Oracle Bones

by Peter Hessler

  One evening in June, I met Polat at the Uighur restaurant to change a couple hundred dollars. He ordered three beers, which meant that he planned to be there for a while. In the evenings, he often arranged his business appointments at the restaurant, where currency dealers could pull their cars right up onto the sidewalk. As long as Polat carried less than forty thousand dollars, he felt comfortable making deals in the cars, but for bigger business he used a friend’s office in the neighborhood. The most money he ever changed at a single sitting was two hundred thousand dollars.

  The Uighur restaurant boss opened the manhole and took out the beers. I waited until we had started the second one before I put the money on the table. Polat told me that the morning Yabaolu rate had been 8.86 yuan to the dollar, but by afternoon it had dropped to 8.84. He offered 8.85, out of courtesy. At the banks you couldn’t do better than 8.26, which was the official government rate. Chinese currency was nonconvertible and pegged to the dollar; the rate never changed significantly, except on the black market. A week earlier, the Yabaolu dealers had paid nine to the dollar.

  “It dropped this week because one of the big Beijing bosses couldn’t get a shipment of cash over to Hong Kong,” Polat explained. “Those dollars are still in Shenzhen and the rate won’t go up again until they cross.”

  The black market operated under a byzantine system of rumors and reports. It never made much sense to me, but to Polat it was completely rational; he often embarked on long explanations of how some corrupt border had been tightened in a place like Kazakhstan, sending a decimal-point ripple back to Beijing. I liked hearing the stories, especially after a day’s clipping at the Wall Street Journal. Matt Forney, one of the Journal reporters, covered Qualcomm, an American telecom company that was trying to establish a new cell phone system in China. Sometimes the Qualcomm stock swung three or four points in a single day, entirely on the basis of Matt’s stories. The reports always hinged on some subtle signal—a leak from a company contact, or an indirect statement by the government. The signs were inconsistent and the Qualcomm stock jumped around like crazy all year. If the freelancing didn’t work out, I figured that I could do some kind of derivative trading that combined the inside information of a clipper with the Yabaolu money-changing rumor network.

  We finished the second beer quickly. A white man and an Asian woman took a table on the far side of the platform. She didn’t look Chinese and I asked Polat about her.

  “She’s actually North Korean,” he said. “Her parents became orphans during the Korean War.” He was careful to use that name for the war, instead of the standard Chinese phrase Kangmei Yuanchao Zhanzheng, “the War of Resistance Against America and Support for Korea.”

  “After the war, Stalin accepted a number of those orphans,” Polat explained. “He moved a lot of them to Uzbekistan, where they were adopted. That’s what happened to her parents; they grew up there and met as adults. That woman was born in Uzbekistan and now she comes to Beijing for trading.”

  I asked if she spoke Korean.

  “All of them forgot their language,” Polat said. “They’re the same as Uzbeks now.”

  We ordered two more beers. A black Audi cruised in slowly from the east and pulled up onto the curb. Polat excused himself, picked up his leather money bag, and got into the car. The windows were dark and they kept the engine running. When he sat back down at the table, I could feel the coolness of the air-conditioning coming off his clothes.

  “That was one of the biggest money changers in Yabaolu,” he said. “His friend is a pilot for Air China and sometimes he helps him get the American dollars out of the country.”

  Twilight came, and we ordered noodles and barbecued lamb. The Korean-Uzbek woman and her companion finished eating, paid the bill, and left together. I wondered whether she was lucky that her parents had been transplanted to Uzbekistan. Probably it had worked out in her favor, but there were so many things in Yabaolu that you couldn’t tell for certain.

  Later that summer, I decided to make a research trip to a Chinese city called Dandong, which was just across the Yalu River from North Korea. I figured that I could find something to write about on the border of such an isolated country. When I mentioned it to Polat, he laughed and said that North Korea was the kind of place that made China look good.

