"Oracle Bones"

[fiefoe]

It was smooth sailing in the middle part of the book, but in the last parts I got distracted again. If I hadn't needed bed rest, I might not have finished the book.

• The sacrificial calendar expands with every generation that passes. In a sense, it foreshadows what will happen three thousand year later, when Beijing is ruled by the Communists: a constant accumulation of sensitive days.
• In the old parts of Beijing, that low-pitched hum, rising and falling as the (pigeons) soared across the sky, was the mark of a beautiful clear day.
• Anding Gate was just a name. Old Beijing was becoming a city of words: an imaginary place the residents invoked when they went from one point of modernity to another.
• In Fuling, my students had recognized some beauty in the written word that wasn't apparent to a Westerner like me. And in Beijing, I sensed that I saw something in the old city that wasn't obvious to most locals. Ever since childhood.. I had learned that the past was embodied in ancient buildings.
• (Falung Gong protests:) one of the most depressing sights in all of Beijing -the great chase of China's dispossessed, the used and the abused, the young men without education seeking older women without security.
• He remarks that the Chinese seem to produce bureaucracy as instinctively as the West creates heroes.
• Again, we have an ancestor who is competent; he does things. And in ancient China there is no evil act. There's no sense of original sin. There's no interest in theodicy, in explaining evil in the world."
• "It's the high-level equilibrium trap." China's cultural continuity, early success, and subsequent decline.
• (After running into a village election:) He was trying hard to think of other questions. There was a long silence and then the cop to my right spoke for the first time.
  "How much is your salary?"   {HAHAHAHAHA}
• I gave up. I threw the scapular into the barbecue.. it stared to crack like crazy. Pop pop pop!.. That was a real reconstruction of the phonological system! It sounded like the Chinese word 卜."
• (On international journalism:) There's a point at which even the best intentions become voyeurism.
• The Chinese looked at distant, uncontrollable events and searched for some consolation in the worst that might happen. It was a passive, remote worldview, and it came from a hard history, but it had also been encouraged by a distinctly human gap int he flow of goods and culture. The world might now seem a smaller, more understandable place if you sent off cigarette lighters and received Hollywood in return.
• "Until the Tang dynasty, the Chinese saw it as .. a southern barbarian drink. The Buddhists were the first to give it legitimacy."
• Every foreigner who studies Chinese has a formative experience involving characters - the "semi-martyrdom" - and John DeFrancis's was particularly scarring.
• Several times, he tells me that he didn't return to China for 49 years because of his bitterness over the failure of writing reform.
• "The East Germans.. quickly designed a typewriter that included those letters.. if we adopted that system, their factories could produce typewriters."
• Those were the exchanges of a freelance foreign correspondent: people and places were distilled into words, and the words were sold.
• If there were patience and determination and honesty, then a glimpse outside might help somebody become more comfortable with his place in the world.
• 'That's what words do: they make things stick out... A language is your browser.'