Oracle Bones

by Peter Hessler

  The committee described simplification as an “initial reform stage.” They still hoped to introduce an alphabet, but it seemed that Mao wanted more time to consider the options. Meanwhile, the relatively optimistic early years of the People’s Republic were coming to an end. In April of 1957, the Communist Party launched the “Hundred Flowers” campaign, during which intellectuals were invited to speak their minds, however critical. The response was overwhelming: thousands of Chinese commented publicly on all sorts of topics. Writing reform became one target of dissatisfied intellectuals, and dozens of commentaries appeared in the popular press:

  Chinese is a tool for uniting our people…. The only reason that we could continue to be a united people is that Chinese characters held us together.

  The Latin alphabet is not our national product…. If we Latinize Chinese writing, then we will be fighting the world for Latin writing!

  Ours is a democratic country which carries out peaceful policies; it cannot justify the adoption of the historically aggressive Latin writing…. Whenever one thing in China is inferior to that in foreign countries, Chinese people feel that everything is inferior to that in foreign countries.

  UNTIL THE HUNDRED Flowers, Chen Mengjia hadn’t been active in the debates over writing reform. His department, the Institute of Archaeology, was separate, and the oracle bone scholar never had the opportunity to speak out. But in the new climate of openness, his words suddenly appeared everywhere in the popular press. In an essay in Guangming Daily, he wrote, “There must be objective reasons why we are still using these characters after more than three thousand years.” In People’s Daily: “It seems there is a new type of dogmatism; some people take the leaders’ words as the golden rule and ignore reality.” Chen complained about the common practice of reporting on others for political mistakes; he remarked that many officials had little or no knowledge of the fields that they administered. He suggested that the Communist Party could use a better sense of humor. He remarked, “I dislike dogma very much, and in my writing I seldom quote Marxist-Leninist phrases.” In a published speech, he declared:

  With today’s “Hundred Flowers Movement,” I think the time is perfect to discuss honestly the future of Chinese characters. I am going to present a different opinion, without any reservations….

  We have used characters for over three thousand years, and there hasn’t been anything wrong with them…. In the past, foreign devils said that the Chinese language was bad. Now more open scholars from the capitalist countries don’t say so anymore….

  Recently I wrote an article and caused some disturbances. I am willing to make troubles like this, because I want to contribute…. I predict that we will still be using these characters for a number of years, and we should treat them as if they were alive. They are our cultural inheritance.

  He was right—the Chinese would continue to use characters for many years—but he was wrong about this being the perfect time to speak openly. After only five weeks, Mao terminated the Hundred Flowers, and soon it was replaced by a new movement: the anti-Rightist campaign. By the end of 1957, more than three hundred thousand intellectuals had been labeled Rightists; many were sent to jail or labor camps. The same newspapers that had published Chen’s opinions now ran angry headlines:

  CRITICIZE CHEN MENGJIA

  REFUTE THE RIGHTIST ELEMENT CHEN

  MENGJIA’S ABSURD THEORY

  CONTINUE THE PURSUIT AND ATTACK OF THE

  RIGHTISTS: CRITICIZE CHEN MENGJIA AND

  GUAN XI

  One article proclaimed, “The Rightist Element Chen Mengjia, a blade of grass that is poisonous…should never be allowed to root deep.” Another described him as a “cow demon” with an “evil scheme”: “Why do counterrevolutionaries of all eras hate simplified characters? Do they really want to return to antiquity?” Somebody wrote, “Chen is still picking up the morsels of the Western capitalist sinologists, and treating them as delicacies.” It was during this campaign, in 1957, that Li Xueqin published his criticism of Chen’s chrestomathy.

  And from Chen—silence. The authorities sent the oracle bone scholar to Henan province, the cradle of Shang culture, to be reformed through manual labor. For the next five years he was banned from publishing in the People’s Republic.

  AFTER SPEAKING WITH Yin Binyong, I climb three floors and gain eight years in writing reformer age. Wang Jun is eighty, and he smiles when I mention Chen Mengjia. “He was my teacher during the war, in Kunming,” Wang says. “He taught bronze inscriptions. It was a small class, only three students. He was like an older brother to us.”

  From newspaper archives, I have collected a number of criticisms of Chen, and now I show them to Wang, asking if he remembers any of the authors. He leafs through the pages, noting that several are obvious pen names. Then he recognizes a couple: a phonologist from Nanjing, a linguist from Fujian. Both scholars have been dead for years.

  “You shouldn’t worry about these criticisms,” Wang says. “The things that people said and wrote in those days don’t count. They had no freedom. If the Communist Party wanted to criticize somebody, everybody had to do it. I was also criticized that year. I made a comment during the Hundred Flowers, and then my institute held a special meeting to criticize me. Even the people who didn’t know me had to say something. The ones who criticized me the harshest, I hardly remember them. I don’t hate them. So you shouldn’t be concerned about who wrote these articles.”

  I nod, and we chat for a while about the writing reform movement. At one point, during a discussion of prominent opponents, I mention the name Yuan Xiaoyuan.

