Oracle Bones

by Peter Hessler

  “Maybe it’s because of age, but I’m so forgetful,” she said. “I forget where I put things, and I forget the new things. But I still remember all the old things. Sometimes I can even remember the details, the date, the time. My daughter says, how can you remember all of these details?”

  Wu Ningkun laughed and sipped his brandy.

  “Such as the date my husband was arrested,” she continued. “April seventeen, 1958, in the afternoon, at two o’clock. I’ll always remember the time. And I remember the three visits I made to the prison in Hebei.”

  I asked Wu how he had kept his spirits up during the years in jail and labor camp.

  “I used to think of Du Fu, Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas,” he said. “Do you know the one Dylan Thomas wrote when his father was dying? That line—‘twisting on the racks.’ From ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion.’ It had to do with the way we behave, the way we should behave. Although we were suffering, although we were being tortured, death shall have no dominion. You know, I heard Dylan Thomas recite his own poems in Chicago. I think it was in 1950. It was very touching.”

  I asked Wu if he had spoken with the Welsh poet.

  “No, I was just in the audience,” he said. “And he was more than half drunk. He didn’t know how to take care of himself. He was suffering—life was such a burden to him, I suppose.”

  WHEELCHAIR RAILS, WHITE walls, blue carpet. Outside of the retirement home, I stood blinking in the afternoon light. Before me stretched a strip mall of Americana: Burger King, Safeway, Hollywood Video, Lido Pizza, Cincinnati Cafe. I wandered into a convenience store, bought a drink, and returned to a bench in front of the retirement home. The public bus was scheduled to arrive in a few minutes. Three old ladies sat on a bench nearby. They weren’t waiting for anything but a conversation.

  “Is it good?” one of them asked. I nodded and put down the drink.

  “Watch your figure,” another woman said dryly. She had a heavy New York accent.

  “Who did you come here to see?” the third one asked.

  “Wu Ningkun,” I said. “Mr. Wu and his wife, Mrs. Li. Do you know them?”

  “Of course!”

  “Everybody knows Mr. Wu!”

  I asked why, and the three old women stared at me as if I were an idiot.

  “Because of his book, and because he went to the University of Chicago,” a woman said, matter-of-factly. Her words sounded familiar—the flat accent of the Midwest. I asked if they had read the book, and then I realized that that was another dumb question. In this particular corner of Reston, Virginia, Wu Ningkun was a hometown author.

  I asked the women what they had thought of the memoir.

  “I liked it,” said one.

  “He had a hard life,” said the Midwest.

  “Especially when they threw him into a labor camp,” said New York.

  The bus pulled up; the door hissed open. Suddenly the image was clear: three elderly sisters, spinning, weaving, snipping. I paused, unsure how to end the conversation.

  “You better get on that bus,” said New York, and I did.

  IN THE LIBRARY of Peking University, a friend helped me find a two-volume Chinese version of Leaves of Grass. It had been published in 1991, and the title page prominently listed Lucy Chao as the translator.

  In 1994, Kenneth M. Price, an American Whitman scholar, visited Lucy in Beijing. Their conversation was published in the Walt Whitman Quarterly. During the interview, Price asked how she had translated the first stanza of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” in which a long sentence builds for twenty-two lines before the subject and verb appear.

  Lucy answered, “There is no way of keeping the sentence together as one sentence because I must say that, though I want to be faithful, I also want my Chinese to be fluent.”

  I reread Whitman’s original, and then I picked up the Chinese volume. Using a dictionary for the hard characters, I did my best to bring the woman’s last three lines back into English:

  I, the singer of painful and joyous songs, the uniter of this life and the next,

  Receiving all silent signs, using them all, but then leaping across them at full speed,

  Sing of the past.

  An oracle-bone scholar once said: Those are the notes. We have to provide the music ourselves.

