social and political evolution in China over the past century. A young archaeologist he interviews about the titular Oracle Bones – ancient, prophetic inscriptions etched onto bones and turtle shells – introduces him to a book about Chinese artifacts. Hessler learns that the author, archeologist Chen Mengjia, committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution. Intrigued, he begins to investigate Chen’s story, leading him to interview those still alive who remember him, as well as others who knew of him and his work.
Similar to the way in which Hessler reveals the character of current day Chinese (and to an extent US) society through the experiences of his friends and others he meets in China, his unraveling of the threads of Chen’s life becomes a window into aspects of China’s complicated recent history. It also serves to remind readers of the challenges inherent in establishing the details of a human life from the memories of others, each of whom have their own conscious and unconscious biases, agendas, and regrets.
This last becomes startlingly clear when Hessler, after having interviewed a wide variety of people about Chen’s life, meets with an aging archaeologist who wrote a criticism of Chen during the Cultural Revolution, a text included in Chen’s book. By that point, Hessler has learned much about the complexity of Chen’s life, but this piece of criticism looms over it all, seeming to indicate cruel intent, and with his subsequent suicide, becoming even almost incriminating.
Bringing it up with the scholar who wrote it, however, Hessler notes that “the emotions that I expected to see – annoyance, defensiveness, even anger – haven’t materialized. If anything, the man just looks tired, the bags sagging heavy beneath his eyes.” (390) The scholar’s eventual reply makes evident the struggle of life under an autocratic government, in a regime based on a cult of personality, wielding loyalty tests and palpable threats of violence to force conformance to the leader’s desires. Speaking of the Cultural Revolution, the scholar explains:
It’s not difficult just for foreigners to understand, … it’s difficult for young Chinese to understand. At that time, there was a kind of pressure on us to write this sort of thing. The Institute of Archaeology asked me to write it. I was very young and I couldn’t refuse. … I didn’t want to do it …. I always regretted that article. (391)
In the discussion that follows, the sincerity of his regret rings true. For readers, and clearly for Hessler himself, it becomes a clarifying moment regarding Chen’s story, but also, more generally, about the complicity and fear present in an autocratic regime. Although Hessler wrote and published this book almost two decades ago, readers will find clear connections to the present day experiences of Republican legislators pushed out for disagreeing with their party leader or feeling the need to censor their comments for fear of violence against themselves and their families.
One moment in Hessler’s chronicle that I found fascinating, although it’s only indirectly related to Chen’s story, is a revealing vignette about China’s architectural legacy. A gentleman he interviews, Mr. Zhao, lives in a traditional style home apparently once quite common in Beijing, which is to be bulldozed to make way for a new, modern apartment complex. Hessler notes that although the Chinese have a deep cultural history,
When I saw old buildings that had actually survived the centuries, like Old Mr. Zhao’s courtyard and house, they usually consisted of materials that had been replaced over the years. His home, like the Forbidden City or any traditional Chinese temple, was built of wood, brick, and tile. In China, few buildings had been constructed of stone. Some sections of the Ming dynasty Great Wall were faced with stone, but that was a defensive structure, not a monument of a public building. Chinese structures simply weren’t designed to withstand the centuries. (184)
Given the increased tensions between the US and China over the past decade or so, Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones can serve as a kind of touchstone, reminding readers of the complex population that lies behind the news generally reported by the media. We discover people busy and distracted with their day-to-day lives, and so as prone to be influenced by their government’s self-interested claims about America as Americans tend to be by our government’s self-interested characterizations of China. We come to better understand how the Chinese view both their own country and ours, and how facile misunderstandings of the other can so easily develop.
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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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