Divining China's Future From Its Past

Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler

If you're familiar with my previous blog effort (Summer '04 - remember when?) you know that I went to China. The trip to China got me very interested in China, because, frankly, I knew almost nothing about it. I remembered learning a little bit about it in freshman and sophmore year world history courses but I knew almost nothing about the country's absolutely fascinating modern history.

So, I've started reading a lot about China. When I am not reading fiction, I am probably reading non-fiction about China. I don't know why. I may never live there. I feel like I'm the equivalent of the 18th/19th century Brit who just couldn't get enough American travelogues, deToqueville, etc. "My goodness, as a consequence of democracy their manners are frightfully informal! Ahem! More Tea!" It's armchair sociology - trying to match up current behaviors and trends to historic or cultural origins. With China, everyone has a field day doing this, because China is really just entering the modern era, like, right now and it's so compelling to trace a theme of China's history - like, say, geographic isolation- and ascribe all your modern conclusions to it.

Peter Hessler's books (and articles in the New Yorker) are a fantastic introduction to China and to the frameworks through which we are trying to learn and understand China. He goes one better than that, though, by including, in all of his books, stories about his Chinese friends and students. So, in addition to the constructed narratives Westerners create to try to understand China, we get their stories. Rivertown, his first work, is a memoir about his time in the Peace Corps teaching English in a small city on the Yangtze. It's great, because as Hessler learns and acculturates himself, you, another ignorant laowei, journey with him and learn bit by bit.

Oracle Bones is just fantastic too. It combines three or four stories, really: the story of the discovery and excavation of the Shang dynasty Oracle Bones, the life of a preeminent scholar who wrote the groundbreaking study, stories of a Uighur immigrant to the US, and the narratives of Hessler's old students, now making lives for themselves in China's bustling and booming cities.

That was a dumb paragraph. But, I am going to try to make it less dumb. Also, in general, these post will probably be dumb for a while until I get in the habit of writing every day.

They won't let me insert another picture so I am going to make a new post.