Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China

China trilogy #2

by Peter Hessler

A century ago, outsiders saw China as a place where nothing ever changes. Today the country has become one of the most dynamic regions on earth. In Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler explores the human side of China's transformation, viewing modern-day China and its growing links to the Western world through the lives of a handful of ordinary people. In a narrative that gracefully moves between the ancient and the present, the East and the West, Hessler captures the soul of a country that is undergoing a momentous change before our eyes.

Genres: China, Nonfiction, History, Travel, Asia, Memoir, Politics

512 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Peter Hessler is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he served as Beijing correspondent from 2000-2007, and is also a contributing writer for National Geographic. He is the author of River Town, which won the Kiriyama Book Prize, and Oracle Bones, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He won the 2008 National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting.

Reviews

[Daren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oracle Bones is the second in Peter Hessler's China trilogy, and is quite a different book from his first. Hessler has moved on from being a Peace Corps English teacher in Fuling, and has stepped into a journalism role in Beijing. He is primarily freelance, but becomes the New York Person for The New Yorker part way through the book.

So starting with the negatives. The copy I have has ridiculously small font. I found it really hard to read for a long time, which meant I read this book in smaller doses than I would normally have - I think I might have read 3 or 4 books between starting and finishing this one (it took me a month to read, which is rare for me). It is also a dense book, which requires some consideration and thinking through.

This book covers a lot of ground, and contains a web of stories which weave throughout the book. It covers a lot of history, historical events and historical figures. It also features many of Hessler's former students, who area spread out in various parts of China. The other primary character is Polat, a Uighur from Xinjiang who Hessler befriends. Polat is a black market money changer who emigrates to the USA, setting up an opportunity for Hessler to write about the process and then his progress in the USA, where the author visits fairly regularly.

While I found Hessler's River Town very readable, engaging, fairly light and amusing, Oracle Bones was a more complex book to read. It still has some of the light and amusing, but a far less proportion, which is balanced with the more academic storyline about the oracle bones (an early form of written information carved into ox scapula bones, used for divining answers to important questions for the royal family) and oracle bone scholars. This had the effect of making the book much less intimate that his first book, but gives views of China from lots of perspectives, which is clever. However I can't help but wonder if this was 3/4 or 1/3 of the length, if I wouldn't have enjoyed it more (or perhaps even if the font size was increased!)

I have prevaricated over the star rating for this book. It has its pro's and con's and I have settled on 4 stars, which is the same as his earlier book, despite how they differ.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

I ran into Hessler's narration on his teaching experience in Fuling two years ago. It was just an excerpt of his book in Chinese, translated by an unknown writer, published in a magazine named BOOK TOWN that cater to the taste of new intellectuals in China by imitating the style and design of NEW YORKER. I read it all through, non-stopped, which is rare for my reading style, and found myself somewhat lost in the delicacy and poetic nature of his writing. Also did I feel a sense of nostalgia and sincere sadness, flowing onwards like ripples of a silent brook, in no way exaggerating and overdue like most of the Westerner do when they touch on a topic of China. In a sensitive language like Chinese, this sadness is aesthetically expanded to an approportion that you just can't neglect. So I managed to buy the book RIVER TOWN and recommended it to many of my foreign friends. One of them, who is also an English teacher in China, kept it for the longest period of time and lent it to many friends of his, Chinese and Westerner alike. The book was terribly worn out the moment he gave it back to me. He told me that all of his Chinese friends love the book as much as I do, while his Western friends think it's nothing more than another bland story given in drab narration.
" Why would you think that way? I think it's marevelously composed." I asked.
He squinted back at me. "Well, not surprising, you're a Chinese."
"So what?"
"Well, no offense. For we who have been living long enough in China and know the land, his' just another normal story coming back to live. It might be appealing to those foreigners who always remain foreign to China, but not to us. We live this life day by day."He said with a pride faintly lingered by his lip.
I certainly was not that easily offended. And I doubted whether he really knows the land as he and his friends proudly proclaimed. Yet his words reminded me of the different perspectives between peoples of different cultures. Is it really because of his uncondescending sympathy that smooths out the reading process for his Chinese reader, turning it into an enjoyable journey, while in the eyes of Americans, his stories still unnecessarily contain familiar traces of arrogance and cultural bias against China?

In his new book "Oracle Bones: A Journey through Time in China", another New York Times Bestseller and National Book Award Finalist, Hessler makes an insightful observation:

"When I first lived in China, I was mostly struck by differences, but over time the similarities became more obvious. Americans and Chinese shared a number of characteristics: they were pragmatic and informal, and they had an easy sense of humor..... Both China and the United States were geographically isolated, and their cultures were so powerful that it was hard for people to imagine other perspectives."

He goes on by commenting how both countries "coped so badly with failure":

"When things went wrong, people were startled by the chaos.....For cultures accustomed to controlling and organizing their world, it was deeply traumatic. And it was probably natural that in extreme crisis, the Americans took steps that undermined democracy and free dom, just as the Chinese had turned against their own history and culture."

Somebody else has picked this part out in her blog as her favorite part in the book. It surely can serve as a manifestation of equivalency, rationally as well as emotionally. Yet why do we care so much about being treated as equivalent? Why is that we feel reassured of our dignity everytime when a Westerner tell us that "we are the same"? Isn't that a fairly simple truth?

