Oracle Bones (13 page)
Authors: Peter Hessler
The man had served in the Chinese navy, and he hadn’t seen much direct action during the war, when his unit had been sent to the Taiwan Strait. Later, in 1964, his leg had been badly injured in a battle off the coast of Taiwan. He was sixty-four years old, and he had been a member of the Communist Party for four decades. He walked with a limp. The enemy who wounded him had been Taiwanese, but the weapon was American-made. The veteran made sure that I understood this detail clearly.
We ordered dinner and local beer, and soon the old man began to relax. He asked about my bandaged finger, and then he shook his head. “Nowadays too many things are uncertain,” he said. “For example, some of the retired people don’t get their pensions. And another difference is that China has some capitalist aspects. Some people are too rich while others are too poor. It’s not like it was in Chairman Mao’s time, when everybody was equal. There wasn’t crime back then. This story about you getting robbed in your hotel—that wouldn’t have happened in the past.”
I asked him what the situation was like across the river.
“When Kim Il Sung was alive, he was like Mao Zedong,” he said. “Everybody worshipped him because he was a great man. But Kim Il Sung’s son isn’t as great as his father. He’s too young, but the main reason is that he hasn’t been hardened by war; he hasn’t experienced struggle. Kim Il Sung experienced war as a small boy; that’s why he became a great man.”
After an hour, the direction of the interview had shifted entirely. The old man shot questions across the table: What are salaries in America? What do Americans think of China? What do they think about the NATO bombing?
The veteran explained that his son, who had a college degree, had turned down a perfectly good government job. The young man had been offered more money in a private firm, but the position didn’t provide complete security. And at twenty-six he was still unmarried! Why did he think this way? Did he learn it from the American teachers in his college? Do Americans believe that it’s better to take a high-paying job over long-term security?
I explained that, in some ways, his son’s thoughts were similar to those of young people in America. The old man kept returning to the same themes—a government job was perfectly good; China needed another Chairman Mao. He was drinking heavily now; he started to slur his words and then he got fussy. He complained about his son and he complained about the service in the restaurant. He said that a foreigner should be able to come to Dandong without
getting robbed. The boat pilot gently suggested that we leave, and the old man suddenly became angry.
“It’s not every day I get to speak with a foreigner,” he said sharply. “I’m not tired. I just need to go to the bathroom.” He stood up and stumbled over his chair; the pilot caught the old man before he fell. A waitress entered the room, and the veteran shouted, “Bring the bill!”
I had already given money to the waitress, who explained that everything had been taken care of. “I’ve got plenty of money!” the old man shouted. “I can pay for dinner!” The pilot tried to guide him to the door. “I can pay!” the old man yelled again, waving a wad of cash.
At last, we steered him outside, where the night air sobered him a little. I thanked him for coming; the old man shook my hand and limped off toward home. He refused to be escorted.
The pilot watched him leave, and then he sighed. He was thirty-three years old. He said, “Many old people don’t understand the way things are in China nowadays.”
ON MY LAST
afternoon in Dandong, the river was full of Chinese wedding boats. Wealthy couples hired big two-tier cruisers; others rented little motor launches. All of them followed the same route—a scoot out to the ruined bridge, a pause for photographs, and then a slow cruise along the banks of North Korea. Beneath their life preservers, the brides wore dresses of bright pink and orange and purple; they stood in the prows like flowering figureheads. It was a hot afternoon and the North Koreans were swimming again.
A pilot named Ni Shichao took me out on the river, where we zipped in and out of the flotilla of wedding boats. Ni explained that it was an auspicious day on the lunar calendar—the sixth day of the sixth month. But on the whole, he said, there had been fewer weddings than usual this year.
“People think that years ending in nine are bad luck,” he explained. “I don’t believe it myself, but many people do. In eighty-nine, there was the disturbance in Beijing, and in seventy-nine there was the trial of the Gang of Four. Sixty-nine was the Cultural Revolution. Fifty-nine was when your America bombed the bridge.”
He paused and thought for a moment. “No, that was in 1950,” he said. “Anyway, something bad happened in fifty-nine.”
That had been during the heart of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, but history books brushed over this disaster. Like many Chinese, Ni Shichao had a shaky grasp of modern events; he had also made a mistake about the Gang of Four trial, which actually started in 1980.
“What about 1949?” I asked.
“That was when New China was founded,” he said. We floated in the shadow of the ruined bridge; the slow-moving Yalu ran blue beneath us. “That year wasn’t the same as the others,” he continued. “That was a good year, of course.”
FROM DANDONG, I
followed the border east toward the Sea of Japan. These areas were lightly populated; the buses passed through forests of birch. I had packed a tent and a sleeping bag, and I camped at Changbaishan. It was an enormous volcanic crater, filled with clear blue water; the Chinese-North Korean border cut the lake in half like a ruined jewel. At night the wind blew hard from the south and I kept imagining footsteps outside the tent.
Locals had told me that the border was unguarded, and in the morning I followed a grassy ridge that skirted the lake. After hiking for half an hour, I saw a tiny white marker in the center of a green field, far below. Before descending, I carefully surveyed the land: no buildings, no people. The nearest city was dozens of miles away, over rugged terrain. It was the emptiest place I had seen in China for a long time.
