Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present

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.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Hessler's writing is both lively and clear, and in this book, he successfully combines his personal experience (as a former teacher and as a journalist in Beijing) with a somewhat more detached observation of historical events.

I found a great deal to relate to here, as well. First, he taught English in a Chinese university, and a couple of decades earlier I taught English, also in the Peace Corps, at a Korean university. Second, while my later work took me to Singapore, I became a student of China and the Chinese language, and I found the information about the oracle bones to be fascinating. (I had, of course, heard about the oracle bones, but the book provides more background on the bones themselves and the researchers who worked with them). Third, while working for the World Bank I also was in China at the time of the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, so Hessler's discussion of the reaction of his contacts in China at that time was interesting. (We were advised to keep a low profile at that time, which we did.) Fourth, Hessler's friendship with the Uighur man he calls “Polat” also struck me because of the time I spent in the '90s in Kazakhstan, a country that neighbors on China's Xinjiang region. Polat, after he moves to the US, ends up living in my old neighborhood just north of Chinatown in DC, yet another detail to which I could relate.

I bought this book shortly after it came out in 2006, but I've only now taken it off the shelf to read. Better late than never. Terrific book.

Parts of this book I loved and parts I wasn't interested in at all. Hessler wanders all over the place, talking to people in China, average people, oddball people. Hessler showed me things about China I'd never thought existed, including ethnic minorities and the slow economic changes occurring.