So contrary to those reiteration of big themes, I am more fascinated, as I always have been, by the daily details he painstakingly drafted down on his notebooks. God, he's so good at dealing with plain facts! To be honest, I've never felt drawn to non-fiction writing of any kind before, but Hessler's two works cast new light on this special writing styles. Facts can be arranged in such a dexterous way to suggest anything you want to suggest, opening up a brand new horizon to many possibilities of interpretation. The narrator's self is still present, but only seems to function in the least active sense; he's just there to record what happened, refrained from any aggressive intention of commenting. Yet what kind of facts he is presenting! And with what subtlety are all the readers unconciously guided by his hidden intentions!

Not in the bad way though. Rather, I consider this reconstruction of "the Chinese daily life through a Western eye" as quite truthful, and the most thrilling elements this reading journey can provide, as our daily life space is suddenly transformed into something artistically appealing, if not ridiculous. In the chapter "Sand", he tells in such a delicate way his experience of being interrogated by a local police that it even gives out the scent of Kafka's masterpiece "Castle".

And there are other moments of sudden revelation, most of which happened when his mind hops from a scene of reality to his past impression of words and letters:

"That link between generations was another type of virtual archaeology：the young men in Anyang, reading the earth cores; and the old exile in Taipei, reading the faxed maps and remembering the fields that he had abandoned so long ago."

"When you look at a photograph of a big family in the 1920s, and see the Qing-style gowns and the Western suits, the bright young faces and the proud old parents, you wonder what the hell happened to all that time and talent. 梦."

Sometimes he can be mildly sarcastic, which shows more about his wit than his conceit:

"In a country where so much was jiade-- knockoff brands, shoddy restorations of ancient structures, fresh paint on the facades of old buildings-- the film sets were real. Sometimes they lasted longer than the movies themselves."

He's extremely sensitive to characters and words, and is good at exploring connections among those randomly chosen events. He views things from all different perspectives. In other words, his viewpoint is shifting, switching from time to time, yet with good reason especially when one deals with a culture as self-assured as Chinese. By so doing, he's capable of breaking the stereotypes of understanding, uttering new idea to trite topics.

"That was true for all of them --- I never met a survivor whose response seemed foreign. The historical events were unimaginable, as if they had come from another world, but the people's reactions were perfectly understandable. Recovery, in all its varied forms, is simply a human instinct."

"Writing could obscure the truth and trap the living, and it could destroy as well as create. But the search for meaning had a dignity that transcended all of the flaws."

The above can count as one of the best comment I've ever heard on an individual suffering of Cultural Revolution. And it's from an American. Maybe it's not fair by mentioning the speaker's nationality, for it's not in anyway indicated in the words; He's not commenting this as an outsider. Rather, he's standing with the people that he writes about. He questions them, and questions himself. He comforts them, and he comforts himself. Maybe, it is by doing the former, that enables him to do the latter.

[Audrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t say enough about this author; I’m really enchanted with him. I feel as if he’s really grown as a writer since “River Town,” his first book. He’s only a little older than me and I hope to be able to keep coming back to him through his writing for my whole life and see how his thinking progresses.
I think when I started the book I was comparing it to “Eat, Pray, Love” because both are non-fiction works about living abroad. Elizabeth Gilbert’s journey around the world is a sort of outward manifestation of her inner journey into herself which she describes with so much openness that it can be painful (for me, anyway). I was initially finding Oracle Bones to be cold in comparison; it is a researched journalistic work about people in China – several longitudinal studies of Chinese people. But I guess by the end I came to feel that the author was extremely conscious of his presence in the work and deliberate about using it.
Like other, similar, “Chinahand” books, it uses the stories of everyday people to sort of paint a big picture of modern China and its psychological relationship with the weight of its recent and distant past.
I would say this book is about the process of researching the past. Hessler tries to reconstruct the life of an archeologist/linguist who was himself trying to reconstruct the way language came about in China thousands of years ago. I guess the book is about that process of reconstruction and unraveling but how the researcher affects his story and how many different sides there always are to one story.
The book is also about words, the importance of words – it was nice to read it after having read “Eats, Shoots and Leaves,” nice to be made to analyze language, how it comes into being, how it’s constantly evolving, the political ramifications of seeking to change or not change writing systems.
There was a lot of self-consciousness of process in it, self-consciousness of language, of the voice of the author. My mind felt really alive while I was reading it – I felt like I was always jumping around and trying to get at different layers of meaning in a sort of diffuse way.

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

A really excellent work combining memoir, reportage and history. Hessler, who previously served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Fuling, Sichuan, soon after moved to Beijing and became a freelance journalist there. This book follows his experiences living in and traveling around the country from 1999-2002 and the big events that went on at the time; the lives of several of his friends and former students, including a young couple making their way as teachers, a young woman who moved to Shenzhen to make her fortune, and a Uighur trader in exile; and some investigations into Chinese history both recent and ancient.

These last sections wind up merging with the author’s own journey, as he becomes interested in a book published during the Mao years, entitled “Our Country’s Shang and Zhou Bronzes Looted by the American Imperialists.” As it turns out that title was all about the political climate rather than the author’s preferences—he was a scholar of antiquities rather than a polemicist, and was hounded to suicide under murky circumstances at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Hessler is able to trace the human story of those involved through interviews with surviving relatives and students, along with visiting archaeological digs and writing about the sometimes surprising discoveries about China’s past.

