Oracle Bones

by Peter Hessler

  “You look at the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Sumeria, where you have these sandstorms, these disasters—it’s a very different world. Read the Gilgamesh; it’s remarkable. The guy is going to die, and he’s angry about it. He wants an explanation about death. There’s nothing like that in China. You die and you become an ancestor. You have the same relationship: once a king, always a king; once a serf, always a serf. I believe that cultures that engage in ancestor worship are going to be conservative cultures. You’re not going to find new things attractive, because that will be a challenge to the ancestors. There’s no room in this culture for a skeptic.”

  I ask Keightley why this optimistic view is so different from what we know of China from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—famines, floods, disasters, wars. And now, the migration of more than one hundred million people.

  “It’s the high-level equilibrium trap,” he says, referring to a phrase used by the historian Mark Elvin in his classic, The Pattern of the Chinese Past. In Elvin’s study of China’s cultural continuity, early success, and subsequent decline, he notes that relative geographic isolation was an important factor. Surrounded by deserts, mountains, and ocean, China was relatively protected from external threats, but that also limited contact with foreign innovation. Meanwhile, political stability combined with early advances in agricultural technology to allow the population to grow to dangerous levels.

  “China has been pressing upon its natural resources for the past several hundred years,” Keightley says. “They’re so successful at what they are doing that they have been pressing the borders. The landscape, it seems to me, is exhausted.”

  The imaginative world, like the geography, was a trap. Ancestor followed ancestor; dynasty followed dynasty—an overpopulated history, the endless spiral of time. The Chinese tended to look farsightedly into the past, whereas Westerners, especially during periods such as the Renaissance, thought more about the future. In the Western view, even the ancient past had lessons that could serve modern progress. During the Age of Enlightenment, when contemporary political systems were changing, Europeans celebrated ancient Greek democracy. In the late 1800s, the modern Olympic Movement reflected the values of imperialism, which required an elite that was both well educated and physically capable.

  But the Chinese view of history limited such redefinition. In the beginning of the twentieth century, some intellectuals attempted to explore their own past, but inevitably more Chinese turned to foreign concepts and values. It was a painful, clumsy process; inevitably they clutched at some of the worst Western ideas (such as Marxism). Today, the Chinese continue to struggle to incorporate Western traditions into their own culture. Keightley believes that this is one reason why they were so bitterly disappointed when, in 1993, they failed in their bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games. In “Clean Hands and Shining Helmets,” Keightley writes:

  …Whether in the Marxism of Mao Zedong or the yearnings for democracy of student dissidents after him, the West has, for better or worse, now become, to a significant degree, China’s Greece and Rome.

  The Asian Games, recently held in Beijing, like the Olympics that the Chinese hope to host…can thus be seen as the descendants of the games that Achilles held for Patroclus’s funeral…. They serve as one example of China’s attempt to appropriate part of the West’s classical and now international heritage into China’s modern culture.

  LIKE CHEN MENGJIA, David N. Keightley is an accidental oracle bone scholar. As a young man, he was determined to become a writer:

  “I was contracted to do a book on the stock market. Eventually I gave that up, very happily. I wrote a novel that wasn’t published, fortunately. But after that I studied all of the short stories in the fiction magazines, got the formula, and sat down and wrote a short story and sent it to the Saturday Evening Post. Sure enough they sent me a check for one thousand dollars, and I had the idea that I could do this every week. But the magazine went out of business before they published it.

  “I was a freelance journalist, and I felt I was spreading myself too thin. I was paying the rent by writing book reviews for Time magazine, which was very nice, but I realized that that wasn’t what a grown man should be doing. I wanted to find myself on one of the new frontiers. I wanted to become a freelance writer about China, so I thought I wanted to learn Chinese, and I went to Columbia. And I got sucked into a Ph.D. program. By the end of my third year I had moved back to the nineteenth century. I wanted to do something about opium smoking—what was it about Chinese society in the south that led them to this British vice? Then I had an epiphany and realized that the really big questions were far back in the past. I wanted to look at public works in the Confucian period, and then I moved back another thousand years. It was a frontier. There was an awful lot of work to be done. I was thirty years old in 1962; I was a little old to be starting. But it was a very new field and you didn’t have to worry, thank God, about the deconstructionism or the New Criticism.

  “I went to Taiwan for two years, ’sixty-five to ’sixty-seven. Before returning to the U.S., I spent six weeks working in Japan, and one day I went to a bookstore in Tokyo. There was this book on the shelf—a book of oracle bone rubbings. The first entry was a character that looks like two hands raised:

  “Gong men: ‘Raise’ men. There were seventy or eighty inscriptions, all about mobilizing a labor force. The king was making a series of forecasts—should he raise men? Raise men, three thousand; raise men, five thousand. Attack this; attack that. This was a revolutionary book. The title was Inkyo Bokoji Sõrui, by Shima Kunio. I dedicated my first book to him. It took him ten years to write this. I never met him.”