  Wang Jun’s head becomes very still. He says quietly, “What do you know about her?”

  “Not much. John DeFrancis said that he didn’t like her. He said that she opposed writing reform.”

  DeFrancis had described Yuan Xiaoyuan as a consummate opportunist. She had spent much of her life abroad as a diplomat for the Kuomintang—she was China’s first female consul, having served in Calcutta—but then she switched her allegiance from the Kuomintang to the People’s Republic. Out of gratitude, the Communists granted her favorable business licenses, and she made a fortune. She funneled some of her money into a journal that opposed the writing reform movement. After the crackdown on the pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989, Yuan Xiaoyuan immediately appeared on Chinese television to condemn the protestors.

  “That woman is a liar,” Wang Jun says. “She lies about everything, including her age. She’s ninety-five years old, but she says she’s one hundred.”

  Something about the man’s face has changed. He still smiles, but his jaw has tightened and there is a light behind his eyes.

  “She used to be younger than Zhou Youguang,” he says. “Now she’s older than Zhou Youguang. How do you think that happened?”

  I say that I have no idea.

  “Simple,” he says. “She lies. She lies about everything.”

  The man is still smiling, and I smile back. Less than ten minutes ago he was talking about forgiveness.

  “I have evidence,” he says. He walks to a cabinet and retrieves a folder. It contains a sheaf of photocopies and yellowed newspaper clippings. The man’s eyes brighten.

  “First, look at this.” He hands me a page from a government yearbook, which features a photograph. A grandmother: soft smile, permed hair, bad glasses. Her birthdate is listed as 1907.

  “Now,” Wang Jun says triumphantly, “look at this!”

  The newspaper clipping is from the year 2000. The headline reads:

  YUAN XIAOYUAN, POET AND CALLIGRAPHER,

  CELEBRATES HER HUNDREDTH BIRTHDAY

  IN BEIJING

  The next clipping is from the year 2001:

  ONE-HUNDRED-YEAR-OLD YUAN XIAOYUAN

  TALKS ABOUT HER HEALTH

  Sections of the articles have been meticulously underlined, in red ink. One underlined sentence identifies Yuan’s birth year as 1901. Another sentence notes that she is 101 years old. In the margin, somebody ha
s written “94” in tight red script, like a correction on a school assignment.

  “It’s in the newspaper every year,” Wang Jun says. “She lies about it every year. That’s how she became older than Zhou Youguang.”

  He points to another underlined section.

  “She claims that she used to be a professor at ‘West-East University’ in New Jersey,” he says. “Who ever heard of ‘West-East University’? What a stupid name! She also claims to have taught at ‘San Francisco University.’ There is no San Francisco University!”

  In the articles, each bogus academic institution has also been underlined in red. Before I leave, Wang Jun hands me the clippings; he suggests that exposing Yuan Xiaoyuan’s lies would make an excellent detail for my New Yorker article. The last thing he tells me is, “She writes well. Actually, she’s a good poet, and she has very good calligraphy. But she is a liar.”

  IT’S DARK BY the time I reach the third floor. Sixteen more years: Zhou Youguang is about to turn ninety-seven, a frail, stooped man who is dressed in sweatpants and slippers. The skin on his bald head is perfectly smooth, as if polished by the decades. When we speak, I have to lean close and shout while the man cups a hand around his hearing aid. But his mind is sharp, and he still remembers English. In the 1940s, he was a banker in New York.

  “I used to read your magazine in the Banker’s Club!” he says.

  I yell at him: “It’s changed since then!”

  The man can’t stop laughing after he sees my name card, and I explain the Foreign Ministry translation. “New York Person!” he says in Chinese, his tiny body shaking like a willow in the wind. “New York Person! How funny!”

  Like many patriotic young Chinese who had been living abroad, Zhou returned to China after the founding of the People’s Republic. Originally, he intended to help the new government establish its banking industry, but he quickly sensed that there wasn’t much of a future in Communist banking. He switched to his hobby of linguistics, and eventually became the main architect of Pinyin.

  I ask Zhou what happened to the four new distinctively “Chinese” alphabets that had been chosen as finalists in 1955. He remembers them vaguely—one alphabet, the old man recalls, had been designed by a physicist named Ding Xilin. But apparently all records of those alphabets had been destroyed. “It was easy to lose things like that during the Cultural Revolution,” he says.

  The Cultural Revolution is perceived in different ways: some blame Mao; others blame his wife and the Gang of Four. But a longer perspective views the period as a climax of China’s long disillusionment with its own traditions. For more than half a century, the Chinese had chipped away at their culture, trying to replace the “backward” elements. During the Cultural Revolution, this process became so fervent that it reached the point of pure destruction: people hated everything Chinese, but they also hated everything foreign.

  Ironically, the Cultural Revolution protected at least one Chinese tradition: the characters. Along with the Great Leap Forward, the chaos of the period prevented the writing reform campaigns from moving forward. By the time Mao died, the Chinese had lost their appetite for radical cultural change. They had passed from crisis to ideology to nihilism—and then they came out on the other side, settling on pragmatism and the slogans of Deng Xiaoping. Be practical and realistic. Seek truth from facts.