While I found this book a little less initially engaging than Hessler’s previous, River Town—which was more strictly memoir, and in which everything was new—I ultimately enjoyed and admire it a lot. Hessler is an excellent writer and storyteller, weaving together a variety of events and people in a consistently fascinating way. He’s always questioning, always seeking out complexities and recognizing absurdity. And he doesn’t disengage himself and his own influence from what’s going on around him, or pretend to be more virtuous than he is; the bit where he assaults a thief in his hotel room along the North Korean border feels particularly real.

It’s also interesting here to see Hessler struggle with his own profession, trying to figure out how to do it ethically and ultimately landing on long-form content. His criticisms of the news media are ones I’ll be thinking about for awhile: not only that it chases horror stories, but that it presents the point-of-view of a single journalist or small handful of people in an objective third-person voice, making it seem less fallible than it is. And also that there’s something voyeuristic about the production and consumption of horror stories by people too far away to make change, as opposed to reporting on problems in one’s own community.

Most of this book is in the detail and the specifics, but toward the end, when the author is visiting an immigrant from China living in Washington D.C., there’s a bit that struck me as particularly insightful, so I’ll leave you with that:

“When I first lived in China, I was mostly struck by differences, but over time the similarities became more obvious. Americans and Chinese shared a number of characteristics: they were pragmatic and informal, and they had an easy sense of humor. In both nations, people tended to be optimistic, sometimes to a fault. They worked hard—business success came naturally, and so did materialism. They were deeply patriotic, but it was a patriotism based on faith rather than experience: relatively few people had spent much time abroad, but they still loved their country deeply. When they did leave, they tended to be bad travelers—quick to complain, slow to adjust. Their first question about a foreign country was usually: What do they think of us? Both China and the United States were geographically isolated, and their cultures were so powerful that it was hard for people to imagine other perspectives.

“But each nation held together remarkably well. They encompassed a huge range of territory, ethnic groups, and languages, and no strictly military or political force could have achieved this for long. Instead, certain ideas brought people together. When the Han Chinese talked about culture and history, it reminded me of the way Americans talked about democracy and freedom. These were fundamental values, but they also had a quality of faith, because if you actually investigated—if you poked around an archaeological site in Gansu, or an election in Florida—then you saw the element of disorder that lay just beneath the surface. Some of the power of each nation was narrative: they smoothed over the irregularities, creating good stories about themselves.

“That was one reason why each country coped so badly with failure. When things went wrong, people were startled by the chaos—the outlandish impact of some boats carrying opium or a few men armed with box cutters. For cultures accustomed to controlling and organizing their world, it was deeply traumatic. And it was probably natural that in extreme crisis, the Americans took steps that undermined democracy and freedom, just as the Chinese had turned against their own history and culture.”

At any rate, overall I found this fascinating and would highly recommend. I look forward to reading Hessler’s other books soon.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hessler's portrait of China is humbling, especially reading it as a Singaporean Chinese. We have many preconceptions of how materialistic or coarse the mainland Chinese are: the book does not deny it, but emphasizes a very different side of China. In the chapter on Shenzhen, in particular, when he profiles a former factory worker turned talk show host who sticks to her moral guns, and becomes an inspiration for many blue collar factory girls, in sharp contrast to the white collar Chinese novelist who chooses to embrace the emphemeral, heady pleasures of the sleep-around socialite. I like it too that he chooses certain academics to track down; again its a very different, far more idealistic, side of China that we read about in the press, with either the economic and financial outperformance or the human rights and safety violations. Style-wise, his New Yorker writing background is all over the book's magazine feature-type pacing.

That said, I would disagree on a couple points on Chinese culture, but those are small quibbles with a highly readable, entertaining and educational book that brings together old and new China, and the best travelogue I've read this whole year.

[AC · Rating 5 out of 5]

(I suddenly realized, on reaching page 454, what it was about this book..., this author.... Though the writing is non-fiction, it was like reading Borges...)

This is a beautiful, surprising, and stunningly good book -- much richer than one could imagine. For anyone interested in the context and texture of modern China, this is a must read.

[Max Berendsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to follow

[Aoi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes, I've spent the better part of a month reading this..

And yes, it is completely THAT awesome.

[Lorenzo Berardi · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the tiny photo on the back cover of "Oracle Bones", Peter Hassler looks like a friend of mine, A., when I was at the university.

One day, around 10 years ago, I met this fellow out of our "Media and communication" department and I told him that he should have tried doing some internship in order to get the 5 credits he missed before getting his degree.

I remember how he originally wanted to take part to some sort of seminar on semiotics or something and I insisted that it was a waste of time.
"Oh come on! - I told A. - Do something practical, instead. Why don't you look for a radio, a magazine, a local tv having an internship programme through the department?".

I was working for a radio in those days and started deserting most of the university lectures due to my reporting all over the town. I wanted my friends to enjoy something similar rather than getting bored over useless theory.
A. listened carefully to me but didn't seem quite sure on taking my words for granted.

A few months later I met A. again at the headquarters of Romano Prodi, a former Italian PM who was campaigning again against Berlusconi. My friend was carrying a big camera and - just like me - had a press pass around his neck. "You see? I followed your tip - he told me - it's just that they needed cameramen rather than reporters but I took the opportunity nonetheless".

Six years later I do write some daily articles from the UK for an Italian newspaper, but get my living thanks to another job which is not related to journalism. My friend A. did so much better. He became the anchorman of prime time news on a regional channel, the host of a popular radio programme and delivered some features for a national television. And he's quite good in what he does.

Well, things are pleasantly unexpected sometimes.