  A chance discovery, a found book—and then three and a half decades reading oracle bones. Keightley has published two books about the Shang, and he has been honored for his work; in 1986, he was granted a MacArthur Fellowship. In retrospect, his career makes perfect sense.

  Of course, stories are always easier to tell after they’re finished. It’s the same with ancient Chinese history: order, regularity, organization. Keightley emphasizes that there’s always another side to the story, and maybe we just haven’t seen the “dirty” details: the irregularities and imperfections of everyday life.

  “I associate it partly with the elite nature of the artifacts that we’re getting,” Keightley says. “In Chinese writing, we don’t find the attention to ‘dirty’ detail until about the Song dynasty. But I’d say that they had that kind of literature all the time; it just wasn’t recorded by the elites. The elites wanted a much more structured view of the world, where morality is rewarded and the ancestors are honored. It’s a highly idealized picture of the world rather than a picture of the world.”

  During another conversation, he tells me that he still thinks about writing fiction. “I would love to write a novel about the Shang dynasty,” he says. “But I just have these structural guides, the oracle bones and the artifacts. I’d have to make up the ‘dirty’ parts. What I mean is that we have the structure, the diagram; we have the written characters. But we don’t have the emotional impact. We have to imagine that.”

  IN HIS BERKELEY home, Keightley keeps two fragments of cattle scapula. One bone is less than two inches long, and over three thousand years old. Ten characters are inscribed into the surface:

  Crack-making on guihai, divined: The king, in the ten days, will have no disasters.

  A Russian émigré named Peter A. Boodberg, who also taught at Berkeley, gave the oracle bone fragment to Keightley. In China, back in the days when such artifacts were still traded freely, Boodberg had purchased it from a dealer of antiquities. Without question, it is one of the oldest cultural artifacts in the Berkeley Hills. Keightley keeps it wrapped in cotton inside an old film canister. Eventually, he intends to donate the bone to the university.

  His second cattle scapula is circa 1978. Back then, Keightley was a research fellow at Cambridge University, and he decided to crack a bone in the Shang style. To his knowledge, th
is experiment had not yet been successfully accomplished by a modern scholar. He went to a butcher’s shop and purchased the object that, nowadays, is better known as a t-bone steak.

  “A professor in material science said that this is a simple problem,” Keightley says. “He told me to bring it in, and we boiled it. Two hours later, the place stank. The score was Shang one, Modern Science, zero.”

  Today, that’s still the score. Scholars have interpreted so much Shang music—the royal lineage, the patterns of warfare, the fears about weather—but they still don’t know the simplest question of all: how to crack an oracle bone in the traditional manner.

  “Ken Takashima and some graduate students tried it,” Keightley says, referring to a scholar who now teaches at the University of Vancouver. “They tried to re-create Shang cracking with a soldering iron. And it didn’t work. One of the problems is that you take a red-hot poker and apply it to the bone and the bone just sucks away the heat. Maybe the Shang heated the bone in the oven itself. I don’t know.”

  Keightley’s second bone is pale—whiter than old ivory. Three scorch marks scar the surface, but the bone is uncracked. Upon the surface nothing has been written.

  13

  The Games

  February 21, 2001

  THE CABBIE SMILED AND SAID “GOOD MORNING,” IN ENGLISH, WHEN I got into his car. It was 3:30 P.M. He had tiny eyes in a cramped dark face and his yellow teeth showed when he smiled. He also knew how to say “hello” and “OK.” Whenever he spoke English, the language gained a physical dimension—he leaned forward and gripped the wheel, pursing his lips, while the pitch of his voice rose and wavered. He said “Good morning” twice and then switched to Chinese. We were heading north, looking for the Olympics.

  That was a good week to be a foreigner in Beijing. The International Olympic Committee’s inspection commission was in town for a four-day tour to evaluate Beijing’s bid to host the Summer Games in 2008. This would be the I.O.C.’s final assessment; half a year later, they would choose between Beijing and the other finalists: Paris, Toronto, Osaka, and Istanbul. Every day, special announcements were broadcast on the cabbies’ radios, reminding them to be polite to foreign fares. The drivers had also been provided with a free two-cassette taped English course designed specifically for the inspection. The course consisted of useful sentences, including “The sun is shining,” “The city will be more beautiful when it hosts the Olympic Games,” and “Lacquerware was introduced to Japan from China during the Tang dynasty.”

