Oracle Bones (6 page)

While clipping in the bureau, I would at times come across a follow-up story. In July, George Tenet, the director of the CIA, testified before Congress. He acknowledged that, of the nine hundred sites targeted by NATO’s bombing
campaign, only one had been researched and selected solely by the CIA: the Chinese embassy. Tenet emphasized that it had been mistaken because of the outdated map.

Three months later, the
Observer,
a London newspaper, published an investigative article claiming that in fact the bombing had been intentional. The story was based on interviews with three NATO officers stationed in Europe, all of whom spoke to the newspaper on the condition of anonymity. They alleged that American military officials had deliberately targeted the Chinese embassy because it had been secretly assisting Milosevic. The newspaper claimed that after an earlier NATO bombing had destroyed the Serbs’ radio transmitter, the Chinese allowed their compound to be used as a backup, broadcasting military commands to Kosovo.

The
Observer
speculated that the Chinese might have helped Milosevic in exchange for access to the wreckage of a Stealth fighter, which had been shot down earlier. The downed American plane would have had great value to Chinese intelligence. In any case, there had been a history of cooperation between the militaries of the Chinese and the Serbs. And it was also true that the NATO bombing had seemed quite precise for an accident. All three bombs struck the southern end of the Chinese embassy, where the defense attaché’s office and the intelligence center happened to be located. The rest of the compound was untouched; casualties were remarkably low. Like many other foreign publications, the
Observer
claimed that two of the three dead Chinese “journalists” had in fact been intelligence officers, a common role in the state-run media.

But that was it—no named sources, no proof. NATO denied the allegations, and few American newspapers picked up the story. In the bureau, I clipped a copy and filed it away:

U.S.-CHINA—EMBASSY BOMBING

U.S.-CHINA—EXCHANGES

U.S.-CHINA—RELATIONS

U.S.-CHINA—SCANDAL

U.S.-CHINA—SUMMIT

U.S.-CHINA—TRADE

ARTIFACT B

The Written World

QIN SHIHUANG BURNED BOOKS. IN THE YEAR 221 B.C., HE BECAME
the first ruler to declare himself
Huangdi,
emperor. He standardized currency, weights, and measures; he commanded the construction of roads and canals and the first version of the Great Wall. He destroyed classics of history, philosophy, and poetry. He buried scholars alive. Under his reign, all Chinese were forced to write characters the same way.

The chief minister advised his emperor to destroy not only the books, but even the
idea
of the books: “If there is anybody who dares to mention the
Songs
or
Documents
in private conversation, he should be executed. Those who, using the old, reject the new, will be wiped out together with their clans.”

All of this was recorded more than a century later by a historian of the Han, the dynasty that followed the Qin. The book,
Historical Records,
became a classic for two millennia.

IMRE GALAMBOS IS
thirty-five years old, with a pedigree that is unusual for a scholar of ancient Chinese. On his mother’s side, he is Central Asian: a Tatar grandfather, a Kazak grandmother. The grandmother was born in Harbin, in the northeast of China, and as an adult she moved west. She gave birth to Galambos’s mother in the Ural Mountains. The girl moved farther west, attending college in Moscow, where she fell in love with a Hungarian. West again: Imre Galambos was born in northern Hungary, near the Danube River.
He is half Hungarian, quarter Kazak, quarter Tatar. He is short and stocky, dark-haired and long-lashed. He is shy. On the telephone, he is reticent to the point of monosyllables; first meetings can be awkward. But once you get to know him well, the fluency of his thoughts is remarkable, and he has already established himself as an innovative scholar in his field.

At the University of California at Berkeley, Galambos wrote his dissertation about the development of ancient Chinese writing. His primary texts were two-thousand-year-old strips of bamboo that had been inscribed with characters. These were old texts, but new sources: most had been excavated during the latter part of the twentieth century. In the past, scholars didn’t have access to such materials. They studied classics such as the
Historical Records
, which had been copied repeatedly and passed down through the centuries.

The bamboo strips were inscribed during the centuries after Qin Shihuang’s reign, but the written characters still aren’t uniform. A single word is written in different ways, as if the ancient culture lacked clear standards. With this evidence, Galambos theorizes that the Qin standardization of characters is an exaggeration and possibly a myth, and the same may be true for the other stories. In his dissertation, Galambos notes that centuries of historians have been obsessed with the tale of the book-burning, but they have ignored “the quiet but continuous process of selecting works for copying.”

His point is simple: 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, like the history of any great culture, was written at the expense of other stories that have remained silent.

In Galambos’s opinion, China’s most important literary unification actually took place during the Han. They produced their history book, as well as the first dictionary, and their emphasis on the written word established the foundation for two millennia of empire. “People talk about this idea of literary worlds,” he says. “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. The officials who ran the country in ancient China—they were selected through exams, through this process of memorizing the classics. They lived in this quasi world of letters. Whoever came in from the outside became a part of it. Even the Mongolian tribes that eventually became the Yuan dynasty—for God’s sake, they were complete nomads, with very little written language. But they became like the Chinese for a time; they assimilated themselves. I think that this literary world is the link in time that permits this thing we call ‘Chinese history.’ It’s not the number of people or anything
like that; it’s the enormous written world that they produced. They produced this world that’s so big that it eats them up and it eats up everybody around them.”

