Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China

by Peter Hessler

Many listings required female applicants to be at least 1.6 meters (five feet two inches) tall and wuguan duanzheng—literally, “the five senses are regular.” The five senses are the ears, eyes, lips, nose, and tongue; essentially, the phrase means “beautiful.”

Roadside billboards advertised factory products, and most were aimed at wholesalers who purchased parts in bulk: alternators, air compressors, heat pumps. These weren’t objects that you bought for daily use, and they would have posed a challenge for even a good advertising agency. But the billboard design, like everything else, had been rushed, and often the ads consisted of nothing more than a photograph of some obscure part—a widget, a wonket—superimposed atop a sunny green field. Beneath the pastoral sprocket, there was a company name, often in awkward English: Professional Manufacture Various Hydraulic Machinery. Friendly Metal Working Lubricants. Good Luck Paper Products.

“You can often use mathematical methods and apply them directly to the study of language. I’ll give you one simple example. Consider animals—which animal has the closest relationship to human beings? You can probably narrow it down just by thinking: cow, horse, dog, pig. But which one is the most important to the way that people live? What do you think?” “Dog,” I say. Yin smiles; the eyebrows dance. “That’s your guess,” he says. “But how can you tell for certain? One method is to analyze writing through statistics and frequency studies. This is something that we did during the 1950s. We examined texts, both modern and ancient, to see which animal name appears the most frequently. For all periods, it was the same: the horse. So we concluded that the horse had the most important relationship to human society in China.”

Usually, I wrote only two or three articles a year, which was adequate to live simply in a country like China. The fee for a single published word in the New Yorker—more than two dollars—was enough to buy lunch in Beijing. With one long sentence, I could eat for a week.

Both China and the United States were geographically isolated, and their cultures were so powerful that it was hard for people to imagine other perspectives.

But each nation held together remarkably well. They encompassed a huge range of territory, ethnic groups, and languages, and no strictly military or political force could have achieved this for long. Instead, certain ideas brought people together.