  Sources

  IN RIVER TOWN, I USED THE PSEUDONYM “ANNE” FOR EMILY, BECAUSE of concern about how people in Fuling might react to my writing. In the years since, I realized that I erred on the side of caution, and for Oracle Bones I decided to do away with the pseudonym (and to restore her to the appropriate Brontë). I apologize for any confusion; my only excuse is that the political climate in China creates many uncertainties for a writer.

  In English publications, the oracle-bone scholar’s name is sometimes written as Ch’en Meng-chia. For this book I have used the standard Pinyin, Chen Mengjia.

  The city of Beijing was known as “Beiping” during the Kuomintang period, when Nanjing became the capital. For the sake of clarity, I have used only one city name, “Beijing,” throughout this book.

  I have not included footnotes, because they are distracting in a work of narrative nonfiction, and the vast majority of my research involved personal interviews and observation. But I also benefited greatly from written materials, and I want to identify the sources that were most useful to each section.

  “The Underground City”

  Clifford, Nicholas R. “A Truthful Impression of the Country”: British and American Travel Writing in China, 1880-1949. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.

  I am grateful to David N. Keightley, who allowed me to read and quote his unpublished letters from China.

  “The Middleman”

  For information about the NATO bombing and subsequent protests, I consulted accounts in the Wall Street Journal, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Observer in London. The Chengdu protests are described in Craig Simons’s Master’s dissertation (“He Who Climbs On a Tiger Might Have Trouble Getting Off: Chinese Nationalism, Protest and Control.” Harvard University, 2001).

  For Uighur history, I depended most heavily on one book:

  Benson, Linda. The Ili Rebellion: The Moslem Challenge to Chinese Authority in Xinjiang 1944-1949. Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1990.

  “The Written World”

  Sima Qian. Historical Records. Translated by Raymond Dawson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

  Galambos, Imre. “The Evolution of Chinese Writing: Evidence from Newly Excavated Texts (490-221 BC).” Dissertation. University of California, Berkeley, 2002.

  “The Voice of America”

  Heil, Alan L., Jr. Voice of America: A History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

  I am grateful to William Jefferson Foster, who helped me interview his parents and relatives about the oral history of Number Ten Village.

  “The Overnight City”

  For the history of Shenzhen and China’s Special Economic Zone strategy:

  Reardon, Lawrence C. The Reluctant Dragon: Crisis Cycles in Chinese Foreign Economic Policy. Seattle: University of Washington Press and Hong Kong University Press, 2002.

  ———. “The Rise and Decline of China’s Export Processing Zones.” The Journal of Contemporary China 5 (November 1996): 281-303.

  “Hollywood”

  For background on contemporary Uighur culture and the class system:

  Rudelson, Justin Jon. Oasis Identities: Uyghur Nationalism Along China’s Silk Road. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

  For background on Falun Gong and the government crackdown:

  Johnson, Ian. Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China. New York: Pantheon Books, 2004.

  “The Voice of the Turtle”

  For the history of Chinese archaeology, the Anyang excavations, and the early oracle-bone scholars:

  Bonner, Joey. Wang Kuo-wei: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge: Harvard Uni
versity Press, 1986.

  Lawton, Thomas. “A Time of Transition: Tuan-fang, 1861-1911.” The Franklin D. Murphy Lectures XII. Lawrence, Kansas: Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1991.

  Li Chi. Anyang: A Chronicle of the Discovery, Excavation, and Reconstruction of the Ancient Capital of the Shang Dynasty. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977.

  Liu E. The Travels of Lao Can. University Press of the Pacific, 2001.

  Trigger, Bruce G. A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

  For background on Shang culture and the oracle-bone inscriptions:

  Chang Kwang-chih. Shang Civilization. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.

  Keightley, David N. The Ancestral Landscape: Time, Space, and Community in Late Shang China (ca. 1200-1045 B.C.). Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California Press, 2000.