  ON MY THIRD day in Dandong, I woke up at two o’clock in the morning with a thief in my hotel room. It was a mid-range hotel, ten dollars a night, and Dandong was a mid-range Chinese city, the sort of place that wouldn’t draw much attention if it weren’t across the river from North Korea. But having the Hermit Kingdom next door changed everything. Dandong promoted itself as “China’s Biggest Border City,” and the riverfront was lined with telescopes that could be rented by tourists, most of whom were Chinese hoping to catch their first glimpse of a foreign nation. Signs beside the scopes promised: LEAVE THE COUNTRY FOR JUST ONE YUAN! For ten, you could catch a ride on a speedboat and get a closer look at the North Koreans, who, during the heat of the afternoon, swam in the shallows off their riverbank. On auspicious marriage days, it was a Dandong tradition for Chinese newlyweds to rent a boat, put life preservers over their wedding clothes, and buzz the North Korean shore.

  There was a lot to think about in Dandong, which was probably why I had forgotten to close my window that night. Because my room was on the second floor, I’d thought I was safe from intruders, but I hadn’t noticed the foot-wide ledge that ran just below the window. I also hadn’t bothered to put my money belt and passport under the pillow, which I usually did while traveling. I had left them on a dresser, along with my camera, wallet, reporter’s notebook, and a pair of shorts. The thief was scooping everything up when I awoke. For an instant, neither of us moved.

  When you live between two languages, there are moments when the boundaries disappear. Sometimes in China, a telephone call would wake me in the middle of the night, and it would take me a moment to understand the voice on the other end—an old friend from the States. Occasionally, I’d be conversing in Chinese, and suddenly an English word would spring to mind for no apparent reason. It wasn’t unusual to have dreams that mixed the tongues. The strangest ones involved people I remembered from Missouri, speaking Chinese. After I awoke from those dreams, I’d lie in bed wondering how the subconscious sifted down through deep layers of language and memory. I figured that if I ever had a sudden crisis, I might learn what was at the very bottom.

  In Dandong, I sat bolt upright in bed and screamed, “Motherfucker!” The thief turned and ran for the door, my possessions in his arms. I was out of bed before I’d finished shouting the word a second time. By the third “Motherfucker!” I was sprinting full-speed down the hallway. There weren’t any lights; the shadowy hotel room doors flashed past. My voice boomed as it echoed off the walls: “Motherfucker!” The thief was running hard, but I gained ground with every stride; we rounded a corner, skidding across the cheap tile floor. I was barefoot, wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. At the end of the hallway, there was an exit and a stairwell, and that was where I caught him.

  I slugged the man as hard as I could. He didn’t fight back; his hands were full of my belongings. Every time I punched him (“Motherfucker!”), he dropped something. I slugged him and my camera popped out (“Motherfucker!”); I hit him again and there was my money belt (“Motherfucker!”); another punch and my shorts flew up in the air (“Motherfucker!”). Wallet, notebook, passport—I left it all lying on the floor. The rage completely possessed me, and I kept punching him even after he had dropped everything. By now, he only wanted to escape, and he ran back down the hall, desperately trying doorknobs: locked, locked, locked. I followed: screaming, grabbing, punching. At last, he found an unlocked door that led to an open window, two stories up, and that was where he jumped.

  I almost followed him out. I ran all the way to the window, my momentum carrying my torso out through the open space, and then suddenly it was if I had woken up. I looked down and saw that the thief had been lucky
—there was a broad overhang below this part of the second story. I stopped shouting; suddenly the night was quiet. I heard the man’s footsteps as he rounded the corner of the building. He was still running hard.

  AFTER THE RAGE was gone, the pain materialized. During the struggle, I had dislocated the third finger of my left hand—it must have been pulled out of the socket when I grabbed the man. The hotel’s night manager accompanied me to the local hospital, where we woke up the graveyard-shift doctor. He yawned, popped the finger back in place, and took an X-ray. The joint still looked crooked, so the doctor yanked the finger out of the socket again and tried once more. This time, the X-ray machine failed to work; I’d have to return later in the morning, when a technician would be on duty. We went to the police station to report the crime. Dazed, I answered questions and filled out forms; my ability to hold a conversation in Chinese was rapidly deteriorating. Finally, at five o’clock, I returned to bed. I didn’t sleep well.

