Oracle Bones

by Peter Hessler

  He translated and the young man’s face fell. There was a torrent of Turkish and then Polat said, “My friend is interested because he is a Jew.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know there were Jews in Azerbaijan.”

  “There aren’t very many,” Polat said, and a moment later he raised his glass again.

  POLAT WAS THE first person who made me think about the sheer size and range of China. When you compared the Uighurs and the Han Chinese, they seemed a world apart in every respect: geography, culture, language, history. They were like antipodes contained within the borders of a single country.

  Xinjiang lies directly north of Tibet, and it’s nearly as remote and forbidding. It constitutes one-sixth of China’s land mass—as much territory as the states of Alaska and New York combined—and the geography includes some of the highest mountains and most expansive deserts in the world. Ancient history is uncertain; the earliest residents were nomadic tribes who didn’t leave written records. Occasionally, the early Chinese dynasties established military garrisons, but the landscape was incompatible with Chinese agriculture and the emperors didn’t control the area with much consistency. It wasn’t until the ninth century that the ancestors of today’s Uighurs began to settle there in significant numbers. Even then, they were usually based in the oases, leaving large stretches of mountains and deserts to the nomads.

  The Uighurs were often middlemen. They taught the Mongols to write using the Uighur alphabet (at an earlier stage, the Uighurs had used a runic script), and they served as intermediaries between the court of Genghis Khan and other Central Asian powers. Uighur religion was pragmatic, often shifting when some new military force arose: at various times, the Uighurs believed in shamanism, Manichaeanism, Nestorian Christianity, and Buddhism. In the tenth century, they began to convert to Islam, and after that, for a period of nearly a millennium, they stopped using the word “Uighur” to describe themselves. Their writing changed as well, to the Arabic script.

  Whereas the Chinese prided themselves on continuity, many basic characteristics of the Uighurs were fluid—their name, their writing, their religion, their political allegiances. But they always seemed capable of surviving on the margins. That quality was still evident in modern times, when Uighurs did business in every Chinese city. Often, they opened restaurants or sold Xinjiang produce, such as raisins and melons, and they dominated the black market for currency. In China, it was rare for members of a minority group to establish themselves in predominately Han economies. Some of the Yabaolu traders used to tell me a popular Uighur saying: When the Americans landed on the moon, they found a Uighur there, doing business.

  Polat and I had a second-language friendship—we communicated entirely in Chinese. I couldn’t understand the groups of Uighurs who patronized the restaurant, but their body language was eloquent. They were bigger than the Chinese, and they moved with a swagger. They were great handshakers—a rarity in China. If a woman came to the table, the Uighurs stood up. They refused to touch pork. They drank heavily—that particular Islamic restriction wasn’t deep-rooted. They had long sunbrowned noses and a hard gaze, and they carried themselves with a physical confidence that made the Chinese nervous. The few Chinese who ate at the Uighur restaurant minded their own business, and I did the same if Polat wasn’t around. In particular, there was one large Uighur trader with a heavy brow who intimated a capacity for violence that I did not want to test. Once, he told me that he had just closed a big deal, selling half a million Tianjin-made condoms to an Uzbek. As far as I was concerned, that sounded as impressive as the Uighur on the moon. Another evening, the heavy-browed man stayed late in the restaurant, drinking vodka with a Uighur friend. As the alcohol disappeared, the two men took turns burning holes into their own forearms with cigarettes. Afterward, whenever they met, they would shake hands and each would touch the other’s scarred wrist, smiling at the memory of whatever shared demons had brought them together that night.

  THE MODERN PERIOD had been hard on the Uighurs. In the eighteenth century, the Qing dynasty sent armies westward, hoping to formally incorporate the territory into the empire. Resistance was fierce, but in 1884 the Qing formally annexed the region and renamed it Xinjiang (New Frontier). After the Qing fell, in 1911, Xinjiang became one of many parts of the empire that threatened to slip away. In the 1920s, some Turkic residents began to push for independence, describing themselves as “Uighur”—a name that hadn’t been used for almost a millennium. In 1944, with the Kuomintang government weakened by the Japanese invasion and the struggle against the Communists, a group of Uighurs, Kazaks, and White Russians in northern Xinjiang attacked and defeated the local Chinese garrison. The rebels declared the foundation of a multiethnic state called the East Turkestan Republic.

  For the next five years, the East Turkestan Republic functioned essentially as an independent country, with close links to the USSR. But the Soviets never gave open support, and they probably saw the new republic as a bargaining chip for future negotiations with whoever happened to win the Chinese civil war. That was the risk of surviving on the margins: powerful neighbors always had a use for pawns. 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.

  Since then, Xinjiang had remained firmly under Chinese control. After the 1980s, when new oil and gas reserves were discovered in the region, Han Chinese migration increased dramatically. Much of the Uighur unrest came from a fear that they were becoming outsiders in their own homeland. Throughout the 1990s, there was periodic violence: bombed buses, derailed trains. People assumed that the attacks were the work of Uighurs resentful of Chinese rule, but no organizations claimed responsibility. The violence, like so much else in Xinjiang, remained a mystery.