  ———. Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

  Loewe, Michael and Edward L. Shaughnessy, eds. The Cambridge History of China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

  “At Night You’re Not Lonely”

  Miao Yong. Wode Shenghuo Yu Ni Wu Guan. Guangzhou: Huacheng Chubanshe, 1998.

  “The Courtyard”

  For background on the history of Beijing and the destruction of the old city, I relied on Ian Johnson’s Wild Grass, as well as:

  Wang Jun. Chengji. Beijing: Sanlian Shudian, 2003.

  For background on Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin:

  Fairbank, Wilma. Liang and Lin: Partners in Exploring China’s Architectural Past. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.

  “Bronze Heads”

  Bagley, Robert, ed. Ancient Sichuan: Treasures from a Lost Civilization. Seattle: Seattle Art Museum in association with Princeton University Press, 2001.

  ———. “Shang Archaeology.” The Cambridge History of China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C. Edited by Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

  Von Falkenhausen, Lothar. “On the Historiographical Orientation of Chinese Archaeology.” Antiquity 67 (1993): 839-49.

  “The Book”

  Chen Mengjia. Yin Xu Buci Zong Shu. Beijing: Kexue Chubanshe, 1956.

  Kaogusuo, bianji. Mei Diguo Zhuyi Jieluede Wo Guo Yin Zhou Tongqi Tulu. Beijing: Kexue Chubanshe, 1962.

  Paper, Jordan. “The Meaning of the ‘T’ao-T’ieh’.” History of Religions 18 (1978): 18-41.

  Wu Ningkun. A Single Tear: A Family’s Persecution, Love, and Endurance in Communist China. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993.

  “The Uncracked Bone”

  Chen Mengjia’s poetry has not been published in English. I am deeply indebted to Frances Feng, who translated many of Chen’s poems so they could be reprinted in this book. All of my quotes are from Frances Feng’s translations.

  Chen’s poems and other writings in the original Chinese may be found in the following sources:

  Chen Mengjia. Chen Mengjia Juan. Wuhan: Changjiang Wenyi Chubanshe, 1988.

  Chen Mengjia. Tie Ma Ji. 1934.

  Xin Yue Shi Xuan. Shanghai: Xin Yue Shudian, 1933.

  Elinor Pearlstein of the Art Institute of Chicago researched Chen Mengjia’s years in the United States, visiting the archives of the Rockefeller Foundation and many museums. She generously allowed me to read her manuscript, “Chen Mengjia in the West: Scholarship Realized, Lost, Preserved.” I am indebted to her for many of the details of Chen’s American and European travels. My quotes from Chen’s letter to the Rockefeller Foundation and from Langdon Warner’s letter to Chen are from Elinor Pearlstein’s paper.

  I am also grateful to Jason Steuber of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, who provided me with copies of Chen’s letters from 1945, which are in the museum archives in Kansas City.

  I also relied on the following Chinese publications:

  Wang Shimin. “Chen Mengjia.” Zhongguo Shixuejia Pingzhuan (Xia Ce). Beijing: Zhongguo Guji Chubanshe, 1985.

  Zhao Luorui. Wode Du Shu Shengya. Beijing: Beijing Daxue Chubanshe, 1996.

  For the oracle bones and other aspects of David N. Keightley’s research, I relied on the previously mentioned volumes (Sources of Shang History and The Ancestral Landscape), as well as the following:

  Elvin, Mark. The Pattern of the Chinese Past: A Social and Economic Interpretation. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1973.

  Keightley, David N. “Art, Ancestors, and the Origins of Writing in China.” Representations 56 (1996): 68-95.

  ———. “Clean Hands and Shining Helmets: Heroic Action in Early Chinese and Greek Culture.” Religion and the Authority of the Past. Edited by Tobin Siebers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.

  ———. “The Making of the Ancestors: Late Shang Religion and Its Legacy.” Religion and Chinese Society. Edited by John Lagerwey. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2004.