Peter Hessler has a similar but far more successful story to tell.
He left the US and Missouri when he was still freshly-faced, freshly-graduated at Princeton and 20 something. At that time, young Hessler had only published an extended etnography work on a tiny place named Sikeston somewhere in the States and spent some time in Oxford, UK as an English literature student. As a journalist he was a nobody.

Then, comes the unexpected step. As the same Hessler in this book tells us, he joined the Peace Corps and went to China as a volunteer.
After some months spent teaching English and learning Mandarin in a small town along the shores of mighty river Yangtze in which he was one of the only two foreigners, (he wrote a book about that) Hessler came back to the US.

As in his homecountry, the still freshly-faced but far more experienced was not able to find the job he looked for, he returned to China.

And in all but friendly Bejing, Hessler had more luck than in the US. Working as a humble clipper "the last one they had" for the Wall Street Journal he got money enough for renting a room of his own, wandering around the Chinese capital and spending a lot of time chatting with people in cheap restaurants and cafes.

Sometimes he did some trekking in the countryside brought his own tent and slept outdoors. Sometimes he did some random translation job. Sometimes he looked for an interesting story to cover as a freelance: at first failing quite miserably in this last respect.

I am insisting so much on the author of "Oracle Bones" because this book has very much to do with Peter Hessler. He's all but shy in talking about himself, his successes and his failures, but never intrusive. He doesn't definitely show off.
Still it's from Hessler personal life in Bejing that I learned many interesting things on how China as a nation changed from 2000 onwards.

"Oracle Bones" is a fascinating reading on two levels: in telling how Hessler made it in becoming a famous freelance reporter and in showing many things that happened when PH was writing around, the people he met, the stories he jumped into, the troubles he had with the police and so on.

All tied up with the mail and paper correspondence Hessler kept with some of his former students who seem all very confident and at ease while writing to him about their adult lives. One starts to like and sympathize with these Chinese people who - unlucky choice - are all introduced with their English nicknames.

Albeit a few unfortunate stylistic choices, this is an author who has a great passion, respect and care for China in all of its aspects and is eager to talk Mandarin with common people rather than with politicians or entrepreneurs. Hessler poses many questions to himself and is considerate enough to investigate over Chinese history.

It's "artifacts" the recurrent term here (even too much). Hessler looks for artifacts wherever he goes from Manchuria to Taiwan passing through Sichuan and Nanking. It's artifacts that matter because they can always teach you something about the people who made them and about those who discovered or preserved them during difficult times such as the so called Cultural Revolution.

After reading "Oracle Bones" I can say I learned many things I didn't know about China and I do trust the author who told me about them here.
Unlike his wife Leslie T.Chang who was a bit clumsy in mixing up her point of view and family history with the personal stories of Chinese workers in "Factory Girls", Peter Hessler is very much at ease with the subject he chose and never loses the grip on its audience.

The fact that Hessler himself has now relocated (with formerly miss Chang) to Cairo and is currently becoming fluent in Arabic in order to report from the Middle East is just another unexpected step.
I wish I knew how to make it. Unfortunately, I'm hopeless with foreign languages.
Oh well, I will let Peter come first!

[Brian Griffith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book seems informal, without pre-set plan or structure. The author seems to wander around, hanging out with ordinary people. He follows a number of friendships over several years, switching back and forth between people and places. And slowly I realized this is the finest sort of journalism I've seen. The loose net of stories explores China from dozens of viewpoints--of Uighur traders, migrant teachers, aging archaeologists, factory girls. Gradually themes of investigation arise--into the fate of an archeologist who died in the Cultural Revolution, or the story of China's script. There's no central theme. Just a world of lives and experiences spread across China, captured with unpretentious art.

[peebee · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book reeeeeeeally cemented me as a fan of peter hessler. he has a way of articulating in words the humanity of people with vastly different life experiences and at times objectionable viewpoints that i find remarkable and admirable. my favourite sections were about the trials and tribulations of one of his former students from fuling, william jefferson foster (lol), who moves to the east coast (of china) after graduation to work as a teacher. things do not go as planned. the first school he teaches at turns out to be a scam (the 'school' in question doesn't even have a fixed address); he fares better at the second school, but in a hypercompetitive society where education is viewed primarily as a tool for achieving economic success and stability, teachers find themselves under tremendous pressure to adapt, often having to bribe corrupt local government officials into leaking exam tips. william keeps an extremely entertaining journal (of sorts) in english, which hessler excerpts throughout the book. he also writes letters to peter in english:

'Hi yagao [toothpaste],

I am sure that this Spring Festical I will stay in Zhejiang. We are required to give so-called extra lessons to the Yahoo students.... The year 2002 this school will have fierce competition and challenges from the fucking Public Boarding school that I hoped will be bombed by Osama Bin Laden. by the way, how is your family? And what's new in there?
I want to bye to you now. Right now I have to coach my top students who are my money and hope in the new year of 2002.'

other threads in this book include: the struggles of a persecuted uyghur intellectual who eventually seeks asylum in the unites states, the history and development of chinese script as told through archaeology, unresolved cultural revolution trauma, the invention of shenzhen, and hilariously offensive bootleg 9/11 memorabilia.

[Larry Bassett · Rating 4 out of 5]

About 10 1/2 years after first reading this book as well as the other two books about China that Peter Hessler has written, I have returned to the books to listen to them in the audible format while also following along with the Kindle version. I find I do not have much recollection of these books from over 10 years ago. My daughter who I adopted from China at the age of 3 1/2 years old is going to be 18 in April. She has not displayed much interest in her Chinese homeland but she is most aware of her Chinese appearance. In her years in school she has experienced some harassment because of her experience and yet she maintains a very strong desire to support her appearance.