The block of stone had Chinese characters on one side and Korean letters on the other. I was accustomed to linear borders—rivers, fences—and it was strange to see this single stone surrounded by emptiness. The boundary was just an idea, and the wilderness rendered it meaningless.
I dropped my pack and took a few steps into North Korea, where I balanced my camera on a rock and set the timer. In the photograph, the sky is a deep blue and white clouds hang low on the horizon. I am kneeling and my shadow falls across the stone marker. There is a dirty white bandage on my left hand. The mountains could be the mountains of any country.
THE UNDERGROUND CITY CANNOT BE SEPARATED FROM THE OTHER
layers that have accumulated in this part of Anyang. One might imagine the ancient Shang site as a whole, lying beneath the earth—the city wall, the interior structures. It’s possible that oracle bones are buried here, having waited three thousand years to tell their stories. But above ground, there is an entirely separate patchwork of modern buildings, organizations, and land-use rights. If archaeologists hope to dig, they have to negotiate with whoever occupies the surface of the earth.
Fortunately, much of this region is farmland—soybean, corn, hemp—and it’s generally easier for archaeologists to negotiate with local peasants. But during the modern period, various authorities have also left their mark in this part of Anyang. In the late-1930s, during the Japanese occupation, the invaders built an airfield, and cement runways still cut across the fields. Later, after the Communists gained control of China, the People’s Liberation Army constructed a military compound next to the airfield. Even later, after Reform and Opening began, the old runways were converted into a site for private flight training. Ironically, many of today’s clients are Japanese, who train in Anyang because it’s much cheaper than in Japan. But what’s cheap for a Japanese pilot is not necessarily cheap for a Chinese archaeologist. Local surveys have avoided extensive work on the airfield, because the flight school charges high rates for permission to dig cores with Luoyang spades.
Here in Anyang, and anywhere in China, the present controls access to the past. When the archaeologists first surveyed the wall of the underground city, it led them straight to the modern barrier of the PLA compound. Two walls: one ancient, one modern; one below ground and the other above. At that point, the modern barrier took precedence. The surveying stopped while the archaeologists submitted applications, paperwork, maps. It took almost a month before the military granted them admittance. After the archaeologists were finally allowed inside, they patiently continued digging cores with their Luoyang spades. The buried Shang wall cut diagonally across the military compound, running straight as an arrow. The archaeologists followed it to another modern barrier, where, without the slightest change in direction, the ancient wall exited the jurisdiction of the People’s Liberation Army.
THE UNDERGROUND CITY
wall is rectangular, and it encloses an area of nearly two square miles. Jing Zhichun and the other archaeologists have carefully surveyed the structure, and they have discovered that it is incomplete; many sections of the wall were only partly built up. The ancient settlement seems to have been abandoned; perhaps the residents moved to another location.
“Eventually, this kind of information will give us clues as to why the city was here and why it was an uncompleted one,” Jing says. “We made six profiles of the walls, and we haven’t found any of them that had been built up. They just finished the base. It’s very strange. That’s why I think it was probably an unfinished city.”
October 1, 1999
SHENZHEN WAS ALIVE. PEOPLE CALLED IT THE “OVERNIGHT CITY”
because growth had been so fast; sometimes they compared its rising buildings to bamboo shoots after a good rain. Intellectuals in cities such as Beijing sneered at Shenzhen for all the usual reasons—no history, no culture, no class—but the city meant something entirely different to migrants from the interior. To them, it had a living character: strengths and flaws, cruelties and successes. In a nation of boomtowns, Shenzhen was the most famous of them all.
I’d heard dozens of Shenzhen tales before I went there. In Fuling, my students liked to write about the city; sometimes they used it as a fictional setting, or they described the experiences of Sichuanese migrants who had headed south. In my writing class, I taught a unit on dialogue, and I asked the students to transcribe a recent conversation. A woman named Emily remembered the day when her older sister made the biggest decision of her life:
“I’ve decided to go to Shenzhen,” said my sister.
“Mother won’t let you go.”
“I’ll try to persuade her,” she said.
“I’ll back you up,” I said, “but have you taken all things into consideration?”
“I’m fully aware of the situation. It means I’ll never get a permanent stable work; I might be fired, or even worse, but to me, an energetic youth, what it matters?”
After a pause of silence, I said,
“All right, I agree with you. It must be a wonderful life to work in that changing city.”
“Wish you good luck,” I added.
“Thank you. Good night.”
“Good night.”
Now my sister has been in that prosperous city for five months. I wonder if she still remembers that conversation, and if she is still full of energy.
Emily was one of the first students I noticed, back when the class was still a blur of eager faces. I taught her section during my first semester in China (it wasn’t until the following year that I taught Willy’s class). In the early days, I had trouble coming up with assignments; often I’d jot a random question on the board and ask the students to write about it for ten minutes. One day, I asked: “Would you rather have a long life with the normal ups and downs, or an extremely happy life that ends after only another twenty years?”
Nearly everybody took the first option. That didn’t turn out to be much of a dilemma in rural China; several students pointed out that their families were so poor that they couldn’t afford to die in two decades, regardless of how joyful they were. I probably learned the most from the activity: after that, I was more careful about adapting American ideas about the pursuit of happiness to a Sichuanese classroom. But I noticed that Emily chose the short life. At nineteen, she was the youngest student in the class. She wrote:
