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Usually ships in 1 business days | | | Starred Review. Hessler, who first wrote about China in his 2001 bestseller, River Town, a portrait of his Peace Corps years in Fuling, continues his conflicted affair with that complex country in a second book that reflects the maturity of time and experience. Having lived in China for a decade now, fluent in Mandarin and working as a correspondent in Beijing, Hessler displays impressive knowledge, research and personal encounters as he brings the country's peoples, foibles and history into sharp focus. He frames his narrative with short chapters about Chinese artifacts: the underground city being excavated at Anyang; the oracle bones of the title ("inscriptions on shell and bone" considered the earliest known writing in East Asia); and he pays particular attention to how language affects culture, often using Chinese characters and symbols to make a point.A talented writer and journalist, Hessler has courageâhe's undercover at the Falun Gong demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and in the middle of anti-American protests in Nanjing after the Chinese embassy bombings in Belgradeâand a sense of humor (the Nanjing rioters attack a statue of Ronald McDonald since Nanjing has no embassies). The tales of his Fuling students' adventures in the new China's boom towns; the Uighur trader, an ethnic minority from China's western border, who gets asylum after entering the U.S. with jiade (false) documents; the oracle bones scholar Chen Mengjia, who committed suicide during the Cultural Revolutionâall add a seductive element of human interest.There's little information available in China, we learn, but Hessler gets the stories that no one talks about and delivers them in a personal study that informs, entertains and mesmerizes. Everyone in the Western world should read this book. (May)
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 A Journey Through Today's China Aug 22, 2008
Oracle Bones is a tale of one Mandarin-speaking American's adventures in modern-day China. From befriending a Uyghur trader in Beijing that immigrated to the United States to staying in touch with his former students from Fuling (introduced in Hessler's book River Town) this book showcases China in a way that few foreigners get to understand. Hessler is a strong storyteller and writer which is what kept me coming back to the book day after day to continue his journey. While the underlying theme seemed to be the Chinese language and its origins and changes over the turbulent Mao years, the book contains some great chapters on Beijing's preparation for the IOC visit (of particular interest now that the 2008 Summer Games are successfully unfolding) to the history of the Kuomintang and its exile to Taiwan. All in all, this book is worthy of its awards and should be read by anyone with an interest in China's past and present.
great book Jul 19, 2008
Like Peter Hessler's other book, this is a great book about China. I have lived in and visited China many times and always find a lot that I can identify with in his books.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
A pleasant miscellany of Chinese scenes Mar 11, 2008
I enjoyed Hessler's book very much. I must admit that I'd never heard of him before, and bought the book because it was one of the few titles on China available on the Amazon Kindle in November of last year. As a student of China with a great interest in the oracle bones of the book's title I found the sections on the great oracle bones scholar Chen Meng Jia very engaging, and in fact bought the textbook of Jia Gu Wen that he mentioned (my Chinese isn't up to reading it yet, but in a few years perhaps!).
The author's interaction with an Uyghur merchant was also very enlightening, especially considering how the conflict between the Uyghurs and Han Chinese has been heating up quite a bit of late.
Overall I found the book both enjoyable to read and useful to a student of modern China. His connections with people all over China made me feel like I am more connected to the real China of today.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
A Personal Tour of China Mar 03, 2008
In Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler tells the story of his time in China as a teacher of English and a journalist. The timeline of his tales is from May of 1999 through June of 2002. Along the way, he touches on some of the big events of the period from his Chinese perch--the captured American spy plane, crackdowns on the Falun Gong, the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, the awarding of the Olympic Games to China and, of course, 9/11. All in all, it was an interesting time to be an American observer in China and Hessler makes the most of it.
The really fascinating parts of this book, however, are not the big events but his stories of the "unimportant" people he met while there. He keeps in touch with many of his former students and their struggles are eye-opening. Emily, who gets an office job and tries to make her way as a single woman. Willy, who struggles to be a successful teacher, make a family life for himself and keep notebooks on his never-ending study of English. And then there's Hessler's friend Polat, the Uighur emigre to the U.S., through whom we get not only a glimpse of what it means to be a minority in China but also what it is like to be new to the United States, trying to work and get citizenship.
Of course, it's not enough to have good material. A writer also has to make good use of it and Hessler is a skillful writer. His prose is excellent, making this a great read. His clever use of the "artifact" chapters allows him to reach from his personal stories deep into Chinese history. The oracle bones not only make a nice archeological artifact through which to look into the far past but their study also gives Hessler an opportunity to look closely at China's more recent past, mainly through the story of Chen Mengjia, a scholar at times revered and reviled as the politics around him changed.