The author was an independent journalist in China writing for US publications predominantly the New Yorker. He apparently did not have to write more than four or five stories a year in order to earn enough money to live in China. For some reason the material he elected to cover in this particular book overall did not excite or interest me in every case. He is interested in archaeology and historic exploration in China. He covers a number of people in the book in some depth and that is probably the most interesting aspect of the book for me.

I am tempted to reduce this book from the previous four stars to three stars but I think I will leave it as is since I believe the forest stars gives the adequate suggestion that I did not find this book as enjoyable as the prior River Town which I gave five stars. I cannot give a simple explanation for that difference other than the topics in this book seemed more complex and more related to history rather than the current life of individuals in China.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hessler’s personal experience in China as a foreigner fluent in Chinese is necessarily anecdotal. But fascinating to me, the father of a seven year old girl adopted from Aksu, Xinjiang province. He has immersed himself in the Chinese culture, not as a sociologist, but as a sensitive person. He considers himself a journalist but he is not dispassionate or impersonal about his subjects. Factual information is scattered throughout the narrative without distracting from the very readable story.

LATER: I can't help but like Peter Hessler. He considers himself a foreign correspondent but for much of the book, especially the last half, he is an investigative journalist with an ability to dig for the truth and to personalize his subjects. He has an ability to get inside his material without being totally subjective. He is not an invisible narrator; you are looking over his shoulder and benefiting from his experience.

He covers a very wide range of topics. He covers the issues of the Uighur minority in China as well as related to the political asylum obtained by a Uighur in the U.S. He examines China's past through archeology as well as personal encounters with Chinese with roots in the past century of upheaval. He tells of Chinese westerns with insight about the movie business in China, from major productions to pirated DVDs. We learn about the role of Chinese written language -- characters -- in the past and present, given its unique history of thousands of years as well as its more recent political implications. He covers the events of September 11, 2001 from his personal perspective as well as a Chinese one.

He observes that "sometimes the more information you have, the less you know. And there is the point at which even the best intentions become voyeurism." He is sensitive to the pitfalls of his craft.

I have now read all three of his books written over more than a decade. He has changed and China has changed tremendously. The hook for me is that I am the father of a daughter adopted from China. My experience about China is, like Peter Hessler's, very personal.

[Troy Parfitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler’s second effort, or Part II, as it were, of his China trilogy, chronicles, mainly, the lives of various Chinese people, from archeologists and intellectuals to the author’s friends and former students. Many of the narratives seem to be more detailed and more rewarding versions of his newspaper and magazine articles. Themes and “characters” recur and are given a sort of chronological treatment. The glue that binds the book together, the oracle bones, is also a sort of loose symbol for the volume in total. The oracle bones convey meaning; their messages and the stories surrounding the people who excavate, study, and try to make sense of them attempt to tell us something about Chinese culture. The people Hessler writes about, and the yarns pertaining to his effort to do so, also try to tell us something about Chinese culture.

Oracle Bones is a long book, about 470 pages of text. Some of the topics are interesting; others are not. But what was not interesting to me would be interesting to someone else. What’s important is that the subjects were interesting to the author. That’s what a good writer does: he writes for himself. If others like it, fine; if not, that’s fine, too. Readers like me are going to criticize no matter what you do, so you may as well scribble about your own interests.

And Hessler is a good writer. His sentences are crisp, his paragraphs economical. His writing is better than in his first book, River Town, even if River Town is a better, or at least more coherent, story. (I suppose it’s fair to clarify that whereas River Town is a story, Oracle Bones is a series of vignettes.) In any event, it’s always interesting, to me at least, to plot an author’s development.

And Peter deserves credit in general. In the sea of China experts, i.e. know-it-all expatriates who write thousands of words in poorly-formed blogs and internet forums, he got off his duff and wrote, seriously, about his experiences in China and what he learned from them. He dug deeply, he researched, he became a journalist, and he travelled extensively (sometimes at considerable risk) to talk to people and record what they had to say. He got published, and his China trilogy continues to sell. Hessler proved that there’s always room for one more voice, provided that voice is reasoned, informed, and intelligent. He’s got much more to say than Henry Kissinger, for instance. He’s got much more to say than a lot of China writers.

That said, I wish the book were a bit more passionate. In places, I found Hessler’s style a little too, well, journalistic. He removes himself from the stories, but in the places where he inserts himself, i.e. expresses his opinion, or shows his frustration (as he does with the “struggle session” he faced after being detained for camping on the Great Wall, or, so the authorities thought, reporting illegally on a village election) it’s quite satisfying. But again, this is a matter of personal taste.

A recurring comment about Hessler’s writing is that he is so very sympathetic toward Chinese people, but I don’t see this as being the case, especially in this book. As there is in any China book worth its salt, there are heaps of send-ups and bucketfuls of criticism, though they are rendered in a flat, ironical fashion. I don’t see Hessler as being eminently empathetic; at one point he describes himself as coldly pragmatic – a journalist getting his scoop.

Oracle Bones did what it was supposed to; it made me want to read his third book, Country Driving. I’m curious as to whether there is (and I hope there isn’t) as much detachment in that book as there is in this one.