  ———. “The Origins of Writing in China: Scripts and Cultural Contexts.” The Origins of Writing. Edited by Wayne M. Senner. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.

  ———. “Shamanism, Death, and the Ancestors: Religious Mediation in Neolithic and Shang China (ca. 5000-1000 B.C.).” Asiatische Studien Études Asiatiques LII.3 (1998): 763-831.

  ———. “What Did Make the Chinese ‘Chinese’?: Musings of a Would-Be Geographical Determinist.” Warring States Working Group, Amherst, Massachusetts. 8 October 2000.

  “The Games”

  Bredon, Juliet. Peking. Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1920.

  Chinese Olympic Committee, eds. 5,000 Years of Physical Culture & Sports in China. Beijing: Beijing Physical Education University, 1996.

  Jennings, Andrew. The New Lords of the Rings: Olympic Corruption and How to Buy Gold Medals. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

  Senn, Alfred E. Power, Politics, and the Olympic Games: A History of the Power Brokers, Events, and Controversies That Shaped the Games. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1999.

  “The Word”

  Lewis, Mark Edward. Writing and Authority in Early China. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

  Takashima, Ken-ichi. “A Cosmography of Shang Oracle-Bone Graphs.” Actes du Colloque International Commémorant le Centenaire de la Découverte des Inscriptions sur Os et Carapaces. Edited by S. C. Yau. Paris: Cenre Recherche Linguistiques sur l’Asia Orientale, 2001.

  “Translation”

  Chuang Tzu. Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu. Translated by Victor H. Mair. New York: Bantam Books, 1994.

  “The Horse”

  Hadingham, Evan. “The Mummies of Xinjiang.” Discover April 1994: 68-77. (A condensed version of Hadingham’s article was subsequently published in Reader’s Digest, August 1994)

  Mair, Victor H., ed. The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia: Volume I. Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications, 1998.

  ———. “The Horse in Late Prehistoric China: Wresting Culture and Control from the ‘Barbarians.’” Prehistoric Steppe Adaptation and the Horse. Edited by Marsha Levine, Colin Renfrew and Katie Boyle. Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2003.

  ———. “Mummies of the Tarim Basin.” Archaeology March/April 1995: 28-35.

  ———. “The North(west)ern Peoples and the Recurrent Origins of the ‘Chinese’ State.” The Teleology of the Modern Nation-State: Japan and China. Edited by Joshua A. Fogel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

  ———. “Prehistoric Caucasoid Corpses of the Tarim Basin.” The Journal of Indo-European Studies 23 (1995): 281-307.

  Wang Binghua. The Ancient Corpses of Xinjiang: The Peoples of Ancient Xinjiang and Their Culture. Translated by Victor H. Mair. Urumqi: Xinjiang Renmin Chubanshe,
1999.

  “Wonton Western”

  For Jiang Wen’s role in the Chinese intellectual climate of the early 1990s:

  Barmé, Geremie R. In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

  “Election”

  Shih Chang-ju, with the assistance of Liu Hsiu-wen, Feng Jong-meei, and Lai Shu-li. Hou Chia Chuang (The Yin-Shang Cemetery Site at Anyang, Honan): Volume X: Descriptions of Small Tombs: One. Taipei: Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, 2001.

  The following book, whose title translates as, “The Returned Swan: Memoirs of an Intelligence Agent Who Worked Behind Enemy Lines,” tells the story of Jacky Lin’s father:

  Lin Kunrong. Gui Hong: Yige Dihou Qingbaoyuan de Huiyi. Taipei: Renjian Chubanshe, 1989.

  “The Criticism”

  Li Xueqin. “Ping Chen Mengjia Yin Xu Buci Zong Shu.” Kaogu Xuebao Di San Qi (1957): 119-29.

  Wang Shixiang. Classic Chinese Furniture: Ming and Early Qing Dynasties. Translated by Sarah Handler and Wang Shixiang. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 2000.