GALAMBOS IS AN
instinctive skeptic. He is suspicious of neatness, regularity, plot; in his view, stories are often a façade for chaos. This perspective may be genetic—Tatar DNA—or it may simply be what happens when your own story doesn’t make sense. Apart from basic details, his family history is unknown. He has no idea why his Kazak grandmother lived in northeastern China, or why she left. He doesn’t know how she met the Tatar, or which route they took to the Urals.

Galambos doesn’t even have a good reason for his original dedication to Chinese studies. He grew up in Communist Hungary, which required mandatory military service from all young males. After high school, he joined the army and quickly learned that it was no place for an instinctive skeptic. As punishment, the military sent him to the hills of Bakony for six months of additional training. Galambos spent much of his time there on kitchen duty. At one point, he faked a hernia and underwent surgery, simply because that meant twenty-eight days’ leave for recovery. The surgery was primitive and nowadays he still feels an occasional twinge in his gut.

After the hernia, the next escape involved higher education. In Hungary, the mandatory term of military service was shortened by half a year if a soldier entered college. Galambos applied, but he missed all the deadlines except one: a scholarship to study in China. He accepted, figuring that it was worth avoiding six months in the army. That was fifteen years ago. “I got sucked into this whole Chineseness,” he explains.

One evening, I meet Galambos for a drink in Beijing, and the conversation turns to history. He explains that people have a natural tendency to choose certain figures and events, exaggerate their importance, and then incorporate them into narratives.

“That’s how history is formed in their minds,” he says. “It’s through these important people and events. But while studying Chinese history, you learn that maybe some of these events didn’t happen, or they were very minor, or a lot of other things happened that were in fact very important. The Chinese say that every five or six hundred years a sage appeared. In reality I would say it’s more fluid, more complex; there’s a lot more stuff going on. Obviously, that’s no way to teach history. You can’t just say, ‘There’s a lot more stuff going on.’ It’s inevitable that you have to pick out certain things.”

We sit in a small anonymous bar near Houhai, a lake in central Beijing.
This is one of the capital’s last intact old neighborhoods, and the bar’s windows open on to the lake. It’s a beautiful evening; the lights streak red and yellow across the nighttime water. Galambos talks about the power of perception, and then he points at me.

“That’s why the Chinese worry about you, the correspondent,” he says. “For the West, whatever you create is China. Otherwise it’s just these random figures—they might publish some numbers about the GDP, and maybe people will think, ‘Wow, that’s really low.’ Or maybe they’ll think it’s high. But you journalists explain it and spice it up and that’s how it comes out. If you write about us sitting here in Houhai, people will think, ‘Wow, China’s a really cool place.’ That’s how the place is formed in their minds. But it might have very little to do with reality.”

2

The Voice of America

May 1999

BEIJING WAS THE FIRST PLACE I HAD EVER LIVED AS A FULL-TIME
writer. In the past, I had been either a student or a teacher, and previously in China, I had been both. From 1996 to 1998, I had served as an English instructor with the Peace Corps in a small city called Fuling, where I also studied Chinese.

At Fuling Teachers College, most of my students had come from peasant homes, and they trained to become English teachers in rural middle schools. A generation earlier, the subject had been taboo—any contact with foreign languages was risky during the political campaigns of the Cultural Revolution. But in today’s China, English was compulsory from the sixth grade on, and the language had become an obsession among the younger generation. During my first year of teaching, I sometimes wondered if the knowledge would ever have any practical use. I was one of only two foreign residents in Fuling, and most of my students would end up teaching in even more remote places. Nevertheless, they worked hard, finding whatever English materials they could. In the evenings, they wandered around campus with shortwave radios, listening to the BBC or the Voice of America.

After I moved to Beijing, I was often lost in my new life: the chaos of the May protests, the petty details of freelancing, the file cabinets of the
Wall Street Journal
. But all of it disappeared whenever a former student wrote or telephoned. One afternoon that spring, I received a call from Jimmy, who was teaching in a village near the Yangtze River. He sounded thrilled; he had a girl
friend now, and he enjoyed his new job. I asked how many students he taught.

“There are ninety-four,” he said.

“How many classes?”

“One class.”

“You have ninety-four students in one class?”

“Yes,” he said. “It’s very crowded!”

After the conversation, I tried to imagine what it would be like to teach English to ninety-four middle-school kids in a remote Yangtze village. From my perspective in the bureau, it was completely abstract:

STUDENTS

STYLE

SUPERPOWER—“NEW THREAT”

SUPERSTITION

TEA

Another day, I received a call from D.J. Like many of my former students, he had chosen his English name for mysterious reasons, and now he taught in one of the poorest parts of Sichuan. He earned less than forty dollars a month. A classmate told me that when D.J. received his first paycheck, he was so excited that he bought a new soccer ball and spent an entire afternoon kicking it around, all by himself.

“I have given my students English names,” D.J. told me on the telephone. “Most of them I named after my classmates from Fuling. But I want you to know that I named one student Adam and another student Peter.”