In total, a very good read. China at the microcosmic level is infinitely more rewarding than books on China’s dynastic history or soporific tomes on, say, the history of Chinese diplomacy. And, among the dozens of intriguing and memorable stories, there are excellent tips for would-be journalists and aspiring writers. Oracle Bones works as a starting-point for neophytes or a refresher for old China hands. I recommend it.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World

[Wendell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This second volume of Hessler’s China reportage is superior to River Town--in part, Hessler knows China much better now and, as a result, his gaze has broadened and deepened, no longer hemmed in by the realities of second-English teaching in a somewhat backwater town and by the limitations of interaction with a series of hyper-driven, consumer-mad students and rather quirky and sometimes sinister administrators. In Oracle Bones, he is more confident; he knows China and the Chinese better, and he touches on a wide and satisfying range of topics, including the “new economy,” Chinese archaeology, and the highly politicized history of the language itself, particularly in the Communist era and beyond. At the same time, twin shadows – on the one hand, that of the Cultural Revolution and the disturbing legacy of the Mao years and, on the other, the proto-capitalist displacements and abuses of the current epoch – hang over the book in ways that are both fascinating and depressing.

Having read Hessler’s two books, however, I’m still not sure I could explain what draws him to China—enough to become fluent in the language and to spend year after year living, working, teaching, and reporting there or to nurture the affection he so obviously feels for the Chinese. Indeed, the China that emerges, especially in this second book, strikes one as inhumane, rigid, and jingoistic, as phobic as it is isolated and isolationist, as critical of the West as it is acquisitive and unprincipled. What appears to pervade the country is capitalism without democracy, surely no less dangerous than Communism without democracy.

In any case, Oracle Bones is a fine book that meanders rather than narrates, touches on rather than deeply explores. It is much more than a travelogue and something less than scholarship. More than anything, the reader is ferried pleasantly about by the author’s personal curiosities, though Hessler’s opinions about what he sees sometimes remain veiled. Hessler’s attempt to track down the “truth” of the fate of oracle-bone scholar Chen Mengjia is touching and absorbing; in the end, the Hessler’s conclusion that such truth can never be known seems both very post-modern and very Chinese.

[Piotr · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book written by a journalist. He doesn't hide it, writing about his reporting experience in China, so it's not a surprise. But the effect is that it feels like a lot of reporting packaged together, some of it pursuing a historical theme, but much of it quite random.

If you overlook this clipped-together feel, the book is very informative, maybe even too detailed (the author obviously had tonnes of notes to work with). It gives you insights into bits and pieces of China's ancient history, in particular the development of its writing, but also provides many glimpses of modern China, in the early 2000s. This is ostensibly its concept, to weave history with modernity, but it feels a bit like a journalistic tool to bring together many disparate narratives that were sitting on the author's desk.

The book weaves together several themes. One is Chinese archeologists, historians and their work uncovering the country's ancient history while contending with pressures of war, the Cultural Revolution and modernity. Another is the history itself, the oracle bones, the ancient inscriptions, the dynasties. Still another is the author's life in China in the late 1990s and early 2000s working as an American journalist in Beijing. The fourth is his friendship with an Uyghur in Beijing who becomes a key to the world of China's ethnic minorities and migrants, and who later emigrates to the US. And the fifth are the lives of his former students of English, who keep in touch with him through letters for many years afterwards, while struggling to adjust to living in booming coastal cities.

Altogether, an interesting book, especially for someone like me who is fascinated with China and hungry to read anything about its people, language and history. It does feel a bit too long, too detailed at times and not as coherent as it could have been.

[Bob Reed · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved Peter Hessler's first book, River Town. In fact, it was the first book I gave a 5-star rating. Oracle Bones fits into the same genre, but for me it fell somewhat flat. What made River Town so appealing to me was the personal stories of the people in Hessler's life. Oracle Bones has some of that, but it is set within a larger context. Hessler tries to superimpose his various experiences and the experiences of the Chinese people he knows onto the canvas of China's history. This obviously appealed to a lot of people, because the book got great reviews. However, it didn't work for me. I felt like the book was attempting to do too many things, and as a reader I felt pulled in too many different directions. Maybe the problem is me. I know that Hessler was trying to pull all these different vignettes together so that the sum was greater than the parts. Maybe I'm just too thick, because I didn't get how the pieces connected. For me, the sum substracted from the whole and produced something less than the parts. Nevertheless, Hessler is an outstanding writer and this book will be of interest to anybody who finds contemporary China as fascinating as I do.

[Nadya · Rating 2 out of 5]

Got through half pretty quickly then just couldn't finish it - kept turning a page and then putting it down. Left last 100 pages unread because it became so scattered, felt like random story after story that did not tie anything together. Was a bit like a thousand news articles put together in a book that did not necessarily fit together.
He's a great writer but I couldn't see the connections in latter half of book.

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderfully written. I loved The structure of the narrative ---genius.
A rich tale of ancient and modern china.
I recently visited the Chicago art institute and was thrilled to see actual oracle bones.
Recommend this book most highly.

[soph · Rating 5 out of 5]

i will always feel very conflicted when it comes to white men writing about china and this was no exception to that. there's a sort of balance to strike between leaning too hard on exoticism and coming off as almost fetishistic, and no matter what, i'm inevitably going to feel a bit stung on behalf of a culture that i have willingly and unwillingly distanced myself from over the years. that being said, hessler does a good job of straddling that balance, i think, and the way he writes is very engaging. a very crunchy read to nom on while you're at work waiting for your assays to finish running

[Donald J. Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really great follow-up to reading “River Town”. Such a great insight into China’s past and present, and where those lines blur. I felt so connected to each of Hessler’s friends’ personal lives. Like, where are Polat and William Jefferson Foster today? The author is a talented writer, and although it gets a bit repetitive with the “in case you forgot where we last were” moments, this was an enjoyable book that I’m sure to read again someday, maybe when my own days in China are behind me.

