BOOK REVIEW From River City to Overnight City Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present by Peter
Hessler
Reviewed by Fraser Newham
In China just about every foreigner with a backpack tries traveling over the
Lunar New Year holiday at least once. Many organizations shut down for weeks -
and so what better way to kill a few days than a leisurely train ride, leaving
the harsh northern winter for the pleasant climes of the country's subtropical
south? Very few try it twice.
In the days leading up to Spring Festival, China's rail network plays host to
the largest voluntary migration in the world, as the majority of the country's
150 million migrant laborers flood station
booking halls, jostling for standing-room-only tickets on the 36-hour
Beijing-Hefei Express. Many are laden with gifts for family, sharing the fruits
of a successful year; no one wants to go home empty-handed, so every year in
January the crime rate goes through the roof.
Most are ultimately heading for towns even the Chinese haven't heard of. One
such town is Fuling, the obscure Yangtze River port where Peter Hessler spent
two years teaching English at the local
teacher-training college, an experience he recounted in River Town, the
2001 debut that won him the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize.
Oracle Bones serves as a kind of sequel; returning to China to join the
Wall Street Journal in May 1999, Hessler picks up where he left off. Some of
his ex-students have disappeared into the countryside of upcountry Sichuan, to
teach in the desperately underfunded schools of one of the poorest regions of
China; but others (including some of the more memorable individuals from River
Town) have headed for the bright lights of the east coast, joining
what, as Hessler reports, some sociologists are hailing as the largest
voluntary migration in human history.
He follows two of his ex-students, Nancy and the grandly styled William
Jefferson Foster, to Zhejiang province; bribing a party official at Fuling
Teachers' College to release their residency documents, the pair find work
teaching at a shady private school. Another student named Nancy heads for
Shenzhen; she abandons teaching altogether, taking work in the office of an
export factory in one of the satellite towns outside the formal city limits.
Hessler regularly checks up on her progress as she moves from job to job,
popping in during regular the visa runs to Hong Kong demanded by his own gray
working situation.
Like his former students, Hessler too has moved to the big city. He is now
living in Beijing, and during the three years covered in the book we get to see
his writing career take off. The publication of River Town occurs on
page 226; by the end he is Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker magazine.
In the late 30s his predecessor at The New Yorker, Emily Hahn, used to regale
readers with stories of her opium smoking and love affairs. For his part,
Hessler spends evenings in the rakish Beijing suburb of Yabaolu, spotting North
Koreans with a Uighur named Polat, a teacher turned trader who in 1985 briefly
saw the inside of a political prison.
He also spends time with various archeologists, getting to grips with the
oracle bones of the title (bones inscribed with the earliest known Chinese
characters, used during the Shang Dynasty for purposes of divination), and
researching the tragic political suicide of researcher Chen Mengjia, a
diverting sub-plot and quasi-detective hunt that all comes together at the end.
By this time Polat has jumped ship to the United States, purchasing forged
documents to secure a business visa, before claiming political asylum on
arrival.
Expatriates barely get a look in. Most, though, will enjoy reading it -
particularly those who lived in China during the period in question. He
describes well the surreal atmosphere in the months following September 11,
2001, the occasion of the International Olympic Committee's visit to Beijing
and the controversy surrounding the midair collision of a Chinese fighter jet
and US spy plane over the South China Sea in April 2001.
As in Rachel Dewoskin's recent memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing, the
protests following the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in May 1999
make a particular impression. Hessler is in Nanjing when it happens; at first
he walks with the mob, but as the mood darkens he has to withdraw. For a new
generation of China hands, the protests vividly underlined something their
interwar predecessors knew only too well - the ultimate fragility of the
foreign resident's position in his or her adopted home. "Now I had to learn a
new body language," Hessler writes of the feeling on the streets at that time.
"I kept my head down and I smiled and I tried to look friendly."
In these situations, even the local noodle shop becomes a diplomatic stage;
presented with an honest-to-God American (and fluent Mandarin speaker to boot),
genuinely hurt locals line up to make the same points again and again. But
while Hessler documents the kind of mass hysteria that in China these sorts of
events can produce, his real strength is his ability to bring out the diversity
of the country and its people. Not for Hessler the obvious pockets of
Westernization showcased in the glossy newsmagazines. He doesn't give us the
sexy Anglophone girls, the scene from IKEA or the salsa bars.
Instead, he tries to get under the skin of something altogether more
interesting. He might just be the only Western writer ever to squeeze literary
effect from the mangled English produced by his ex-students - carefully
deployed, these extracts offer windows into the dreams and pressure points of
the upcountry soul. Best of the lot is William Jefferson Foster: his English is
hot, crude and spiky like Sichuan beef stew.
In particular, Hessler presents an image of Shenzhen like nothing you've seen
before (unless of course you read Hessler's original article for The New
Yorker). Where Western guidebooks gloss over the town in a headlong charge for
the Hong Kong border, pausing only to contrast the steep hotel prices with the
lack of anything meaningful to do, Hessler offers us the view that originates
from the red earth of rural Sichuan; and in his hands the border boom town is
reborn as the city on the hill.
"Sometimes they compared its rising buildings to bamboo shoots after a good
rain," he says, recalling conversations with ex-students. "Any young person
from Sichuan had grown up hearing about the Overnight City, whose tales often
had the ring of legend - the migrant who became a millionaire, the young
secretary who rose to the top of a trading company."
Hessler's subjects are all university graduates - in the case of the Fuling
kids, onetime big fish in one of China's thousands of small ponds; and like the
Shang Dynasty oracle bones each illuminates only part of a bigger picture. But
each has a vital story to tell, partial or not - Hessler has produced an
engaging and important study of a society in motion, as 20% of the world heads
for the train to China's city on the hill.
Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present by Peter
Hessler. US publisher: Harper Collins (April 2006). ISBN: 0060826584. Hardback,
512 pages, price: US$26.95. Published in the UK by John Murray, 20 pounds.
Fraser Newham is a freelance writer and China specialist. He is based in
Scotland and Shanghai. His website is www.frasernewhamfreelancing.com.
teacher-training college, an experience he recounted in River Town, the
2001 debut that won him the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize.
