"Oracle Bones"

[fiefoe]

This is the most ambitious of all three Peter Hessler books I've read. It's got his trademark thoughtfulness, but wanders a bit too freely from the past to the present.
I suddenly wonder if there's a Chinese counterpart to Hessler who writes about the US like this.

• Where are the gentry estates, the mansions, the great houses of England and France? What was it about this society that failed to produce such monuments to civilized aristocratic living?
• In the traditional view of the Chinese past, there is no equivalent of the fall of Rome, no Renaissance, no Enlightenment. Instead, emperor succeeds emperor, and dynasty follows dynasty. History as wallpaper.
• Usually, we ordered Yanjing beer. The restaurant manager would step down from the platform, open a manhole cover on the sidewalk, and pull out two bottles. The cool water inside the manhole served as the restaurant's beverage refrigeration system.
• Often, the Uighurs' fate hadn't been shaped by language, culture, or tradition; the whim of great foreign leaders mattered much more.
• Censorship captures the imagination, but the process of creation might be even more destructive. In order to write a story, and create meaning out of events, you deny other possible interpretations. The history of China.. was written at the expense of other stories that have remained silent.
• "There are certain cultures, like the Byzantine and the Chinese, in which the written documents create a world that is more significant than the real world.".. They produced this (enormous written world) that's so big that it eats them up and it eats up everybody around them."
• Here in Anyang, and anywhere in China, the present controls access to the past.
• The urban landscape was marked by the type of premature aging that was characteristic of Chinese boomtowns.
• Every product came with a tale that was intended to sooth suspicions: a narrative warranty... I felt a sense of brotherhood with anybody who peddled stories.
• Like many other middle-aged and older intellectuals whom I met in China, Mr. Wang didn't perceive his career as a narrative. Instead, it consisted of a series of mostly unrelated vignettes.
• "But the truth is that it's much easier once you realized that your product is inferior. Then you can focus on just doing business!".. Whenever I met people like him, I understood why the transition from Communism to a market economy had been handled so well by many Chinese.
• Often they had big lass windows in the shade green that was so common in modern Chinese construction. That color always made me think of The Great Gatsby - the glow at the end of Daisy's dock... But in Fujian, it was like glimpsing light that had taken years to cross a galaxy. Some of these success stories had belonged to an earlier generation.
• Beijing is in the midst of a spring sandstorm, one of those heavy-lidded days when the grit blows south from the Gobi. I can taste the wind in my teeth.
• Without the sense of a rational (legal) system, people rarely felt connected to the trouble of others.. A foreigner inevitably felt even more isolated. I lived in the same environment as everybody else - the blurred laws, the necessary infractions - but I had even less stake in the system.
• He emphasized that, technically, the documentation was not jiade. The papers themselves where completely authentic; it was simply the information conveyed within the documents that was false. Polat's new life was as real as paper could get.
• Centuries underground have left the (oracle bones) with a slightly golden hue, and the years have also separated the objects from the trappings of craftsmanship.
• "The Travels of Old Derelict" (Liu E) / Wang Yirong / Duan Fang