  A couple of hours later, the hotel owner arrived in order to escort me personally back to the hospital. He was a handsome man who gelled his hair so that it swept blue-black across his forehead. He wore a new white button-down shirt and well-pressed slacks. He apologized profusely about the robbery, and introduced himself.

  “My name is ,” he said.

  I couldn’t believe it: “Li What?”

  “Li Peng.”

  “The same name as the former Premier?”

  “Yes,” he said. The man smiled in a tired way, and I could see that I wasn’t the first person to have made this observation. In the summer of 1989, Li Peng had announced the official decree of martial law, and many average Chinese associated him with the crackdown. Afterward, a Hong Kong newspaper reported that angry citizens were telephoning and harassing twenty Beijing residents who also happened to be named Li Peng. At least one of them had applied for a legal change of name. Ten years later, Li Peng jokes had become popular among Chinese intellectuals.

  “Do you like Li Peng?” I asked the hotel owner.

  “No,” he said, using English for emphasis. It was clear that he preferred talking about other subjects. He asked me about the robbery.

  I had already told the police everything that I could recall about the thief: he had black hair, and he was somewhere between the ages of twenty and forty. He was smaller than me. I wouldn’t recognize him if I saw him again.

  This vagueness had bothered the cops: how could you break your finger on another human being and remember nothing about him? It bothered me as well. I could recall details of the chase with remarkable clarity—for some reason, I had a particularly vivid image of a darkened hallway with doors flashing past. In my mind, I could also see the stairwell, and my camera bouncing up in the air, and the open window. I could still hear the echoes of the word I had shouted. Mostly, I recalled the overwhelming rage, whose memory left me unsettled. And yet the thief himself was a blur in my mind. Li Peng wrinkled his brow.

  “Was it a child?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “It wasn’t a child.”

  “But how did you catch him so easily?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you have thieves in your America?”

  I told Li Peng that there were thieves in America, but they carried guns and you didn’t run after them.

  “Most thieves here in China have knives,” he said thoughtfully. “What kind of thief doesn’t carry a knife? That’s why I think he was a child.”

  “He wasn’t a child. I know that for certain.”

  “But why didn’t he fight back? Why did you catch him so easily?” Li Peng sounded almost disappointed.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  The police had followed a similar line of questioning, and it was beginning to annoy me. As we replayed the event, it passed through layers of insecurity: first and foremost, people were ashamed that a foreigner had been robbed in their city. But after that unfortunate fact had to be admitted, it seemed even more shameful that the foreigner had caught the thief. Only a criminal of unusual ineptitude would be beaten by a foreigner at two in the morning, and so there must have been something seriously wrong with him. The police had offered various excuses. He must have been a drunk, or a cripple, or a migrant who was desperately poor. Dandong, the police emphasized, was a modern, orderly city, with a growing tourist industry. It wasn’t the sort of place where a foreigner woke up in the middle of the night with a common thief in his room.

  Nobody seemed to take seriously another possibility: that the man was a North Korean refugee. The police had assured me that there were few refugees along this part of the border, because Sinuiju, the North Korean city across the river, wasn’t as poor as the rest of the country. People in Sinuiju ate twice a day, according to Dandong residents who had relatives there. But farther east, where the combination of famine and mindless economic policies had been particularly brutal, an estimated seventy thousand North Koreans were fleeing to China every year. It seemed likely that at least a handful of them had made their way to Dandong. This possibility bothered me: If the locals wanted the thief to be disabled, I preferred him to be perfectly fit. I wanted him to be experienced, savvy, and fleet of foot—a worthy adversary. I wanted him to be Chinese, not North Korean. It disturbed me to think that I had viciously punched a man who might have been starving.