  In Yabaolu, I watched the traders—the Central Asians, the Middle Easterners, the ones I couldn’t identify—and wondered how many belonged to some obscure ethnic group that had slipped in and out of the histories of great nations. Often, the Uighurs’ fate hadn’t been shaped by language, culture, or tradition; the whim of great foreign leaders mattered much more. Mongolia had recently become independent, a path that probably would have been open to Xinjiang if it had originally fallen under the control of the USSR instead of the People’s Republic of China. In the Great Game of Central Asia, the Uighurs were one of the losers.

  After I came to know Polat well, he told me more about his family background. During the mid-1940s, his father had joined the army of the East Turkestan Republic. Like many of his fellow soldiers, Polat’s father had the image of a rifle tattooed onto his left shoulder. That had been a dangerous mark to carry into the Cultural Revolution, and by the end of that period the man was a cripple. Polat said that he wished he could write about this in a true history of the Uighurs. He also wanted to write about his own personal experiences, which included a prison term in 1985 for protesting against Chinese rule. He told me that that was why he could no longer teach in Xinjiang; he had left the province because of political pressure. He also said that he had saved forty thousand dollars, and he swore that sometime soon, when the money and the time were right, he was going to find a way to flee to America.

  I TRIED TO write my travel article about Nanjing but finally gave up. I swallowed the expenses, attributing the failure to bad timing, and then I turned to other projects. By summer, the embassy bombing already seemed like a distant memory. Occasionally, Chinese people brought it up in conversation, but they rarely pushed the topic. When they did, they tended to be more disappointed than angry, because their government had accepted the American apology and a financial settle
ment for the damage to the embassy in Belgrade. I almost never met a Chinese who believed that the attack had been accidental.

  While clipping in the bureau, I would at times come across a follow-up story. In July, George Tenet, the director of the CIA, testified before Congress. He acknowledged that, of the nine hundred sites targeted by NATO’s bombing campaign, only one had been researched and selected solely by the CIA: the Chinese embassy. Tenet emphasized that it had been mistaken because of the outdated map.

  Three months later, the Observer, a London newspaper, published an investigative article claiming that in fact the bombing had been intentional. The story was based on interviews with three NATO officers stationed in Europe, all of whom spoke to the newspaper on the condition of anonymity. They alleged that American military officials had deliberately targeted the Chinese embassy because it had been secretly assisting Milosevic. The newspaper claimed that after an earlier NATO bombing had destroyed the Serbs’ radio transmitter, the Chinese allowed their compound to be used as a backup, broadcasting military commands to Kosovo.

  The Observer speculated that the Chinese might have helped Milosevic in exchange for access to the wreckage of a Stealth fighter, which had been shot down earlier. The downed American plane would have had great value to Chinese intelligence. In any case, there had been a history of cooperation between the militaries of the Chinese and the Serbs. And it was also true that the NATO bombing had seemed quite precise for an accident. All three bombs struck the southern end of the Chinese embassy, where the defense attaché’s office and the intelligence center happened to be located. The rest of the compound was untouched; casualties were remarkably low. Like many other foreign publications, the Observer claimed that two of the three dead Chinese “journalists” had in fact been intelligence officers, a common role in the state-run media.

  But that was it—no named sources, no proof. NATO denied the allegations, and few American newspapers picked up the story. In the bureau, I clipped a copy and filed it away:

  U.S.-CHINA—EMBASSY BOMBING

  U.S.-CHINA—EXCHANGES

  U.S.-CHINA—RELATIONS

  U.S.-CHINA—SCANDAL

  U.S.-CHINA—SUMMIT

  U.S.-CHINA—TRADE

  ARTIFACT B

  The Written World

  QIN SHIHUANG BURNED BOOKS. IN THE YEAR 221 B.C., HE BECAME the first ruler to declare himself Huangdi, emperor. He standardized currency, weights, and measures; he commanded the construction of roads and canals and the first version of the Great Wall. He destroyed classics of history, philosophy, and poetry. He buried scholars alive. Under his reign, all Chinese were forced to write characters the same way.

  The chief minister advised his emperor to destroy not only the books, but even the idea of the books: “If there is anybody who dares to mention the Songs or Documents in private conversation, he should be executed. Those who, using the old, reject the new, will be wiped out together with their clans.”

  All of this was recorded more than a century later by a historian of the Han, the dynasty that followed the Qin. The book, Historical Records, became a classic for two millennia.

  IMRE GALAMBOS IS thirty-five years old, with a pedigree that is unusual for a scholar of ancient Chinese. On his mother’s side, he is Central Asian: a Tatar grandfather, a Kazak grandmother. The grandmother was born in Harbin, in the northeast of China, and as an adult she moved west. She gave birth to Galambos’s mother in the Ural Mountains. The girl moved farther west, attending college in Moscow, where she fell in love with a Hungarian. West again: Imre Galambos was born in northern Hungary, near the Danube River. He is half Hungarian, quarter Kazak, quarter Tatar. He is short and stocky, dark-haired and long-lashed. He is shy. On the telephone, he is reticent to the point of monosyllables; first meetings can be awkward. But once you get to know him well, the fluency of his thoughts is remarkable, and he has already established himself as an innovative scholar in his field.

