Oracle Bones

by Peter Hessler

  The Yalu River Broken Bridge stood at one end of the Dandong Border Cooperative Economic Zone. Locals proudly called this the Development Zone, and the area illustrated how far Dandong had come during the past ten years, after Reform and Opening finally started to take hold in this part of the country. People told me that a decade ago the Development Zone had been nothing but peasant shacks and makeshift docks. Now there were restaurants, ice-cream parlors, karaoke halls, and a luxury apartment complex called the European Flower Garden. The eastern end of the Development Zone featured the Gateway to the Country Hunting Park and a new bridge that carried a thin stream of train and automobile traffic across the water to North Korea. Between the bridge and the luxury apartments, there was a twenty-four-hour venereal disease clinic and the Finland Bathing and Pleasure Center, a massage parlor whose marquee featured a photograph of a topless foreign woman taking a shower.

  At the Gateway to the Country Hunting Park, tourists pursued “wild” quail, pigeon, pheasant, and rabbit. The birds were tethered to the ground, and for one yuan, tourists could shoot at them with either a .22-caliber rifle or a bow and arrow. For three yuan, they could take a potshot at a rabbit that was also tied to the ground. They were allowed to eat anything they killed.

  One afternoon, I watched two visitors from Guangdong province hunt quail. The young couple were in their early twenties, nicely dressed, and the man was very drunk. He missed so badly that the quail didn’t even strain at their tethers. They just sat there in the sunshine. They were the most bored-looking quail I’d ever seen.

  “I’m too drunk,” the man said. “I want you to shoot instead.” He had originally grown up in this part of the country and now he had brought his girlfriend back for a visit.

  “I don’t want to shoot the gun,” she said. “It’s too loud.”

  “Here,” he said. “You shoot it. I’m too drunk. I can’t shoot straight.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Go ahead. It’s easy.”

  The man showed her how she could rest the gun on the fence so that it would be simpler to aim. Usually, customers weren’t allowed to do that, because it wasn’t sporting, but the park keepers were willing to make an exception for the woman. I sat nearby, listening to the conversation and trying to remember which Hemingway story it recalled. In the best stories there were always guns, animals, women, and drunk people bickering. The only difference was that in Hemingway stories the animals were never tied to the ground.

  Finally, the man persuaded his girlfriend to pick up the .22 and the keeper helped her prop the gun on the fence. She shot three bullets, and every time, after the gun sounded, she squealed and covered her ears. She missed badly. The quail appeared to have fallen asleep.

  Later, after it got dark, the Development Zone was a riot of lights—neon and fluorescent blazing from the restaurants and karaoke bars and the Finland Bathing and Pleasure Center. Across the Yalu, there was complete darkness on the North Korean shore. There was no sign of electricity there and the North Koreans didn’t go swimming at night.

  IN DANDONG, I spent much of my time around the river. I got to know a couple of the local speedboat pilots, and several times a day they’d drive me along the banks of North Korea. We’d cruise by run-down tourist boats that were empty, and we’d pass factories that looked abandoned. On the sandy stretches, where the North Koreans swam, children smiled and waved when we passed. Armed soldiers stood stiffly at their posts, watching over the bathers. They were like lifeguards with guns.

  Officially, China had good relations with North Korea, but the average people in Dandong were quick to say that their neighbors had bad leadership. When I pressed for more details, the Chinese shrugged. “Meiyou yisi,” they said. “It’s not interesting.” Even the photo vendor who was so enthusiastic about the WTO looked bored when I asked him about the possibility of traveling to North Korea. “What am I going to learn from them?” he asked. Nobody in Dandong seemed particularly intrigued by their neighbors’ poverty or isolation; the Chinese had already experienced enough of that themselves during the first thirty years of Communism.

  To me, North Korea was tragic, and I was fascinated by the fact that this country had been closed for half a century. Cruising past the shore, I picked out details: an empty tour boat, an armed soldier, a swimming child. From my perspective, every glimpse was heavy with significance, the same way that my brief conversations seemed meaningful to the people in Dandong. But the Chinese and I stared across the river for different reasons: I was looking in; they were looking out. Chinese tourists buzzed the North Korean shore simply because it was the closest they could get to international travel.

  If they had money, they could cross. My hotel ran tours that started at around two hundred dollars, and passports weren’t required; a Chinese identity card was adequate. It was easier for a Chinese citizen to visit North Korea than Hong Kong, which had officially returned to the Motherland two years earlier. The Chinese government had established unusually lax rules in Dandong because it was pretty sure that anybody who crossed the Yalu River would want to come back.

  Every morning, tour groups of middle- and upper-class Chinese met in front of my hotel before leaving for North Korea, and one day I watched a guide give a briefing. It reminded me of some of the things I had been told by the Peace Corps when I had first arrived in China. The guide explained that the Chinese tourists should be careful to show respect when they visited North Korean memorials, and they should avoid taking photographs of people laboring. The North Koreans are proud people, and the Chinese need to remember this. Also, when visiting the Demilitarized Zone, it was important that the Chinese not shout “Hello!” at any American soldiers on the other side.