[Alexis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an excellent narrative of Peter Hessler's time in China as a correspondent for various American newspapers and magazines. I thought overall it was a worthwhile read and a great audiobook for work. There wasn't anything groundbreaking in the format, but the personal stories (there a three or four "main" Chinese storylines) were interesting and well-framed. Would recommend to anyone interested in China or human-interest stories from China.

[Jesse Field · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm almost sheepish to confess not having read this all the way through before, despite knowing passages of it very well. I certainly was always eager to read Hessler's work in the New Yorker back in those days, the 2000s; he is such an engaging and wide-ranging writer on China, a humane voice with the capacity to deal with all the moral and cultural contradictions of his subject. And Oracle Bones was often around -- there were copies of it at the Wenbei building, up at Tsinghua University, where we IUPers struggled with our tones and dreamed of our own China essays. And copies down at HomeShop, the now-defunct artist space, and more copies in all the quaint bookstores of the Andingmen neighborhood. It was a book to flip through, excerpt from, but somehow never to read all the way through, sprawling and disconnected as the various chapters and portraits were.

At least until I came across the audio-version this past summer. Audio knows nothing of skimming and flipping through; it's a remarkably linear approach to a book.

Which, was good, because I finally got more of a sense of the logic of Oracle Bones -- it is sprawling, but it's also a distinct and valuable portrait of China in an era now rapidly fading in our memories, roughly 1998 to the early 2000s, the days when China responded to 9-11, won its shot at the Olympics, and kept pumping at its economy. Back then, a young man like Hessler could bum around on a business visa, hiking without a passport, never registering when he went to new cities -- of course, all impossible now, in the post-COVID-19 era. These was also days when some of the great Chinese humanists of the 20th century were still alive and willing to be interviewed by a student of history -- Hessler has valuable conversations with Shih Chang-ru, Zhou Youguang, and Li Xueqin, as well as David N. Keightley, Victor Mair (what a character!), and John De Francis. He hit on a great theme with these interviews, tracing out the ghost of an oracle bones scholar called Chen Mengjia, whose immense contribution to the study of the Chinese civilization did not protect him from criticism during the tumultuous years of Maoist political movements.

Hessler threads these conversations with the old guard and meditation on China's past with even greater attention on on the post-70s and earliest of the post-80s generation, which was just hitting its stride in the early 2000s, often full of hope and internationalism, as Hessler documents through his friend Willy. This was a period of break-neck growth in Shenzhen, where contractors hardly finished a project before moving on to the next, as Hessler documents. It was also the time when Xinjiang Uighurs were restive in the face of a powerful hegemon, but the hammer hadn't descended on them like it would over the next twenty years -- it's chilling to think what might have happened to Hessler's friend Polat, and Polat's family in that hapless western region, in the years since publication.

Arguably, it's all too much for a book. And yet it did come together. It's heartwarming that the book made it onto the New York Times bestseller lists, meaning presumably many people gained a deeper understanding of China through Hessler's stories. And 15 years later, reading Oracle Bones brings up nostalgia for that stage of China on march, now passing on to some new, and fearful stage. Hessler closes his book with a look at Lucy Chao's Chinese translation of Whitman's Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, back-translating from her Chinese to a new English. For some reason -- sentimental me -- this brought tears to my eyes, and does again as I type out the lines:

I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,
Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,
A reminiscence sing. (Original)

我，痛苦和欢乐的歌手，今世和来世的统一者/ 所有暗示都接受了下来，加以利用，但又飞速地越过了这些/ 歌唱一件往事 (Lucy Chao)

I, the singer of painful and joyous songs, the uniter of this life and the next,
Receiving all silent signs, using them all, but then leaping across them at full speed,
Sing of the past. (Hessler Rendition of Chao)

[Mark Oppenlander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Several years ago, Beth and I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to chaperone a Study Abroad trip to China. The lead faculty member on that trip required her students to read a number of pre-trip books. Since I had never been to Asia before, I grabbed the reading list too and soaked up as much of it as I could. One of the books on her list was Peter Hessler's "River Town." It was a terrific book describing his two years as a Peace Corp teacher in Fuling, a smaller city near Chengdu in central China. It was one of the best of a very good batch of stories about China. I so enjoyed that memoir that I decided to read another of Hessler's books.

"Oracle Bones" picks up not long after the Peace Corps teaching experience chronicled in "River Town." Hessler has now moved to Beijing and is trying to make a living as a foreign journalist. In the various chapters and sections he describes different ways in which he tries to keep his visa up-to-date, make enough money to stay alive in Beijing and legitimize himself as a journalist. Some of the assignments he gets seem dangerous, others are just silly, but all are fascinating. He also keeps in touch with some of his former students and travels around the country to see them. And in still another sub-plot, he befriends a Uighur man who traffics in black market goods of many types but is really just trying to get to America somehow. The book has a picaresque and episodic quality to it.