  At the University of California at Berkeley, Galambos wrote his dissertation about the development of ancient Chinese writing. His primary texts were two-thousand-year-old strips of bamboo that had been inscribed with characters. These were old texts, but new sources: most had been excavated during the latter part of the twentieth century. In the past, scholars didn’t have access to such materials. They studied classics such as the Historical Records, which had been copied repeatedly and passed down through the centuries.

  The bamboo strips were inscribed during the centuries after Qin Shihuang’s reign, but the written characters still aren’t uniform. A single word is written in different ways, as if the ancient culture lacked clear standards. With this evidence, Galambos theorizes that the Qin standardization of characters is an exaggeration and possibly a myth, and the same may be true for the other stories. In his dissertation, Galambos notes that centuries of historians have been obsessed with the tale of the book-burning, but they have ignored “the quiet but continuous process of selecting works for copying.”

  His point is simple: censorship captures the imagination, but the process of creation might be even more destructive. In order to write a story, and create meaning out of events, you deny other possible interpretations. The history of China, like the history of any great culture, was written at the expense of other stories that have remained silent.

  In Galambos’s opinion, China’s most important literary unification actually took place during the Han. They produced their history book, as well as the first dictionary, and their emphasis on the written word established the foundation for two millennia of empire. “People talk about this idea of literary worlds,” he says. “There are certain cultures, like the Byzantine and the Chinese, in which the written documents create a world that is more significant than the real world. The officials who ran the country in ancient China—they were selected through exams, through this process of memorizing the classics. They lived in this quasi world of letters. Whoever came in from the outside became a part of it. Even the Mongolian tribes that eventually became the Yuan dynasty—for God’s sake, they were complete nomads, with very little written language. But they became like the Chinese for a time; they assimilated themselves. I think that this literary world is the link in time that permits this thing we call ‘Chinese history.’ It’s not the number of people or anything like that; it’s the enormous written world that they produced. They produced this world that’s so big that it eats them up and it eats up everybody around them.”

  GALAMBOS IS AN instinctive skeptic. He is suspicious of neatness, regularity, plot; in his view, stories are often a façade for chaos. This perspective may be genetic—Tatar DNA—or it may simply be what happens when your own story doesn’t make sense. Apart from basic details, his family history is unknown. He has no idea why his Kazak grandmother lived in northeastern China, or why she left. He doesn’t know how she met the Tatar, or which route they took to the Urals.

  Galambos doesn’t even have a good reason for his original dedication to Chinese studies. He grew up in Communist Hungary, which required mandatory military service from all young males. After high school, he joined the army and quickly learned that it was no place for an instinctive skeptic. As punishment, the military sent him to the hills of Bakony for six months of additional training. Galambos spent much of his time there on kitchen duty. At one point, he faked a hernia and underwent surgery, simply because that meant twenty-eight days’ leave for recovery. The surgery was primitive and nowadays he still feels an occasional twinge in his gut.

  After the hernia, the next escape involved higher education. In Hungary, the mandatory term of military service was shortened by half a year if a soldier entered college. Galambos applied, but he missed all the deadlines except one: a scholarship to study in China. He accepted, figuring that it was worth avoiding six months in the army. That was fifteen years ago. “I got sucked into this whole Chineseness,” he explains.

  One evening, I meet Galambos for a drink in Beijing, and the conversation turns t
o history. He explains that people have a natural tendency to choose certain figures and events, exaggerate their importance, and then incorporate them into narratives.

  “That’s how history is formed in their minds,” he says. “It’s through these important people and events. But while studying Chinese history, you learn that maybe some of these events didn’t happen, or they were very minor, or a lot of other things happened that were in fact very important. The Chinese say that every five or six hundred years a sage appeared. In reality I would say it’s more fluid, more complex; there’s a lot more stuff going on. Obviously, that’s no way to teach history. You can’t just say, ‘There’s a lot more stuff going on.’ It’s inevitable that you have to pick out certain things.”

  We sit in a small anonymous bar near Houhai, a lake in central Beijing. This is one of the capital’s last intact old neighborhoods, and the bar’s windows open on to the lake. It’s a beautiful evening; the lights streak red and yellow across the nighttime water. Galambos talks about the power of perception, and then he points at me.

  “That’s why the Chinese worry about you, the correspondent,” he says. “For the West, whatever you create is China. Otherwise it’s just these random figures—they might publish some numbers about the GDP, and maybe people will think, ‘Wow, that’s really low.’ Or maybe they’ll think it’s high. But you journalists explain it and spice it up and that’s how it comes out. If you write about us sitting here in Houhai, people will think, ‘Wow, China’s a really cool place.’ That’s how the place is formed in their minds. But it might have very little to do with reality.”

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  The Voice of America