Title: Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present
Author: Peter Hessler
ISBN: 9780060826581
Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2006
Overview
Peter Hessler, correspondent for the New Yorker in Beijing and author of the bestseller River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, links China’s past to its today and how it is seen through the eyes of a diverse group of people.
The book begins in May 1999 with the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and closes in June 2002 when Hessler returns to the United States. During this time, Hessler was a freelance writer for various newspapers and magazines, for example National Geographic and The Wall Street Journal, until he becomes the New Yorker’s first accredited correspondent in China before the communist revolution. While living in Beijing and traveling through rural parts of China, Peter Hessler explores China’s twenty-first century transformation and its increasing links to our Western world. Hessler quotes a historian who once said: “China has a far longer past than the West. The past and history are not the same thing. Here in China’s past there was no narrative but only stories”. Related to this, the book is built on a very interesting structure; it interweaves threads of history and archeological research (Artifacts) with a focus on Oracle Bones (inscriptions in animal shell and bones that count as the oldest record of writing) with threads of individual stories about the author’s friends and former English students. The tales of Emily a factory worker, William Foster who becomes an English teacher, Polat an Uighur that engages in various illegal business and struggles with the problems as belonging to an ethnic minority in China and ends up moving to the United States with false papers, as well as the story about oracle bones scholar Chen Mengjia all show how these people struggle to cope with the changes that this nation is undergoing. By tying history to these individual stories, the author not only manages to teach facts about history and sociology but more over gives an insight into the impact that the culture as well as the opening of the doors to the outside world has on its people. Throughout the book, current events and their effects on society are tied into the character’s stories and the reader learns how to relate them to China’s past.
Contribution
Hessler makes references to past events from many thousand years B.C until the 1980s and how he and his friends experience their effects on the current age. The description of the various occurrences gives the reader a good base to understand their effects that they will have on China and the world in the future. Hessler, having lived in China for several years, brings China’s people and its history into focus while showing how this country is struggling to define its role in the global economy.
The author assumes that the reader has a basic understanding of the Chinese history. Personally I had to look up a couple of political events and important political figures in order to understand their meaning and therefore the feelings that many Chinese share. Other than that, this book is a great benefit for everyone who would like to learn about Chinese culture and its people who are trying to find their way in this fast changing country. Furthermore, anyone with an interest in history and science will find himself addressed by this non-fictional novel since it contains many archaeological facts.
Weaknesses
One downside of this book is the lack of personality. It is clear that this book has been written by a journalist who sometimes sees events in a rather factual than human manner. Furthermore, this might also influence the description of some events, for example the various demonstrations. Journalists that report current events tend to over dramatize them to correspond to the direction that our media coverage is moving towards. Therefore I was torn between factual stories as well as the rather human aspect of the tales about his friends and letters from his former students. Additionally, the book covers many historical facts that tend to be disorganized due to the books structure. This also leads to a lack of depth and it is hard to fully engage one in all the superficial described events. Until the reader reaches the middle of the book, he might be more confused by the structure until he understands why the author is moving back and forth between the historian narrative and the individual characters and how to relate them to each other.
Attributes & Strengths
First of all, Oracle Bones is a very easy written and appealing book, especially because it covers the past five to ten years. The individual stories that Hessler ties into historical and political facts effectively illustrate the position that Chinese people find themselves in today. One of the most interesting facts in this book is the fast moving economy that develops the past at the same time it destroys it. Hessler describes this as “yin to the bulldozer’s yang: old cities like Beijing disappear, … , but the construction opens up ancient tombs and underground cities at an unprecedented rate.” Even though the pace of rediscovery accelerates more and more with reform and opening and therefore destroys many historical statements, it opens up new possibilities. This is also because China is moving away from the traditional view that development can only be seen as a single line throughout time (the history of China is often represented in a spiral form from one dynasty to another) towards a more decentralized view. China consists of societies in several places that are in touch with each other, that are related to each other but at the same time are distinctively different and this has to be taken into consideration as well.
The most interesting aspect of this book for me was the description of how Chinese see American events, for example 9/11. I was shocked that the Chinese population was happy about this political incidence. But the book has also taught me how to understand their viewpoint especially because the author succeeds to explain and eliminate misperceptions that exist on both, the Chinese and the American side. For example Hessler explains how the extreme views, positive or negative, that the Chinese have about America tend to reflect their instability that their lives involve. At the same time, they are very open to foreigners and therefore willing to learn about foreign countries, the same way they also like to educate about Chinese history.
Very interesting is the author’s approach to help the reader understand the Chinese culture and change through its people, rather than through its political system. Throughout the book, Hessler included letters that he had received from his former English students. The following quote is from one of them that has made me laugh but at the same time also shocked me: “Now I find a girlfriend finally, she will be my wife after 2000. She isn’t beautiful, there are many black points on her face, but I love her, because she has more money than me, maybe I love her money more…” These letters have enabled me to learn the trade-off that many young Chinese have to face; do they want to stay at home, start a family early and help their peasant families survive or do they want to face the unknown, disappoint their traditional families and migrate to the cities in order to try to find a better paying job that promises a better future to be able to support their families back home. This is only one example of how young Chinese in my age struggle between living a traditional life in their rural towns after the policies of Mao and living after the new western style with the goal of accumulating as much money as possible.
Conclusion, Overall Impression
This informative work has offered me a unique perspective on the development of China and where it might be headed. It has also taught me how history influences current political occurrences. This was a good choice as a first book for my preparation to the upcoming business trip to China as I have gained many important insights on today’s Chinese population. Based on my experience with this nonfiction work, I am interested in reading the prelude “River Town” that is about Hessler’s life as an English teacher on the Yangtze.
Just as oracle bones are individual parts that have to be put together to make sense, this title stands for the loosely connected history and social tales that Hessler writes about. Only if you read them all together, you get a sense about today’s China.