All in all, this is a great, up-close look at modern China through the eyes of real people that has tendrils reaching far back into history. Anyone with an interest in China and the Chinese would be foolish to pass this one up.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 More of today than yesterday in these Chinese bones Dec 31, 2007
In Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler paints pictures of around 20 different aspects of China, typically answering "how" rather than "why" questions. He sketches recent encounters with the village police and the film director Jiang Wen in vignettes on censorship and democracy, whilst reflections on the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and the visit of George Bush to Beijing in 2002 look at how China and the USA have interacted politically in recent years. He also describes the perverse destruction of an old hutong courtyard house in Beijing, reactions to the upcoming Olympic Games and the Taiwanese elections.
In River Town, Hessler's first book, there is an immediacy, which I know successfully takes many newcomers to China - including myself - along with its flow. Now, as a features reporter in Beijing, he tries to delve deeper, but occasionally the script moves little beyond travelogue. Gosh, do I know it is difficult to burrow; I was a non-Chinese speaking business researcher in Shanghai for a year, and since returning to London, I have tried - often in vain - to characterise the personal attitudes and developments in the country for my friends. Hessler has the advantages of good Mandarin, plenty of time and a host of contacts with his ex-Fuling students.
This book is a canvas looking at the lives or incidents in the lives of some of China's "average" people; it cannot do more than give snapshots; it is not an academic study, but a story map of some of Hessler's travels around China. On the one hand, this makes for easy reading. On the other, the hopscotch of reminiscences leaves gaps, some rather big, for example, there is quite insufficient comment of how the Chinese personally interact among themselves - whether as friends or family, Party or non-Party members, men or women. But it is also important to bear in mind that the country holds a fifth of the world in population terms (the USA is a mere 5%), and has a long history - much of it peaceful, compared to Britain, though recently punctured on several occasions by chaos and famine - and that in one book it is impossible to describe more than a few surface ripples of today's extraordinary social and economic changes.
These written photos, some of friends, some of mere acquaintances, are held together - I think reasonably successfully by Hessler's own investigations into the life and death of Chen Mengjia, the oracle bones' scholar. These archaeological finds are essentially ancient turtle shells carrying writing. They are part of China's roots. These short chapters in the book, which are called "artefacts" can be heavy going; but they introduced me to the Shang dynasty, to a superficial understanding of some of the origins of Han China around the city of Anyang in Henan province in the north, and to Sanxingdui in Sichuan province (in the west), the home of another ancient culture. They also lead into a discussion on the nature of Chinese characters/writing, and the failure of Mao's nerve to introduce a real Latin alphabet in the early 1950s.
But in addition, Hessler revisits the feature articles he wrote for various US publications in the early part of this decade as well as his letters and phone calls from former students - Emily in Shenzhen, and William Jefferson Foster in Wenzhou, as well as his relationship with Polat, a Xinjiang intellectual and small time Beijing businessman. He describes Emily as one of his most motivated students, but once her studies were completed, she leaves to become a secretary in Shenzhen, aptly called the overnight city due to the speed of its construction since the early 1980s. For me, the chapters on her years there are among the most fascinating. Jefferson migrates from Fuling in Sichuan, to become a teacher in a secondary school near Wenzhou, to the south of Shanghai; the city produces some 60-70% of the world's cigarette lighters. The school is private and has to compete with a local state school: in one episode, Willy has to contend with cheating at exam time to help his pupils pass with flying colours and gain a financial bonus.
One underlying and nearly hidden theme of the book is the emotional emptiness facing at least some young Chinese, far from home - at one point Emily speaks of normal life in Shenzhen being "bleak and petty - a steady accumulation of possessions." Though not justifying such a void, the material culture that dominates China should not be surprising - over the last 100 years many have died from hunger and/or poverty. And it is a point some acquaintances echo - "Ordinary Chinese could make a simple list of what they do in an evening - my parents: dinner, TV, bed; my cousin: dinner, TV/ movie, internet, bed; my roommate: bread/ instant noodles, DVD, internet, bed," a friend once told me. A second theme is the virtually incomprehensible turmoil (both to young Chinese and foreigners) of the Cultural Revolution, and the way personal revelations are hidden under years of denial, and even shame - making it harder, I believe, for individuals to come to terms with their past.
As a small point, it should be noted that [...] calls this book A Journey between China's past and present; my version calls it - I believe wrongly - A Journey between China and the West. This may be because I bought it in the UK and for me, there are rather irrelevant chapters on Polat's move to the USA, and his life there.
Roger Manser (London,UK)
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