  “You’ll notice that it’s not as developed as China,” the guide said. “You shouldn’t tell the North Koreans that they need to Reform and Open, or that they should study the example of our China. And remember that many of their tour guides speak very good Chinese, so be careful what you say.”

  THE KOREAN WAR was the only conflict in which the People’s Republic of China and the United States had fought directly against each other. The war began in June of 1950, when North Korea invaded the south. Along with other members of the United Nations, the U.S. quickly came to the assistance of South Korea, and General MacArthur’s troops gained ground all the way to the Chinese border. In October of that year, Mao Zedong started sending “volunteer” soldiers to help their neighbors in the North. The war lasted three years, and claimed more than 54,000 American lives. Foreign historians estimated that Chinese casualties—injured and dead—were as high as nine hundred thousand. But it was impossible to know for certain, because Chinese accounts of the war were so unreliable. Dandong’s local museum claimed that only eleven thousand Chinese died.

  While hanging out on the Yalu River docks, I told one of the boat pilots that I was interested in meeting a veteran of the war. The pilot knew a man who had served—the father of a friend—and he arranged for the three of us to have a meal together. When we met on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, the old man’s eyes widened. “I thought you said he was an ethnic Chinese from America!” he said loudly, and then he spun on his heel. The pilot ran after him, trying to soothe the old man; after a long conversation, they returned. I explained that I was only interested in history, and I promised not to publish the veteran’s name. Finally he agreed to join us in a private room at the restaurant.

  The man had served in the Chinese navy, and he hadn’t seen much direct action during the war, when his unit had been sent to the Taiwan Strait. Later, in 1964, his leg had been badly injured in a battle off the coast of Taiwan. He was sixty-four years old, and he had been a member of the Communist Party for four decades. He walked with a limp. The enemy who wounded him had been Taiwanese, but the weapon was American-made. The veteran made sure that I understood this detail clearly.

  We ordered dinner and local beer, and soon the old man began to relax. He asked about my band
aged finger, and then he shook his head. “Nowadays too many things are uncertain,” he said. “For example, some of the retired people don’t get their pensions. And another difference is that China has some capitalist aspects. Some people are too rich while others are too poor. It’s not like it was in Chairman Mao’s time, when everybody was equal. There wasn’t crime back then. This story about you getting robbed in your hotel—that wouldn’t have happened in the past.”

  I asked him what the situation was like across the river.

  “When Kim Il Sung was alive, he was like Mao Zedong,” he said. “Everybody worshipped him because he was a great man. But Kim Il Sung’s son isn’t as great as his father. He’s too young, but the main reason is that he hasn’t been hardened by war; he hasn’t experienced struggle. Kim Il Sung experienced war as a small boy; that’s why he became a great man.”

  After an hour, the direction of the interview had shifted entirely. The old man shot questions across the table: What are salaries in America? What do Americans think of China? What do they think about the NATO bombing?

  The veteran explained that his son, who had a college degree, had turned down a perfectly good government job. The young man had been offered more money in a private firm, but the position didn’t provide complete security. And at twenty-six he was still unmarried! Why did he think this way? Did he learn it from the American teachers in his college? Do Americans believe that it’s better to take a high-paying job over long-term security?

  I explained that, in some ways, his son’s thoughts were similar to those of young people in America. The old man kept returning to the same themes—a government job was perfectly good; China needed another Chairman Mao. He was drinking heavily now; he started to slur his words and then he got fussy. He complained about his son and he complained about the service in the restaurant. He said that a foreigner should be able to come to Dandong without getting robbed. The boat pilot gently suggested that we leave, and the old man suddenly became angry.

  “It’s not every day I get to speak with a foreigner,” he said sharply. “I’m not tired. I just need to go to the bathroom.” He stood up and stumbled over his chair; the pilot caught the old man before he fell. A waitress entered the room, and the veteran shouted, “Bring the bill!”

  I had already given money to the waitress, who explained that everything had been taken care of. “I’ve got plenty of money!” the old man shouted. “I can pay for dinner!” The pilot tried to guide him to the door. “I can pay!” the old man yelled again, waving a wad of cash.

  At last, we steered him outside, where the night air sobered him a little. I thanked him for coming; the old man shook my hand and limped off toward home. He refused to be escorted.

  The pilot watched him leave, and then he sighed. He was thirty-three years old. He said, “Many old people don’t understand the way things are in China nowadays.”

  ON MY LAST afternoon in Dandong, the river was full of Chinese wedding boats. Wealthy couples hired big two-tier cruisers; others rented little motor launches. All of them followed the same route—a scoot out to the ruined bridge, a pause for photographs, and then a slow cruise along the banks of North Korea. Beneath their life preservers, the brides wore dresses of bright pink and orange and purple; they stood in the prows like flowering figureheads. It was a hot afternoon and the North Koreans were swimming again.

  A pilot named Ni Shichao took me out on the river, where we zipped in and out of the flotilla of wedding boats. Ni explained that it was an auspicious day on the lunar calendar—the sixth day of the sixth month. But on the whole, he said, there had been fewer weddings than usual this year.