But although this is ostensibly a memoir, the book isn't really about Hessler himself. He frames the stories of his own life with a series of vignettes about Chinese archeology. He's especially interested in the discovery of a cache of "oracle bones" discovered early in the 20th century. These bones are actually bits of turtle shell with prophecies burned into them; they represent some of the earliest known examples of Chinese writing. Hessler does some research on the dig and becomes fascinated with one particular scholar, Chen Mengjia, an expert in the oracle bones, who died under mysterious circumstances during the Cultural Revolution. Hessler uses the framing device of the oracle bones and the mystery of the scholar's strange life and death to explore Chinese history, culture and identity. He juxtaposes these stories of the past with his own observations of the present.

It's hard for me to say why I like Hessler's writing so much. Part of it may simply be that I like exploring exotic places and Hessler is an excellent tour guide to one such place, China. Another is probably Hessler's supreme empathy for his characters. No matter how strange, small-minded, wicked or stunted the people he meets may seem to be, he never sees them as anything less than human. He tries to understand their motives; he rarely judges them. And finally, he has a journalist's eye and knack for the telling detail. His acute observations bring out things that the casual tourist would almost certainly miss on their own. Whether he is describing late night lonely-hearts talk shows in the boom town of Shenzen, or observing wedding-day water taxi rides along the North Korean border, Hessler gives us new ways to think about what it means to be Chinese.

If you ever yearned to learn more about the Far East, I encourage you to check out the books of Peter Hessler. He is an excellent traveling companion.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

The stories of the author’s former English language students who took such names as William Jefferson Foster, Nancy Drew and Emily Bronte are interesting and funny. The author does a great job of presenting the unique perspectives of the various Chinese people he encounters without being patronizing or judgmental, although he often puts a very funny spin on them.

I’ve always thought of China as a social monolith but that’s clearly not the case and it was interesting to me to know why I was so wrong. The story of Polat, the author’s Uighur friend, underscored the differences and struggles of the ethnic and religious minorities in China whom I never even knew existed.

Interwoven throughout the modern day stories of the author’s friends and associates is the mysterious tale of Chen Mengjia which builds slowly and completely through the Artifact chapters interspersed throughout the book. At first these chapters seem disparate but they ultimately come together beautifully.

The author’s story of the burglary and its aftermath in the first third of the book is genuinely the funniest passage I’ve ever read.

This book is the second in a trilogy and I’m reluctant to read the others because I enjoyed this one so much. Maybe it would have been better to read the first book (River Town) but it didn’t detract from my enjoyment of this book.

Update - I read River Town (the first in the series) and it’s excellent and worth reading first.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't know much about China before so I found the various glimpses this book provides interesting. It's focused on three things-- a) Chinese archaeologists of the 20th century and some of their discoveries, b) a Uighur trader, and c) recent students of the author who taught English for a while and how they're lives in some of China that has opened up to capitalism. It seems that everything in China that is suppose to help move it forward (whether communism or capitalism and the government programs to implement both) is forced and ineffectual in their long term goals. And the people are just trying to get by.
At one point late in the book, the author interviews a Chinese actor/director who says: "Everybody is too busy; there's not enough quiet for reflection. In the distant past, the country was peaceful and stable, but now it changes so fast. Certainly that's been the case since Reform and Opening, but to some degree the past two hundred years have been like that. We don't know where we are. We haven't found our road. In the early part of the twentieth century, the Chinese tried; some of them tried to find it in our own traditions, while others looked outside the country. This debate is still going on." That's a good summary of the book.

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVE his writing. This book, like his other book River Town is a joy to read, and I tore through this. This book examines modern China from the point of view of many of its everyday citizens, especially those marginalized, while simultaneously exploring the previous generation's experiences through the pursuit of an archaelogical mystery. The most interesting things about this book were: the Chinese perspective on September 11th (or at least the perspective of an American who is in China during that time and receives information about the attacks through DVD bootlegs that patch together news footage with Hollywood movies), and the amazing comparisons between the U.S. and China that he makes near the end of the book. Reading books like this makes me want to BE a writer, just so I could bring something so interesting into the world (a minor obsession with Chinese culture helps).

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just read this before going to China. This is a must read if you plan on going to China and want to know what to expect, or if you want to know current China and how the distant and recent past has shaped China today.

Hessler went to China in 1996 as a Peace Corps volunteer to teach English. And he stayed, becoming a newspaper reporter, then magazine writer, and now a non-fiction author. Hessler recently published the introductory and concluding articles in the National Geographic Special Edition on China. That NG is excellent as well.

If you only have time to read one book on China, this should be it.

[gee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hessler reads like a Dalrymple to me. Foreign guy with a strong interest in a big Asian country. Interesting stories about local people, lots of historical stuff. In all, a great read. I'll keep an eye out for more of his books.

All that being said, I'm uncomfortable with the shades of white privilege I see throughout. Emily says it best:
"I always enjoy talking with you, you are the one who knows my everything... But every time you went back to Beijing (after reporting in Shenzhen), I felt the panic of hollowness. As if I had given everything out but gotten nothing in return."

[Liona · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was one of the best ones I read last year. Peter Hessler manages to give an insider and outsider's view of China. He first arrived in China as a teacher and then stayed in contact with his students when he moved to Beijing as a journalist. What makes this book fascinating and a pleasure to read is the way he sympathetically tells the stories of his Chinese friends.

[Anne · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't know if I will pick this one back up or not. Not sure if it was the timing or the book itself, but this one just didn't grab me. For sure Hessler has the ability to find unique voices and tell their stories in a compelling way, but compared to his other books this one was less captivating for me. I didn't finish it, and I'm not sure if I will.