In the police station, my discourse on the Electoral College was particularly unsuccessful. The cops looked bored; finally, all of them left, except for the man who seemed the youngest. The moment that we were alone, he said, “How much money does a policeman make in America?”
THE LONGER WE were alone, the less friendly the young officer became. I tried to win points by saying that my brother-in-law was a policeman in Missouri, but that didn’t seem to help. The Chinese cop started asking questions slowly, as if the notion of handling an interrogation were new to him, but soon he was shooting them across the room. He didn’t seem to care much about what had happened in the village; most of the questions were about the United States.
“Which place is safer?” he said. “China or the United States?”
“China,” I said. It hadn’t been long since I’d visited Rhode Island Avenue.
“Why are there so many people living on the streets in America?” he said. “Why doesn’t the government give them money?”
“The government gives some money to poor people,” I said. “Not a lot, but some. Often the people on the streets are mentally ill.”
“No, they’re not. They’re just poor.”
I shrugged; the man spoke again: “Why do people in America have guns?”
“It’s a right,” I said. “It’s in the Constitution.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Do you know that it’s against the law to sleep on the Great Wall?”
“No,” I said. “There wasn’t a sign, and the locals said that other people had done it recently.”
“They don’t know the rules,” he said. “You need to read the law. That’s why you’re in trouble. You’ve broken a number of Chinese laws. You aren’t allowed to report without permission, and you didn’t carry your passport. We can fine you fifty yuan for not having your passport.”
“I’ll pay it now,” I said. It was the equivalent of six dollars. The cop shook his head and before he could ask another question I requested a trip to the bathroom.
HE STOOD NEAR the urinal, waiting. When we returned, his expression became even sterner.
“Why do they provide birth control to middle-school students in America?” he said.
For the first time that day, I was completely speechless. He repeated the question:
“Why do they provide birth control to middle-school students in America?”
“I think you mean high-school students,” I said at last. “They don’t give them to middle-school kids.” I had no idea why I said that; for some reason the specific age group seemed extremely important to me at that moment.
“It is middle school,” he said. “I’ve read about it. Why do they do that?”
This time I said nothing.
“That’s a difference between China and America,” he said triumphantly. “Things are much more open in America. Women are more open.”
AT THE END, there was mostly silence. If he asked a question, I answered as briefly as possible: yes, no, I don’t know. Finally he looked at his watch.
“You’ve broken the law,” he said. “You are required to carry your passport, and you must request permission before you report. You are not allowed to sleep on a cultural relic. All of these things are against the law. You could be fined, but we will waive it today. You must never do this again. Do you understand?”
He escorted me to the police station’s front gate. Four hours had passed since the police had picked me up at Xituogu. I didn’t see the other cops; they must have instructed the young man to hold me a while longer, to teach a lesson. I caught a cab on the street. Driving out of Not-Old Station, I realized that the way I felt—filthy and tired, angry and frustrated—reminded me exactly of bad days as a schoolchild.
ARTIFACT H
The Word
WORDS IN CHINA HAVE ALWAYS SEEMED ALIVE. THE VOCABULARY OF a calligraphy connoisseur is physiological: the “bone” and “breath” and “muscle” of a written word. The first Chinese character dictionary was compiled around A.D. 100, during the Eastern Han dynasty, and the author’s afterword described the legendary invention of writing. The creator, Cang Jie, was a demigod with four eyes:
He observed the footprints of birds and beasts, and recognized that meaningful patterns could be distinguished. For the first time he created graphs and tallies…. When Cang Jie first made graphs, he relied on categories and the imaging of shapes. Therefore they were called [wen, “patterns”]. Later the “form and sound” graphs increased and these were called [zi, “compound graphs”]. are the roots and images of things. means to be fruitful, multiply, and gradually increase. When written on bamboo and silk, they were called [shu, “writing”]. “Writing” means “to resemble.”
Animals leave tracks; tracks are copied into patterns; patterns combine to create new patterns. Words mate—pieces of one character are attached to pieces of another—to create new words. Writing originates from the world of living things and it behaves the same way.
After Cang Jie’s invention, according to legend, the heavens rained millet and ghosts wept all night long.
AT THE UNIVERSITY of Washington at Seattle, I interview a professor of Chinese, and he mentions that Ken-ichi Takashima has just arrived to teach a summer course. The name sounds familiar, and then I remember David N. Keightley’s story: Professor Takashima once tried to crack an oracle bone with a soldering iron.
I find the scholar in a temporary office, where he is unpacking some belongings. A native of Japan, he is a short, wispily goateed man in gold-rimmed glasses. He speaks fluent English with an accent, and his academic career has always involved crossing cultures. After studying at Japan’s Sophia University, which is run by Jesuits, he attended the University of Washington for graduate school. Originally, he researched linguistics, but he became interested in Shang writing after studying under Father Paul Serruys, a Belgian priest and accomplished oracle bone scholar.