  Every Beijing cabbie knew about Meng Jingshan, a driver who, just last year, had spoken about China’s Olympic dreams to a reporter from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The Atlanta article was only 335 words long, but it caught the eye of the Chinese authorities, probably because it quoted Meng as having said, “The Olympics is not the venue for talking about human rights.” Meng also mentioned that if Beijing had succeeded in its 1993 bid to host the Games, the city would have demolished his neighborhood in order to construct new sporting facilities. The American newspaper quoted the man: “I kept my house, but I really want to move out so I was doubly disappointed that we lost.”

  Foreign journalists were obsessed with human rights and hutong preservation, and the Beijing government had rewarded Meng by designating him one of the capital’s “Hundred Best Taxi Drivers.” He received a bonus of a few hundred dollars, and the city’s newspapers portrayed him as an exemplary common man (he reportedly gave some of the money to charity). The message was clear: every citizen must do his part for the Olympics.

  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. When I got into the cab, I took out paper and pad and told the driver that I was a reporter who needed to visit potential Olympic sites. He promised that we would find them along the highway that leads to the Great Wall. He kept glancing over at the blank page. “The Olympics can help the Chinese people,” he said. “I don’t really know how to say it right, but it would improve our status in the world.”

  His name was Yang Shulin—he said I could call him Yang Siji, Driver Yang. He told me that two days earlier, at the airport, his fare had been a Chinese stewardess who had personally witnessed the arrival of the I.O.C. inspection commission.

  “She saw them get off the plane,” Driver Yang said. “She was at the door at the airport.”

  “What were they like?”

  “She didn’t tell me anything else about them,” he said. “But she was pretty. All of the stewardesses are pretty.”

  I told Driver Yang that in three days I planned to accompany the I.O.C. commission on the final leg of its tour, and he nodded approvingly. The man was a throwback: he wore cloth shoes, white cotton driving gloves, and a polyester olive-green military uniform with brass buttons. He was fifty-three years old. A Mao Zedong pendant dangled from his rearview mirror. Beneath the Chairman’s photograph were two sentences:

  MAY THE ROAD BE SMOOTH

  PROTECTION AGAINST ONE HUNDRED CURSES

  We cruised along the Second Ring Road, where the old city wall used to stand. The pavement was lined with bright-colored banners that had been installed in honor of the visiting inspectors. According to the statistics of the Beijing Olympic Bid Committee, twenty thousand banners had been erected around the capital. In English, the banners read: NEW BEIJING, GREAT OLYMPICS. In Chinese, they proclaimed:

  One adjective had been tweaked in translation. Literally, the Chinese signs said: NEW BEIJING, NEW OLYMPICS. When I interviewed Beijing’s vice-mayor, Liu Jingmin, he explained that the Chinese “new” has a broader meaning that doesn’t translate well. “We decided to translate it into English as ‘great’ instead because the Olympics has a classical meaning,” he told me. “It didn’t seem right to say ‘new.’” But I talked with another Chinese sports official whose explanation was more frank, although he asked not to be quoted by name. “If they said ‘New Olympics’ in English, it would seem as if China wanted to change the Games,” he said. “The I.O.C. wouldn’t like that. They’d think, here’s this Communist country that’s trying to take over the Olympics.”

  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!

&
nbsp; DURING THE FIRST hour, Driver Yang stopped to talk with two other drivers, half a dozen bystanders, and two cops, and he used his cell phone to call information and get the number for the Beijing Olympic Bid Committee. The line was busy, so he telephoned the taxi communication station and asked the operators if they knew anything about potential Olympic sites. Nobody could name a specific location for any of the proposed sites north of town. Driver Yang told me not to worry; we’d get there fine. He looked worried as hell and by the time we got to the Sandy River, twenty miles north of Beijing, he asked if we could stop for a cigarette. The two cops had just told us that we needed to turn around and head to a suburb called Datun.

  “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. Down the road, a faded propaganda sign said: IMPROVING THE HIGHWAY’S ADMINISTRATION IS EVERYBODY’S RESPONSIBILITY. There weren’t any Olympic banners out here and pieces of trash blew across the road. Walking back to the cab, Driver Yang put his arm on my shoulder.

  “We’re friends, right?” he said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  On the way to Datun, he took off his driving gloves, and we chatted. Thirty years ago, Driver Yang had served in the People’s Liberation Army in Inner Mongolia. He had two children, a son and a daughter; he told me proudly that both were enrolled in college. In Datun, we passed a McDonald’s, a Popeye’s, and a Kenny Rogers Roasters. At the intersection of Anli and Huizhong roads, two cops were ticketing another cabbie. The man had picked up a fare in a no-stop zone; it was a bad week to break rules. Driver Yang pulled over and started talking fast, before the cops could yell at him.