Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present

review of the week

Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present

by Peter Hessler

HarperCollins, John Murray, $210

The maxim 'may you live in interesting times' - often cited as an ancient Chinese curse - works better as a blessing for teacher-turned-journalist-turned-author Peter Hessler.

Posted by the Peace Corps to a remote town on the Upper Yangtze river in the mid 1990s, the Missouri native moved with creditable fluency into the rhythms and manners of life in a part of China where he was one of a handful of foreigners. From there he shifted to Beijing, clipping news reports for the archives of an international newspaper and writing freelance articles.

He was most fortunate to be in China at a time when its development was accelerating beyond expectations, surfing the vicissitudes of so-called Reform and Opening. Oracle Bones - a Journey Between China's Past and Present is a reflection of these years - acutely observed, moving, frequently funny and a perspicacious X-ray of China's zeitgeist.

Hessler was around for some of the major news events in China during the past decade. He fielded questions from curious citizens about why the US bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, tagged along with a befuddled international team of Olympic Games inspectors, looked askance at the Hainan spy plane incident and - like any seasoned reporter - once found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and was arrested after blundering into a local election having camped out overnight on the Great Wall.

Hessler's engaging style allows him to observe and then let the facts speak for themselves, never more tellingly so than the day he was in Tiananmen Square as plain clothes police broke up a Falun Gong demonstration.

Wherever he goes, Hessler's narrative adds a human face, tracing the lives of those who are uprooted by time and fate. He portrays the officially sanctioned repression of the Uighur ethnic minority in the far west through the eyes of a peripatetic trader named Polat, whose eventual migration to the US coincides with the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001. Polat's attempts to gain citizenship are delayed by American paranoia about aliens, while back in his former homeland, Beijing - a new recruit to George W. Bush's so-called war on terror - launches a fervent crackdown on the independence movement.

The burgeoning development of China's new economic zones such as Shenzhen is tracked through the trials and tribulations of Emily, one of Hessler's former students, who joins the legion of itinerant workers setting out to seek their fortune, a previously inconceivable option for the peasant classes. And as the old is swept away in favour of the new, Hessler is on the spot when the capital's picturesque hutongs are demolished to make way for more skyscrapers. The owner of one centuries-old home mounts a gallant but futile stand against this vandalism; and his story is entwined with one of the Cultural Revolution's saddest tales, that of Chen Mengjia, a scholar of oracle bones, the earliest known form of writing in East Asia.

Dating back more than 3,000 years, the bones were first excavated at Anyang in Henan province in the 19th century, and many more have turned up since. The bones were consulted as auguries, and Chen was noted for his brilliance, not simply in divining their meaning, but in many other fields as well. An unwitting victim of his education and upbringing, he was purged during the Cultural Revolution and eventually committed suicide.

Hessler reveals Chen's and other life histories gradually, interspersing them with his own experiences, whether suffering an attempted robbery on the Korean border or visiting one of his most dynamic students who decided to change his name to William Jefferson Foster. Despite speaking and writing the language, Hessler enjoys the unique position of never quite being an insider, always taking the perspective of the inquisitive foreigner. His appraisal, tinged with irony, of the similarities between the US and China is concise and witty. And his own circumstances often mirror those of his subjects. As Polat wrestles with the reams of documentation that will permit him to enter the US, for instance, Hessler puts together his own papers to secure journalist accreditation in Beijing.

Oracle Bones never loses sight of the wider picture. Of all the people that Hessler meets, filmmaker Jiang Wen provides one of the most thought-provoking vignettes. Jiang wrote, directed and starred in Devils on the Doorstep, which focused on a single village during the Japanese occupation, a microcosm of the upheavals afflicting life in China in the 1930s. 'I agree that the Chinese people have been victims,' he says. 'But we have our own faults; we need to look hard at a mirror and think about why we became victims. You can't simply point to others and say that they're evil ... that's too simple.'