ISBN: 0060826584
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Avg Cusomer Rating: 4
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Summary: very good story
Hessler is doing it again and tells very good stories about Chinese lives set in a historical framework. This book is much more ambitious than his other book River Town, though I like the first book more. Very interesting read, but it is not really that strong on the Chinese history and society in general. Better read another book: China's global reach: markets, multinationals, and globalization, which offers vast ideas on the huge changes in the Chinese political, economic and business world.
Summary: NEW YORK PERSON
Had you ever heard of a magazine called The New York Person? I expect not. However if you take the title `New Yorker' for which Peter Hessler is the Beijing correspondent, translate it into Chinese and give it to the appropriate officials of the Chinese Communist party, the title will come back as `New York Person', and argument with the functionaries will be futile.
This is the second volume of Peter Hessler's memoirs of his life in China. In River Town he had set down his experiences as a teacher of English for the Peace Corps in a small town on the Yangtse. In Oracle Bones he is a professional journalist, still at that time single and unattached, exploring China, its peoples and their culture. As I read the book, it is autobiography even more than it is sociology or history. The author gets about a lot of China, as can be easily checked from the beautiful map at the front of the book, but his explorations have more of a random feel to me than the sense of any systematic search. Wherever he goes, he goes there with an open mind, and the acquaintances he makes are only big names insofar as some of them are highly specialised scholars. In fact the oracle bones of the book's title are not even a major element in the narrative. They are of interest in their own right and they serve as a literary linking device, but this book is mainly about people. Peter Hessler has been long enough in China to get to know a number of its ordinary citizens well. A few of his former students kept in touch with him, but in particular a good deal of the story is hung around an Uighur going under the pseudonym of Polat, kept anonymous for his own protection. Unless I am mistaken, in the `west' we don't read a lot about the real lives of ordinary ethnic Chinese let alone about Uighurs, and it is the special insight that this book gives into the thoughts, attitudes and living conditions of the hidden population that gives Oracle Bones much of its characteristic flavour.
On the other hand far and away the main linking thread in the book is the author himself and the journey of discovery he is making. The style of writing is like the man in real life, a very distinctive mixture of candour and reserve. In real life one always has the sense that Peter is noticing a great deal and missing very little. In his books we are not reading academic texts or comprehensive studies of the communities he reports on, what we are given is a set of vignettes of life in today's China (plus what can happen to an expatriate Uighur in the USA) drawn from a true journalist's perspective of what is significant, and remarkably free from preconceived notions of what to expect. He was around at the time of the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, at the time of the mid-air collision between an American and a Chinese military aircraft at the start of the current presidency of the United States, on 9/11/2001 itself, and during the visit of GWB to China. Typically, he stays detached in his reports. If I read him rightly, he seems to suggest that the Belgrade bombing actually was deliberate, but one can't be completely sure whether he is saying that. His deadpan humour is at its best when recounting the struggles of the administration over whether to apologise for the air accident, and maybe even better in his final comment on the remarks occasioned by Mr Bush's plonking inanities during his visit - nobody was even interested enough to talk about him. Even here I have glossed what he says to some extent - Peter Hessler's way is to stay noncommittal. As regards 9/11, what he reports is telling indeed. The government of China expressed proper outrage and said all the right things: among the populace themselves the main emotion expressed was glee.
These were some of the headline events, and this is the distinctive and unusual angle we get on them. Every bit as significant and revealing are the letters from his former students and his own encounters with some of the minority communities, all of his comments thoughtful and serious but with his own special tongue-in-cheek humour as well. As you would expect, there is a fair amount of historical material, as usual seen from his own perspective with less emphasis than commonly on battles and emperors and more on excavations and methods of writing.
Insofar as Oracle Bones is about China, it is a fascinating glimpse of the other China, the China of the common people behind the headlines. Insofar as it is autobiography, it is a fascinating account of the experiences of a thinking man and a fair-minded man with an independent turn of thought and an enviable gift for expressing it, and the book is enjoyable to read as well as being beneficial. I gather there is another book in preparation, although at the moment he's not giving details, at any rate not to me. There is plenty more to be said about China, and this is the source I would rather read it from than most of the periodicals put together, except perhaps The New York Person.
Summary: A terrific view of China from a point of view of a yanguezhi
It is a bit disconcerting for a person of Chinese descent to learn about himself and his culture from a yanguezhi (foreign devil). Yet this is exactly what happened when I read Oracle Bones.
This is an extremely fine book, full of subtle observations and exquisite narratives of matters great and small. Like Pankaj Mishra's An End to Suffering, Peter Hessler attempts many things in this moveable feast. This is a travel journal, a small peek at how Hessler was able to parlay a stint in the Peace Corp teaching English in China to a freelance gig writing for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and The New Yorker. Mostly this is a expansive look and humanistic rumination on how the globalization of the free market has touched the lives of common people of China, as exemplified by a number of Hessler's English students. Hessler used the story of his Uighur friend Polat to give us a view of every day street life in Beijing as well as the life of an oppressed asylum seeker in the US.
This style can easily become clumsy and ponderous, but Hessler does a masterful job of keeping the narrative interesting and colorful enough to lead the reader along through the turbulence of the serial form without losing each of the intricate interweaving threads.
The key to Hessler's success with this form is his usage of the archeological history of the Oracle Bones in China as the rhythm section to his narrative. Much like a steady drum beat in a good song, the rhythm soon overtakes much of the decorative accompaniment and dominates the song. The story of the archeology serves as a solid counterpoint for Hessler's riffing on globalization, on the ever-changing business environment in China, and on the peculiar yet inscrutable reactions of the Chinese government to all these changes. As the story evolves, the story of the Oracle Bones and the scholar who deciphered them comes around to dominate the narrative. The story wends itself around all the previous threads and makes the juxtaposing lines of inquiry reasonable. The story of the scholar, his wife, his family, and his wife's family, and his various colleagues - friends or foe- is transcendental in its universality. The latter part of the book, majority of which is devoted to the story of the Oracle Bone scholar has the impact of a fine mystery novel and it gives the reader the punch in the gut that one rarely gets when reading a travelogue or a book of history, or an autobiographical portrait.
This book was thoroughly enjoyable; it was concomitantly informative and soothing to the soul. The writing was superb, rhythmic, and transformational in its structure and meaning.
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