Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China and the West

A leap from his fabulous first book River Town, in terms of style and content, Peter Hessler manages to pull off a difficult balancing act of biography, autobiography and history, showing readers the real face of both today's China and the decades stretching back to the beginnings of the country's history.
It's an unusual format, where the Oracle Bones of the chapter are dotted through the stories of several people (Polat the Uighur from the disputed north western part of China) and several former students, but makes for a fascinating mix.
I read this in China, along with several other books, and it was simply the best introduction to the country. Hessler's observations are never heavy handed or forced, and there's nothing irrelevant or superfluous. Funny, moving and enormously informative, this is simply outstanding.

Aspects of China (3/5 people found this helpful)

Very readable, factual book about the lives of some people that the author knows in China, interspersed with pieces on `artefacts` (such as the horse, chinse calligraphy, etc.) linking ancient and modern China.

I read this while travelling through China, and was delighted to find so much information relevant to what I was seeing. Certainly enhanced my understanding and appreciation.

NEW YORK PERSON (11/13 people found this helpful)

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.

A scrapbook (1/2 people found this helpful)

Oracle Bones appears to be a "cut-and-paste" of Hessler's research and recent experiences in China. It reads like a disjointed scrapbook: a collection of articles and stories that Hessler has sought, unsuccessfully, to weave into a coherent work.

One is left wishing that Oracle Bones had been disaggregated into two or three separate books, one for each set of the characters within it; but perhaps Hessler realised that - other than Polat - he had failed to paint the characters well enough to sustain the reader's interest in any one of them. The tale of the oracle bones scholar seems interminable, seemingly superimposed simply as sticky tape to hold the various other stories together.

Gone is the empathy and enthusiasm we saw in Hessler's "River Town"; he now seems jaded. (And from the glimpses that Oracle Bones presents into the author's own existence, that is unsurprising.) Writing seems to have become simply a job, rather than a pleasure, for Hessler.

A scrapbook (0/3 people found this helpful)

Oracle Bones appears to be a "cut-and-paste" of Hessler's research and recent experiences in China. It reads like a disjointed scrapbook: a collection of articles and stories that Hessler has sought, unsuccessfully, to weave into a coherent work.

One is left wishing that Oracle Bones had been disaggregated into two or three separate books, one for each set of the characters within it; but perhaps Hessler realised that - other than Polat - he had failed to paint the characters well enough to sustain the reader's interest in any one of them. The tale of the oracle bone scholar seems interminable, seemingly superimposed simply as sticky tape to hold the various other stories together.

Gone is the empathy and enthusiasm we saw in Hessler's "River Town"; he now seems jaded. (And from the glimpses that Oracle Bones presents into the author's own existence, that is unsurprising.) Writing now seems to be a job rather than a pleasure for Hessler.

Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China and the West

Peter Hessler

Reader Reviews:

Thought provoking - the perfect book for China (0/0 people found this helpful)

Aspects of China (3/5 people found this helpful)

NEW YORK PERSON (11/13 people found this helpful)

A scrapbook (1/2 people found this helpful)

A scrapbook (0/3 people found this helpful)

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