Three weeks with these teenagers, however, showed me that I know nothing about China. I was amazed to find that my students had no idea what Disneyland, or Mickey Mouse, is. They were amazed by their American counterparts and the sort of I-own-the-world mentality that teens here have. While they were familiar with Adele and Taylor Swift and a select few other Western pop stars, most American music was as foreign to them as about 99% of Chinese culture is to me.
Hessler is an American journalist who first traveled to China as a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching English in a remote province. Later, he would find himself in Beijing, and Oracle Bones is his account of this period of time, with some references to an earlier book he wrote about his experiences as an English teacher in Fuling (River Town: Two Years on the Yangtzee).
The back cover description says,
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.
Oracle Bones chronicles modern-day life in China through the eyes and ears of a foreign journalist who befriends and listens to Chinese citizens from every walk of life. Hessler has a distinctive voice--never dry, always engaging and with a certain compassion for his subjects that shines through. These are not just people he encounters, but people he cares about.
I rather expected to walk away from this book knowing more about China's cultural identity...and I suspect that Hessler himself hoped to understand better after writing this book. We both remain unfulfilled in that regard, as it turns out that China, for all its differences from the United States, is much like our home country--it has no one defining cultural identity, and is a large, geographically-isolated nation comprised of people from many cultures and ethnicities.
Of particular interest to me was the recurring story of Polat (a pseudonym), a Uighur man living in Beijing who eventually found political asylum in the United States. My previous assumptions about China held that all Chinese people were of the same ethnic group, spread out over a large mass of land; this is not true. As in any large country, the population is comprised of many ethnic backgrounds, and not all of them necessarily wanted to be part of the "mother country" to begin with.
As I read Oracle Bones, I marked my place with a metal hooked bookmark given to me by one of my Chinese students in August. As I read about China's newish role in the world market, I would gaze at the bookmark, thinking how strange it is that I am, on a daily basis, surrounded by things made in China and yet I know so little of the people who made them.
The book is long, at 458 pages, but Hessler's style makes for a fast read. He orders the book chronologically through modern times (approximately 1999-2002), with inserted "Artifacts" that tell the story of the ancient oracle bones and the trouble China has had facing modernization versus their ancient past.
Should you read it? Yes, if you like reading about other cultures and enjoy travel narratives (which this book is in some ways). If you like authors like Bill Bryson and Tony Horwitz, you might enjoy Hessler, though he approaches his subject with less humor and more wry observation.
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