Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present by Peter Hessler
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China’s size and diversity make it a daunting subject for any journalist wishing to paint a complete picture of the country. Peter Hessler doesn’t even try: he goes an anecdotal route, focusing on the lives of a small number of individuals and concentrating on selected events and themes. Hessler writes with both elegance and sympathy and unlike many (if not most) other commentators, he tries to interpret China, insofar as it is possible, from within the perspective of his subjects.
The result is an impressionistic and very human view of this huge and complex country, but which may for all that be in many ways more accurate than books filled with case studies and reams of statistics: it is all too easy to forget the China is made up of individuals, rich and poor, peasants and intellectuals, students and police - and not just cadres, victims, companies and issues.
In addition to the author’s own journey from the teacher he was in his acclaimed River Town to journalist and writer for the Boston Globe, New Yorker and other publications, we follow Uyghur trader and black-marketeer Polat to (contrived) asylum in the United States, and William Jefferson Forster, the adopted name of one of Hessler’s Chinese students, who hails from an illiterate family, yet has an unquenchable thirst for language and teaching.
In these extended vignettes, Hessler moved beyond the black and white stereotypes that are so common in press reports. Forster’s dedication to self-improvement and teaching is admirable, and even remarkable given the other opportunities that must surely be open to someone of his drive, yet he is brusque and often presumptuous and intrusive: Hessler must be very patient. Polat (not his real name) is appealing if raffish character; one has considerable sympathy for tribulations in both the rough and tumble world of Chinese capitalism (in which he excels) as well for his membership of a less-than-privileged minority. Yet, his application for an American visa—and hence asylum application—was bogus. One finds it hard to blame him, and Hessler leaves us in no doubt that he will be a hard-working and tax-paying American resident, but the system isn’t supposed to work like that. Emily, Hessler’s student who ends up working in a factory in Shenzhen, will undoubtedly resonate with Hong Kong readers: she is economic migrant from the countryside, yet an educated one.
The oracle bones of the title are both a metaphor (a rather complicated one, embracing the length of Chinese history, Chinese desire for a clear path through the uncertainty of life, the relationship between Chinese characters, the language and the people) and a subject: Hessler traces the history of Chen Mengjia, a leading scholar of the oracle bone inscriptions, driven to suicide by the Cultural Revolution.
Rather like his acclaimed first book, River Town, Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present defies genres: it isn’t really memoir; it isn’t travel writing. It isn’t really journalism, and if Hessler is making any political or philosophical points—except perhaps for a plea for patience and understanding—he makes them so gently that they pass unnoticed. People in this part of the world need no reminding that China is not monolithic, that it is made up of people whose aspirations for themselves and their families mirror our own, and that their climb up the ladder of prosperity is happening remarkably quickly. Oracle Bones lacks the straightforward narrative of River Town; it may prove less appealing to Asian readers for that reason.
However, other countries, especially those that have found themselves embroiled in the Iraq War, do seem to need reminding not to view the world as a set of cartoonish stereotypes. Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present just might, if people read it, do just that.