  Both Li Peng and I were silent for a while, and then he thought of another possibility.

  “Probably he was a heroin addict. That would explain why he was so weak.”

  “Are there a lot of heroin addicts around here?” I asked.

  “Oh, no,” Li Peng said quickly. “I don’t think there are any in Dandong.”

  THE MAIN ATTRACTION in town was the Yalu River Broken Bridge, which had once connected Dandong and Sinuiju. In November of 1950, the first year of the Korean War, as General MacArthur’s troops made their push toward China’s border, American bombers destroyed most of the bridge. In 1993, after restoring their half of the structure, the Chinese opened it to tourism. Visitors could walk along the bridge, look at the bombed-out wreckage that ended in the middle of the river, and pay one yuan to stare through a telescope at the far side. The North Koreans hadn’t restored their part of the structure. A line of empty pediments punctuated the clear-flowing Yalu and ended at the far bank.

  One morning, I stood on the Chinese bridge and asked the telescope man what the North Koreans were doing.

  “They’re swimming,” he said.

  I paid and looked through the eyepiece. On the far bank stood a pretty North Korean girl in an old-fashioned bathing suit, skirted and striped in red and white. She shivered as she stepped into the river. Behind her, a group of children gathered around an adult—a teacher, perhaps. I picked out one mischievous boy and followed him with the scope. He bumped another boy, skipped around the group, and tossed sand at a girl. The teacher scolded him. Nearby, a soldier stood with a rifle slung over his back. All of the figures were framed by the scope’s round lens, and for a minute I was lost in this compact world. Then the telescope man asked me what my nationality was. I stepped back from the eyepiece and answered him.

  “If America and China had a war today, who do you think would win?” he said.

  “I don’t think America and China will have a war today.”

  “But if they did,” he said, “who do you think would win?”

  “I really don’t know,” I said. It seemed like a good time to ask him how business was going. He said that it was fine; next to the telescope, he had a photography stand where tourists could dress up and have their pictures taken with the wrecked bridge in the background. They could wear either a traditional Korean folk costume or a full Chinese military uniform, complete with helmet and plastic rifle.

  Another vendor on the bridge ran a café where tourists could buy Titanic ice cream bars, with pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet on the wrappers. The café manager explained that although the bridge was state-owned, private entrepreneurs
were allowed to rent space for their telescopes and snack stands. Next to the bridge, I stopped to talk with another tourist photographer. “Do you think that China will be able to join the World Trade Organization?” he asked. “Back in April, when Zhu Rongji went to America, all of the newspapers said that it would happen. But after the Yugoslavia bombing, it doesn’t look so good.”

  We chatted for a while, and the photographer kept bringing up the WTO. I asked him why he was so interested. “The newspapers say that if we join the WTO, we’ll have more foreign visitors coming to China,” he explained. “And of course if China’s economy improves, then there will be more Chinese tourists coming here, too. So it has an effect on me.”

  I had always liked traveling to small cities like Dandong, which had few foreign visitors. Locals were eager to talk—from their perspective, there was something momentous about a simple conversation with an American. And often these discussions reminded me of China’s complex relationship with the outside world. It wasn’t unusual for people to speak about war or conflict with a sense of inevitability, and they fully believed that the United States and other countries deliberately bullied China. But at the same time, people were incredibly friendly to foreigners, and they spoke enthusiastically of international trade links.

  Initially, these contradictions had mystified me—I thought that eventually I would figure out what the people really believed. But over time I realized that conflicting ideas could exist simultaneously, even in the mind of a single person. The news of a distant bombing might trigger one response, while a conversation with a Chinese-speaking foreigner sparked something else. The sheer complexity of the modern landscape had a lot to do with it. If you visited a bridge that had been bombed out by Americans, restored by Chinese, and then rented out to small-scale entrepreneurs who sold Titanic ice cream bars, it wasn’t surprising that people reacted to the outside world in illogical ways.