Like Keightley, Takashima’s path to the bones was indirect, and he has often applied his background in linguistics to the study of Shang writing. Most recently, he and another scholar noticed that the inscriptions of different Shang diviners follow different grammatical patterns. This may reflect multiple dialects or languages—a possible sign that the Shang royal court involved more diversity than previously imagined.
The professor shakes my hand, and his face lights up when I mention that I’m researching the story of Chen Mengjia.
“Chen Mengjia was a great scholar,” Professor Takashima says. “His 1956 general introduction to the oracle bones is still a chrestomathy.”
From his mouth to my notes, the word mutates: “crestmathy.” I stare at what I’ve written, and then I admit, “I’ve never heard that word before. What does it mean?”
“Masterpiece,” he says. “Chen Mengjia’s book is a masterpiece.” The professor opens a dictionary, and then his face falls.
“My understanding of this word—” he mutters. “It’s not my understanding…”
He shows me the printed definition:
a selection of literary passages used to study literature or languages.
He grabs another dictionary from the shelf. “It’s the same thing,” he says. “‘A collection of passages from literature’. I wish I could find a better dictionary than this. I may have been misusing the word. I usually rely on the OED.”
He fiddles with a computer. Today was his first day teaching; he is moving into a new office; a journalist has just dropped in unexpectedly. But at this particular moment, the word is the biggest distraction of all. He tries to go on-line; he searches the office for a better dictionary. I wait in silence. I haven’t spent much time in the company of scholars of ancient writing, but already I’ve learned that these people have a unique relationship with language. Professor Takashima speaks fluent Japanese, English, and Chinese; he reads ancient Chinese texts for a living. Words matter. Gently, I try to bring the interview back: “So Chen Mengjia’s book was a masterpiece?”
“Yes, it’s a masterpiece.” He looks up. “People still use it. It covers almost everything; it’s very comprehensive. When I’m researching something, Chen Mengjia’s book is the one that I always go to.”
Finally, the word is gone, and now he picks up another thread:
“When I was at Tokyo University, I heard some rumors about him. Some of the professors said that Chen Mengjia died fairly young, and they said it was not natural. There was something political about it. I don’t know how to verify this or not. But usually the Japanese are pretty good about this. They won’t tell rumors that aren’t true.”
He continues: “You know, he also wrote a book about Chinese bronzes. And the title, when translated into English, is something like Chinese Bronzes Stolen by the American Imperialists. It’s a very hard-to-get book. A professor at Tokyo University reprinted it with the original title. Chen was calling the U.S. a kind of imperialist. I don’t see why he titled it in that way.”
I explain what I’ve learned about the book, and I tell Professor Takashima that Chen Mengjia committed suicide in 1966. I mention that, although I have only begun to research the story, some people have told me that Chen’s troubles began when he opposed the reform of Chinese writing.
“Good for him,” the professor says. The response is instinctive; immediately he catches himself. “That’s not what I meant,” he says quickly. “I understand that as a result he was put in a position where he had to commit suicide. That’s terrible. I just mean that I also do not like the simplification of Chinese characters.”
TAKASHIMA LAUGHS WHEN I mention the cracked bone. “Keightley quoted that in his book!” he says. “I couldn’t believe it.” He shakes his head, and then he tells the story:
In June of 1969, when Takashima was a graduate student, he decided to crack an oracle bone. He went to a Seattle meat shop, where he purchased some steaks and convinced the butchers to throw in a couple of meatless scapulas. (“They asked, ‘What are you doing with this?’ I said, ‘I want to crack it.’ They gave it to me for free.”) Along with his fellow students, Takashima hosted a party, where Father Paul Serruys occupied the Shang role of the “presiding priest”—the oracle bone diviner. Takashima was the technician.
“First I tried it with the soldering iron,” he remembers. “It’s electric and the heat was not intense enough. It just made a little scorch—that’s it. So I used the electric soldering iron plus the burning charcoal. It made the bone really hot. And it made a terrible stench.”
He continues: “Apparently there are different theories about how to prepare it—maybe you soak it in vinegar, or something like that. I had just dried the bone in the oven beforehand. And it wouldn’t crack. Father Serruys and the other students were disappointed, so we just went back to eating and drinking. I gave up. I threw the scapula into the barbecue. We forgot about it, and then it started to crack like crazy. Pop pop pop! Historical linguistics are always trying to reconstruct ancient sounds. Well, that was a real reconstruction of the phonological system! It sounded like the Chinese word bu.”
He pauses to write a character onto a scrap of paper. It means “divine; tell fortunes,” and the shape resembles a crack in a bone:
“In modern Chinese it’s pronounced bu,” he explains. “But in ancient Chinese it was buk. And the bone sounded just like that! More like a p sound, though—to me, it sounded like, Pok pok pok pok! It was a really sharp sound. I wrote a letter to Keightley, and he reproduced this in a footnote in his book Sources of Shang History. I couldn’t believe it! And he said that Takashima has reconstructed the cracking in a Neolithic way!”
DESPITE THE SYMBOLIC neatness of the ancient Chinese theory about the origins of writing—from animal tracks to words—nobody knows how it really happened. Naturally, there aren’t any records of how humans first learned to record things.
