Comments on "Oracle Bones"

I ran into Hessler's narration on his teaching experience in Fuling two years ago. It was just an excerpt of his book in Chinese, translated by an unknown writer, published in a magazine named BOOK TOWN that cater to the taste of new intellectuals in China by imitating the style and design of NEW YORKER. I read it all through, non-stopped, which is rare for my reading style, and found myself somewhat lost in the delicacy and poetic nature of his writing. Also did I feel a sense of nostalgia and sincere sadness, flowing onwards like ripples of a silent brook, in no way exaggerating and overdue like most of the Westerner do when they touch on a topic of China. In a sensitive language like Chinese, this sadness is aesthetically expanded to an approportion that you just can't neglect. So I managed to buy the book RIVER TOWN and recommended it to many of my foreign friends. One of them, who is also an English teacher in China, kept it for the longest period of time and lent it to many friends of his, Chinese and Westerner alike. The book was terribly worn out the moment he gave it back to me. He told me that all of his Chinese friends love the book as much as I do, while his Western friends think it's nothing more than another bland story given in drab narration.
" Why would you think that way? I think it's marevelously composed." I asked.
He squinted back at me. "Well, not surprising, you're a Chinese."
"So what?"
"Well, no offense. For we who have been living long enough in China and know the land, his' just another normal story coming back to live. It might be appealing to those foreigners who always remain foreign to China, but not to us. We live this life day by day."He said with a pride faintly lingered by his lip.
I certainly was not that easily offended. And I doubted whether he really knows the land as he and his friends proudly proclaimed. Yet his words reminded me of the different perspectives between peoples of different cultures. Is it really because of his uncondescending sympathy that smooths out the reading process for his Chinese reader, turning it into an enjoyable journey, while in the eyes of Americans, his stories still unnecessarily contain familiar traces of arrogance and cultural bias against China?

In his new book "Oracle Bones: A Journey through Time in China", another New York Times Bestseller and National Book Award Finalist, Hessler makes an insightful observation:

"When I first lived in China, I was mostly struck by differences, but over time the similarities became more obvious. Americans and Chinese shared a number of characteristics: they were pragmatic and informal, and they had an easy sense of humor..... 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."

He goes on by commenting how both countries "coped so badly with failure":

"When things went wrong, people were startled by the chaos.....For cultures accustomed to controlling and organizing their world, it was deeply traumatic. And it was probably natural that in extreme crisis, the Americans took steps that undermined democracy and free dom, just as the Chinese had turned against their own history and culture."

Somebody else has picked this part out in her blog as her favorite part in the book. It surely can serve as a manifestation of equivalency, rationally as well as emotionally. Yet why do we care so much about being treated as equivalent? Why is that we feel reassured of our dignity everytime when a Westerner tell us that "we are the same"? Isn't that a fairly simple truth?

So contrary to those reiteration of big themes, I am more fascinated, as I always have been, by the daily details he painstakingly drafted down on his notebooks. God, he's so good at dealing with plain facts! To be honest, I've never felt drawn to non-fiction writing of any kind before, but Hessler's two works cast new light on this special writing styles. Facts can be arranged in such a dexterous way to suggest anything you want to suggest, opening up a brand new horizon to many possibilities of interpretation. The narrator's self is still present, but only seems to function in the least active sense; he's just there to record what happened, refrained from any aggressive intention of commenting. Yet what kind of facts he is presenting! And with what subtlety are all the readers unconciously guided by his hidden intentions!

Not in the bad way though. Rather, I consider this reconstruction of "the Chinese daily life through a Western eye" as quite truthful, and the most thrilling elements this reading journey can provide, as our daily life space is suddenly transformed into something artistically appealing, if not ridiculous. In the chapter "Sand", he tells in such a delicate way his experience of being interrogated by a local police that it even gives out the scent of Kafka's masterpiece "Castle".

And there are other moments of sudden revelation, most of which happened when his mind hops from a scene of reality to his past impression of words and letters:

"That link between generations was another type of virtual archaeology：the young men in Anyang, reading the earth cores; and the old exile in Taipei, reading the faxed maps and remembering the fields that he had abandoned so long ago."

"When you look at a photograph of a big family in the 1920s, and see the Qing-style gowns and the Western suits, the bright young faces and the proud old parents, you wonder what the hell happened to all that time and talent. 梦."

Sometimes he can be mildly sarcastic, which shows more about his wit than his conceit:

"In a country where so much was jiade-- knockoff brands, shoddy restorations of ancient structures, fresh paint on the facades of old buildings-- the film sets were real. Sometimes they lasted longer than the movies themselves."

He's extremely sensitive to characters and words, and is good at exploring connections among those randomly chosen events. He views things from all different perspectives. In other words, his viewpoint is shifting, switching from time to time, yet with good reason especially when one deals with a culture as self-assured as Chinese. By so doing, he's capable of breaking the stereotypes of understanding, uttering new idea to trite topics.

"That was true for all of them --- I never met a survivor whose response seemed foreign. The historical events were unimaginable, as if they had come from another world, but the people's reactions were perfectly understandable. Recovery, in all its varied forms, is simply a human instinct."

"Writing could obscure the truth and trap the living, and it could destroy as well as create. But the search for meaning had a dignity that transcended all of the flaws."

The above can count as one of the best comment I've ever heard on an individual suffering of Cultural Revolution. And it's from an American. Maybe it's not fair by mentioning the speaker's nationality, for it's not in anyway indicated in the words; He's not commenting this as an outsider. Rather, he's standing with the people that he writes about. He questions them, and questions himself. He comforts them, and he comforts himself. Maybe, it is by doing the former, that enables him to do the latter.