Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China

by Peter Hessler

In 1949, after the Communists gained control of China, they invited the most charismatic leaders of the East Turkestan Republic to come to Beijing for meetings. The men left Xinjiang for their flight from Alma Alta, in the Soviet Union, and were never heard from again. Months later, after the People’s Liberation Army had gained control of Xinjiang, the Chinese announced that the plane had crashed. Many Uighurs believed that in fact their leaders had been executed, the victims of a secret agreement between Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin.

ON THE DAY of the fourth, the Wall Street Journal correspondents and I took turns going out to Tiananmen, to see if there were any commemorations. We missed the two most prominent demonstrations, each of which involved exactly one person and lasted only a few seconds.

“It’s always like that with politics,” Mr. Wang continued. “You always get fucked by your deputies. That’s politics. If you want to be president, you have to fuck up your competition. If you’re a mild, nice guy, then you’ll get moved out. They fuck you.” Wim and Kees jumped every time Mr. Wang used the word “fuck.” Mr. Wang’s English was excellent, but he was one of those foreigners who had learned the language without becoming aware of what happens when you use the word “fuck” three times in one paragraph. What happens is that Dutch people jump.

THE PAST IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION. IT LIES UNDER HOUSES, BENEATH highways, below building sites. Usually, it reappears by chance—somebody digs, something turns up. In the end, luck discovers most artifacts in China.

On July 23 of 1986, at eight o’clock in the morning, in the Sichuan province village of Sanxingdui, a group of peasants are digging clay in order to make bricks when they suddenly uncover a cache of beautiful jade pieces. Archaeologists step in, and over the course of that summer they excavate two huge burial pits that date to around 1200 B.C.—contemporary to the Shang. The archaeologists find eighty elephant tusks; more than four thousand cowry shells; artifacts of gold, jade, stone, amber, and pottery. Most impressive are the bronzes, whose technical quality and artistic style are clearly the work of an advanced civilization. The bronze figures include a tree that is more than thirteen feet in height, a statue of a man that stands over eight feet tall, and more than fifty bronze heads. The style of the bronze figures is completely unlike anything ever discovered in China—in fact, the next known example of human statuary doesn’t appear on the archaeological record for nearly a millennium. The Sanxingdui figures don’t look remotely like the artifacts of Anyang, which is seven hundred miles away. The pits in Sichuan contain no oracle bones or inscribed bronzes—not a single word of writing. Nobody has any idea who made this stuff.

Once, he remarks that the Chinese seem to produce bureaucracy as instinctively as the West creates heroes. But he emphasizes that this is not a value judgment; in fact, the need for Western-style heroism—decision, action—might naturally produce war. Historians have long theorized that Europeans educated in the Greek classics were particularly willing to rush headlong into the First World War.

My own role, I figured, was simply to ride the wave. All week, I told everybody that I was writing stories about the Olympics, and it was as if the city had suddenly been bathed in a soft light. Conversations were friendlier; people smiled more. When I requested interviews with government officials, they agreed, and then they actually answered questions. In China, I had learned to be discreet about notebooks, but now I flourished them shamelessly.

For anybody living in Beijing, the reverse seemed true: the Olympics, or at least the idea of the Olympics, was taking over the city. Tens of thousands of workers, students, and volunteers had been mobilized to clean up streets, and the government had embarked on an ambitious urban beautification program. It involved a lot of paint. They painted the highway guardrails white, and they dyed the grass in Tiananmen Square green. They splashed Old World colors onto Brave New World housing projects. Shortly before the commission arrived, many of the city’s proletarian apartment blocks seemed to march through a hot Italian palette: bitter greens, brilliant ochres, smooth pale blues. On Workers’ Stadium Road, a cluster of old Soviet-gray buildings emerged in burnt sienna. Down the street, the façade of a squat six-story apartment building was doused in sunny Venetian pink. Its other three sides were still gray, but you couldn’t see them from the road. The Chinese government, which had a penchant for statistics, announced that they had touched up 142 bridges, 5,560 buildings, and 11,505 walls, for a total surface area of 26 million square meters. They had painted something bigger than New Jersey.

Beijing was one of the most polluted capitals in the world, but even the air could be cleaned, at least for the short term. A friend of mine worked in an office building whose management distributed a cheerful notice: Since the Olympic Committee’s delegation will visit Beijing next week, some buildings around the Third Ring Road have been ordered to stop heating in order to reduce the smoke and dust. Therefore, please wear heavier clothes when you are in your office next week!