“It’s such a giant step,” Takashima says. “This step to writing, after thousands of years of oral communication. You know, the history of writing isn’t that long. But once it began, civilization progressed by leaps and bounds. It’s tremendous. Writing is really the great engine for progress in human civilization. Basically, that progress has been during the last three thousand years, whereas human history is fifty thousand, maybe seventy thousand years long. All of those years, they really didn’t do much because there was no writing. What made people first feel the necessity to write things down?”
We talk about Chinese writing, and the professor mentions that he has published a paper about the squareness of Chinese characters. Over the centuries, their form changed: Shang words were slightly elongated, but by the Han dynasty they had been pressed into a square shape, now known as fangkuaizi.
“I’m interested in the cosmography,” he says. “I’m interested in the Chinese view of what the world is like. Where it comes from, I don’t know. But it seems that they looked at things as if they were square. Not only the writing, but also in terms of the geographical.”
In the oracle bone inscriptions, the Shang world is always described in terms of the four cardinal directions. Shang tombs and cities, and the walls that often surrounded them, were also arranged strictly according to the compass. Professor Takashima jots down the modern character cheng. It’s often used as part of two terms: “city,” and “city wall”:
He notes that the ancient form of the character contained one element that is shaped like a box: . When written alone, indicated a “squared area” or “demarcated area”—basically, a settlement. And the Old Chinese pronunciation of and sounded similar.
“It’s like the Greek idea of the barbarians,” he says. “Those who are living within the city are civilized; those who are living outside of it are barbarians. functions like that. And the city walls are square, basically. They were rectangular in the Shang, but it’s essentially the same shape. There were never any round walls or any other shape. The Chinese must have had some very ingrained notion of what the world should look like.”
He continues: “Maybe twenty or thirty years ago, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra said something about Chinese music. He said that the music sounded like Chinese characters. What he meant was that the sound came in chunks. He said that Western music is not that way.
“When I heard this, I thought, what is he talking about? But when I was working on this idea of squareness, I suddenly thought that maybe it’s not so far off. He was describing music as chunks instead of as a flow. It’s very impressionistic, but I thought that perhaps he is hitting something really deep down in the primordial level of consciousness.”
MORE THAN A year later, while reading David N. Keightley’s Sources of Shang History, I reach page sixty-six, paragraph two. The first sentence is long and crawling with commas—a swarm of words across the page. One catches my eye:
The standard introduction to oracle-bone grammar, despite its unsystematic and dated nature, is still the chrestomathy of Chen Mengjia, which leads the student through word order, particles, time words, pronouns, verbs, modifiers, numbers, demonstratives, connectives, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, negatives, omissions and abbreviations, and sentence types.
And even later, when I meet Professor Takashima again, he mentions that a Czech scholar named David Sehnal has successfully cracked a cattle scapula. The key was placing charcoal next to the bone and then blowing on it to make it even hotter. In the Czech Republic, the voice of the cracked bone sounded exactly the same as it had in Seattle: Pok pok pok pok!
15
Translation
April 1, 2001
IN THE WORLD OF U.S.-CHINA RELATIONS, IT WAS POSSIBLE FOR A disagreement to begin with a plane wreck and then, over the course of eleven days, to become distilled to an adverb and a noun. The event could have been an exercise in linguistics, or perhaps a fable—something out of Chuang Tzu, the ancient Taoist classic:
Once upon a time Chuang Chou dreamed that he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting about happily enjoying himself. He didn’t kno
w that he was Chou. Suddenly he awoke and was palpably Chou. He did not know whether he was Chou who had dreamed of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that he was Chou. Now, there must be a difference between Chou and the butterfly. This is called the transformation of things.
ONCE UPON A time, on the morning of April 1, 2001, two military planes collided in international airspace high above the South China Sea. One plane was American, the other Chinese. The Chinese craft—an F-8 fighter—was badly damaged. The American plane was bigger: a Navy EP-3E Aries II, designed to gather the electronic communications of foreign militaries. After the collision, the Navy plane plummeted nearly eight thousand feet, regained control, and requested permission to make an emergency landing on China’s Hainan Island. Airport control didn’t respond; the plane landed anyway. The American crew consisted of twenty-four men and women, who were promptly taken into custody by the People’s Liberation Army.
The Chinese F-8 was piloted by a thirty-three-year-old lieutenant named Wang Wei. His plane crashed into the sea.
None of these events was witnessed by an independent, nonmilitary observer.
Within hours, government officials of each country presented very different descriptions of the incident.
Neither nation’s top leader issued a statement on the first day.
ON APRIL 2, President George W. Bush spoke. This was the first major foreign policy test of his presidency. The American media speculated that this incident could set the tone for the Bush administration’s future dealings with the outside world.
Standing on the White House lawn, the president did not apologize for the collision, and he did not express condolences to the family of Wang Wei. His words were straightforward: “Our priorities are the prompt and safe return of the crew and the return of the aircraft without further tampering.”
Oracle Bones Page 35