  Nowadays, practically nobody in China talks about alphabetization, apart from the old men who live in one entryway of the State Language Commission dormitory. Even these scholars speak of it sadly. Zhou Youguang tells me that China won’t give up its characters for at least another century, if ever. Like most linguists, he describes the simplification of the characters as a failure. There’s no evidence that simplification has improved literacy rates, because the fundamental structure of the writing system didn’t change. If anything, character simplification only divides the Chinese literary world. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and most other overseas Chinese communities still use the traditional characters. For years, it was illegal for a Taiwanese to import a book that contained simplified characters. That restriction was politically motivated, but nowadays the disgust is mostly aesthetic. For a traditionally educated Chinese, writing simplified characters is like walking thru the Kwik-mart 2 by sumthing.

  I ASK ZHOU YOUGUANG about the critical moment, Mao’s call for a Chinese alphabet in 1950. To my surprise, the old man takes the question in stride.

  “Of course, the Party was already using a Latinized system in the 1940s,” he says. “So it seemed natural that they would make a change. But once they came to power, they were more cautious. They had so many other things to take care of. That was one factor in the delay.

  “But another very important factor was Mao’s first trip to the Soviet Union, in 1949. At that time, Mao respected Stalin as a leader of the Communist world. He explained that China was going to undertake writing reform, and he asked Stalin for advice about it. Stalin told him, ‘You’re a great country, and you should have your own Chinese form of writing. You shouldn’t simply use the Latin alphabet.’ That’s why Mao wanted a national-in-form alphabet.”

  I ask if the Korean War played a role, and he shakes his bald head. The old man smiles when I shout out Chen Mengjia’s name.

  “I liked him a lot,” Zhou Youguang says. “But, to be frank, his opposition had no impact on any of this.”

  BACK DOWN: THIRD floor, second, first. The entryway opens to a city that feels as big as the world. Of all the details that swirl in my mind—the human-horse relationship, the shifting birthdate of Yuan Xiaoyuan, the lost alphabets—I’m most struck by the realization that Chen Mengjia’s defense, however brave and however much it cost him, was completely unnecessary. Joseph Stalin had already saved the Chinese characters.

  22

  Encapsulate Prime

  June 2002

  IN THE MONTHS AFTER 9/11, WILLIAM JEFFERSON FOSTER CONTINUED to follow the news closely. Sometimes he telephoned me in Beijing, often with a question about the situation in Afghanistan or some other development in the war on terror. At night, he listened to the Voice of America, writing in his journal:

  US fighter-jet resumes it’s mission on Afganistan

  More anthrax cases surface in U.S.A.

  Pakistani police clash with anti-protestant

  Peaceful anti-war demonstration in New York, Berlin

  God Bless George W. Bush

  He also translated commentaries from the local press:

  It’s interesting that the two brother cities, Ningbo and Wenzhou, are both aimed at becoming the China’s Milan. There must be fierce competition between the two cities. Wenzhou wants to be the capital of clothes as well of leather shoes. “Dressing in Wenzhou” is a quite eye-catching slogan in downtown Wenzhou.

  And occasionally he wrote English “news” stories in his journal, based on his own experiences:

  Last year this school achieved great success. Some 25 students were recruited to the only key high school in this city. This year the school is facing fierce challenge from the outside society—a public newly-built school which is aimed at making our school go bankrupt….

  Competition was everywhere. Willy and Nancy’s school competed with the public school; their city competed with Ningbo; China competed with the outside world. One of Willy’s most powerful childhood memories was watching his father initially succeed and then fail with his contracting work, a victim of his own illiteracy. That was the story of Willy and Nancy’s generation: they had grown up with China’s reforms, children of the market economy.

  At the start of the 2001-2002 academic year, Willy’s headmaster gathered all the instructors together and gave a motivational speech. He exhorted them to battle the public school on three fronts, just as the Communists had fought the Kuomintang during the civil war. Later, when Willy told me about the speech, he couldn’t remember exactly what the school’s three fronts were. Over the years, there had been so many Chinese slogans with numbers—the three this, the five that—an
d inevitably they blurred. The important point was that the struggle between the schools had become a war. In one letter, Willy wrote:

  Hi yagao [toothpaste]:

  I am sure that this Spring Festival I will stay in Zhejiang. We are required to give so-called extra lessons to the Yahoo students…. The year 2002 this school will have fierce competition and challenges from the fucking Public Boarding school that I hoped will be bombed by Osama Bin Laden. By the way, how is your family? And what’s new in there?

  I want to bye to you now. Right now I have to coach my top students who are my money and hope in the new year of 2002.

  A couple of months later, after Willy and Nancy’s bank account finally cleared one hundred thousand yuan, the stakes became even higher:

  Hi peter

  How is it going with you in Beijing? First I wil tell that possibably in one year I will be a yahoo’s father. That’s to say Nancy is in the family way here in Wenzhou.

  These days I am quite busy with the coming High School Examination. This year rather crucial for me. I was told that if we can let more students go to the only key school, I can get a decent bonus for this.