“You can smoke in the car if you want,” I said. “Smoking makes the car smell bad,” he said. It was the first time I had ever heard a Chinese cabbie say that. We pulled over near a coal refinery and Driver Yang pissed in the dust while smoking a Derby cigarette. He seemed a little calmer after that.

I HAD ALWAYS been bad at daily journalism. I worked slowly; I dreaded deadlines; I failed to cultivate contacts. I knew only three Wang Weis. I quoted everybody that a good journalist doesn’t quote: cabbies, waitresses, friends. I spent a lot of time in restaurants. I avoided press conferences. I loathed talking on the telephone—a crippling neurosis for a news reporter. In particular, I hated staying up late at night to call American academics so they could give me a quote about what was happening in China. I already knew what was happening: normal people were asleep.

Magazine work was a better fit. Stories were longer; you could write in the first-person voice; editors didn’t care so much about news. They paid by the word, which was a lot better than the flat rate for newspaper freelancers. Magazines covered expenses. Because they moved slower, it was possible to research stories without ever using a telephone. For the past twenty years, China’s economic reforms have resulted in dramatic changes…. It felt as ritualized as an oracle bone inscription: the same well-worn phrases, the same letters and documents. The New Yorker had never posted a full-time correspondent in the People’s Republic, so I created an official New Yorker bureau, which happened to be located in the same place as the Boston Globe, which happened to be located in the same place as the Wall Street Journal. The paper piled up, but nobody at the Foreign Ministry seemed to care. Everything proceeded smoothly until we reached the stage of translation. The Foreign Ministry announced that the magazine’s Chinese name would be Niu Yue Ren, which translates directly as “New York Person.” My name cards would read: New York Person Peter Hessler Every time I showed it to a Chinese friend, he burst out laughing. In Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other Chinese-speaking communities in the United States, the magazine was already called Niu Yue Ke. That was a phonetic transcription, pronounced “neo-you-ay-kuh”; it wouldn’t cut it in Brooklyn but sounded a hell of a lot better than “New York P...

The Chinese-language station used Fox footage of New York and Washington, D.C., which was almost as disorienting as the Hollywood cut-ins. The Fox logo appeared in the corner, and the images were the same as the ones that Americans watched, but here the shots were joined by the anti-American commentary in Chinese. I remembered Willy’s comment about the Chinese government being unable to express the way that it really felt. That was politics, but this was business; the media gave the people what they wanted. News Corp. used the same footage to sell patriotism in America and in China, and in both places the people bought it.

Many customers were lawyers working late; they came down, bleary-eyed, fumbling with wallets and purses. None of them looked at us twice. It would have been a lot for them to process if they had known all the baggage that accompanied their General Tao Chicken. That name was a misspelling of General Tso, or Zuo Tongtang, the brilliant and ruthless Qing general who had expanded the Chinese empire. Under Zuo’s command, in 1884, Xinjiang had become a Chinese province; and now Uighurs were delivering his namesake chicken in the American capital. General Tso and Colonel Sanders: great chicken imperialists. Don’t eat Kentucky, Don’t eat Xinjiang.

There are rumors that the museum actually profited from the Cultural Revolution, when many intellectuals and wealthy people lost their belongings. I ask the curator about this, and he takes the question in stride. “I was also criticized,” he says. “We were just concerned with survival.” He tells a story about a “struggle session” in which the curator and other museum staff were lifted to a height and then dropped onto the marble floor. Ma says that he was bruised but intact; another colleague landed on his head and died. The tale is short but effective: I’m not going to ask any more questions about whether the Cultural Revolution was good for the Shanghai Museum.

“What is reality?” Galambos asks, during one of our conversations in Beijing. “It’s this huge amount of data. There’s this philosopher who had a lot of influence on me, Ernst Cassirer. He wrote this book called Language and Myth. Basically, his idea is that language itself creates reality. For example, in order to have words like nouns, you have to have concepts. When you form concepts, that’s when you’re creating stuff—it’s a creative process. You pick out certain things from the environment, and you give them labels, and you create this reality around you. When you’re a kid, you’re not just learning how to speak; you’re learning how to perceive a reality. It’s almost like a computer language, an internal code that makes you able to think. “From a linguistic point of view, this is a very old concept, and a lot of people nowadays don’t believe it. But I think it’s probably to some degree true. Perhaps if you don’t have a word for a certain feeling, or a certain color of the sky, then you don’t notice it. It doesn’t stick out from the background. That’s what words do: they make things stick out. Otherwise, it might just be a big haze of data. In a computer language, you’d call it uninterpreted data. So a language is your browser.”