  “People think that years ending in nine are bad luck,” he explained. “I don’t believe it myself, but many people do. In eighty-nine, there was the disturbance in Beijing, and in seventy-nine there was the trial of the Gang of Four. Sixty-nine was the Cultural Revolution. Fifty-nine was when your America bombed the bridge.”

  He paused and thought for a moment. “No, that was in 1950,” he said. “Anyway, something bad happened in fifty-nine.”

  That had been during the heart of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, but history books brushed over this disaster. Like many Chinese, Ni Shichao had a shaky grasp of modern events; he had also made a mistake about the Gang of Four trial, which actually started in 1980.

  “What about 1949?” I asked.

  “That was when New China was founded,” he said. We floated in the shadow of the ruined bridge; the slow-moving Yalu ran blue beneath us. “That year wasn’t the same as the others,” he continued. “That was a good year, of course.”

  FROM DANDONG, I followed the border east toward the Sea of Japan. These areas were lightly populated; the buses passed through forests of birch. I had packed a tent and a sleeping bag, and I camped at Changbaishan. It was an enormous volcanic crater, filled with clear blue water; the Chinese-North Korean border cut the lake in half like a ruined jewel. At night the wind blew hard from the south and I kept imagining footsteps outside the tent.

  Locals had told me that the border was unguarded, and in the morning I followed a grassy ridge that skirted the lake. After hiking for half an hour, I saw a tiny white marker in the center of a green field, far below. Before descending, I carefully surveyed the land: no buildings, no people. The nearest city was dozens of miles away, over rugged terrain. It was the emptiest place I had seen in China for a long time.

  The block of stone had Chinese characters on one side and Korean letters on the other. I was accustomed to linear borders—rivers, fences—and it was strange to see this single stone surrounded by emptiness. The boundary was just an idea, and the wilderness rendered it meaningless.

  I dropped my pack and took a few steps into North Korea, where I balanced my camera on a rock and set the timer. In the photograph, the sky is a deep blue and white clouds hang low on the horizon. I am kneeling and my shadow falls across the stone marker. There is a dirty white bandage on my left hand. The mountains could be the mountains of any country.

  ARTIFACT C

  The Wall

  THE UNDERGROUND CITY CANNOT BE SEPARATED FROM THE OTHER layers that have accumulated in this part of Anyang. One might imagine the ancient Shang site as a whole, lying beneath the earth—the city wall, the interior structures. It’s possible that oracle bones are buried here, having waited three thousand years to tell their stories. But above ground, there is an entirely separate patchwork of modern buildings, organizations, and land-use rights. If archaeologists hope to dig, they have to negotiate with whoever occupies the surface of the earth.

  Fortunately, much of this region is farmland—soybean, corn, hemp—and it’s generally easier for archaeologists to negotiate with local peasants. But during the modern period, various authorities have also left their mark in this part of Anyang. In the late-1930s, during the Japanese occupation, the invaders built an airfield, and cement runways still cut across the fields. Later, after the Communists gained control of China, the People’s Liberation Army constructed a military compound next to the airfield. Even later, after Reform and Opening began, the old runways were converted into a site for private flight training. Ironically, many of today’s clients are Japanese, who train in Anyang because it’s much cheaper than in Japan. But what’s cheap for a Japanese pilot is not necessarily cheap for a Chinese archaeologist. Local surveys have avoided extensive work on the airfield, because the flight school charges high rates for permission to dig cores with Luoyang spades.

  Here in Anyang, and anywhere in China, the present controls access to the past. When the archaeologists first surveyed the wall of the underground city, it led them straight to the modern barrier of the PLA compound. Two walls: one ancient, one modern; one below ground and the other above. At that point, the modern barrier took precedence. The surveying stopped while the archaeologists submitted applications, paperwork, maps. It took almost a month before the military granted them admittance. After the archaeologists were finally allowed ins
ide, they patiently continued digging cores with their Luoyang spades. The buried Shang wall cut diagonally across the military compound, running straight as an arrow. The archaeologists followed it to another modern barrier, where, without the slightest change in direction, the ancient wall exited the jurisdiction of the People’s Liberation Army.

  THE UNDERGROUND CITY wall is rectangular, and it encloses an area of nearly two square miles. Jing Zhichun and the other archaeologists have carefully surveyed the structure, and they have discovered that it is incomplete; many sections of the wall were only partly built up. The ancient settlement seems to have been abandoned; perhaps the residents moved to another location.

  “Eventually, this kind of information will give us clues as to why the city was here and why it was an uncompleted one,” Jing says. “We made six profiles of the walls, and we haven’t found any of them that had been built up. They just finished the base. It’s very strange. That’s why I think it was probably an unfinished city.”

  4

  The Overnight City

  October 1, 1999

  SHENZHEN WAS ALIVE. PEOPLE CALLED IT THE “OVERNIGHT CITY” because growth had been so fast; sometimes they compared its rising buildings to bamboo shoots after a good rain. Intellectuals in cities such as Beijing sneered at Shenzhen for all the usual reasons—no history, no culture, no class—but the city meant something entirely different to migrants from the interior. To them, it had a living character: strengths and flaws, cruelties and successes. In a nation of boomtowns, Shenzhen was the most famous of them all.