Oracle Bones

Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present is a 2006 work of travel journalism by Peter Hessler, the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker magazine. The book attempts to provide an overview of contemporary China by recounting Hessler’s experiences in the country and those of some of the people he has met there. Woven into this narrative are 13 chapters about the “oracle bones” used by Shang dynasty diviners in the second millennium B.C. These chapters allow Hessler to explore Chinese history and some of the contentious contemporary debates about that history. Reviewers have hailed Oracle Bones as one of the most informative pieces of English-language writing on contemporary China: “Everyone in the Western world should read this book” (Publishers’ Weekly).

Hessler sets out his goal: to describe what is happening in China in a deep and measured way. He argues that the stories about the country reported in the West are typically superficial, “like splashes of foam on the surface of a massive sea change.”

The narrative of Hessler’s own experiences in China begins in May 1999, when the news reaches China that the country’s embassy in Belgrade has been bombed by American planes. At the time, Hessler is eating at a Uighur restaurant in Beijing, and some of the Chinese diners take out their anger on him, as the only visible American. An Uighur man whom Hessler identifies as “Polat” (a false name, to protect him) comes to Hessler’s aid, and soon the two of them are swept up in street protests. Thousands of Chinese civilians chant “Down with American imperialism” and “Don’t eat McDonald’s” (in Nanjing, Hessler reports, the protesters attacked a statue of Ronald McDonald since the city had no US embassy).



In the next chapter, Hessler introduces the “oracle bones.” These artifacts, found in the city of Anyang, are more than 3000 years old. Most of the bones are the flat lower parts of tortoise shells, inscribed with Chinese characters—the earliest known form of the Chinese language. These bones were heated until they cracked, and the patterns of the cracks used to predict future events. The bones are of enormous interest to scholars of Chinese and world history, the Chinese language and linguistics, and they have proven a site of contention over the way Chinese history is interpreted. One of China’s most important academics, Chen Mengjia, studied the bones. In 1957, he was condemned as a “Rightist,” which resulted in his suicide, during the Cultural Revolution. Hessler’s 13 chapters on the bones culminate in the author confronting one of the scholars who denounced Mengjia and pushing him to confess that he acted wrongly.

Meanwhile, the chapters on modern China focus on three students Hessler knows from teaching English in Sichuan during the 1990s (which he wrote about in 2001’s River Town). Hessler meets these students occasionally, and receives letters from them, some of which he reprints in the book: "My parents and relatives all wanted to introduce girlfriends to me," one of them writes, "So they introduced one and one, but the one and one passed me and didn't become my wife.”

Through these students, Hessler tells what he sees as the most important story of modern China: millions of restless young people, uprooted from rural communities that cannot support them, are in cut-throat competition for sweatshop jobs in boomtowns like Shenzhen.



Polat, Hessler’s Uighur rescuer, reappears too. Over regular beer-and-dumplings at a Beijing restaurant, Hessler learns that Polat is engaged in black-market activities (possibly adjacent to the terror networks of the oppressed Uighur people). Finally, Polat pays a Chinese “visa consultant” to help him secure a US visa under a false identity. Hessler visits him again in Washington, D.C., where he works delivering Asian takeout.

Alongside these recurring stories are one-off narratives detailing some of modern China’s most striking phenomena. Hessler visits the artificial boomtowns, “designed to flourish and then fade, like a flower that blooms only once,” speaks to survivors of the Cultural Revolution, follows a film production crew on the edge of the vast desert of the Tarim Basin, and joins Chinese “tourists” as they rent telescopes to peer into North Korea, the nearest they can get to going abroad: “The Chinese and I stared across the river for different reasons. I was looking in; they were looking out.”

Hessler’s experiences in China also provide him with a different perspective on the West. He describes Chinese people laughing as they watch the terrorist attacks of September 11th on TV. In the days after, the street markets are flooded with doctored DVDs of the footage and little plastic models of the Twin Towers collapsing. There was little malice in this, Hessler reports: “For most Chinese…the outside world was still abstract—something at the end of an imaginary arrow that began at the local factory.”



Hessler’s final chapter brings his two narrative strands together. Returning to the US, he visits two elderly Chinese academics—scholars of the oracle bones—in their Virginia retirement home.