Mysteries of Modern China

I recently finished reading Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones. As Jennie noted when she reviewed it on her book blog, Hessler does a remarkable job of not writing yet another “I was a foreigner in Asia” book. He also avoids making it either a book all about him or a book all about impersonal views of contemporary China. Instead, what we get is an excellent blend of his own story, the stories of people he meets, stories from recent history, and stories from ancient history. These smaller stories, which all seem quite disparate at first, get woven skillfully together into a very neat overarching panoramic story at the end, using the mysterious death of one of the first modern oracle bone scholars as the touchstone. And as an added bonus, his writing, as well as his life, is very entertaining, with occasional bursts of wry humor in unexpected places. (See here and here for examples.)

As you can probably tell, I liked it. A lot. It takes a huge amount of work and talent to turn that much information about a country as old and complicated as China into a comprehensible, interesting, and entertaining narrative, accessible to pretty much any audience. What’s more, it underscores my own thoughts on the way history influences culture, which seems particularly revealing in the case of China, where modern history is seen as so separate from the ancient. Hessler draws out how those connections still stand.

While I was reading Oracle Bones, though, I was occasionally struck by a sense of deja vu, as if I’d read that description, or something very like it, before. And then I realized it was from a mystery series I found in the library earlier this year: Qiu Xiaolong’s Chief Inspector Chen novels. Now, I don’t know about you, but I love it when I find a series of fiction books that have enough actual facts in them that I can learn something while having fun. This is one of those series. The author, as you can probably tell from his name, isn’t a native English speaker, which gives his writing (while very fluent) a sometimes peculiar flavor, but he does an excellent job making the reader feel like they are in 1990s China with the characters. (Complete with tons of food description, an important Chinese detail.)

Ancient History on a Road Trip

The other day on NPR, I heard this story:

World’s Oldest Hominid Now World’s Oldest Tourist

The basics:

One of the world’s treasures, the hominid fossil known as “Lucy,” is about to go on public display for the first time outside its native Ethiopia.

The Lucy exhibition has been praised by some as a coup for Texas and denounced by others as the reckless exploitation of one of humanity’s most famous ancestors. Renowned paleontologist Richard Leakey even called it a form of prostitution.

Next week, the 3.2 million-year-old fossil goes on display at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. It could be the start of a six-year, 10-city tour for Lucy…

There is now a huge argument over whether or not such rare archeological finds should be allowed outside their countries of origin at all. The main argument, of course, is that they are too fragile or could be damaged, which seems like a fairly good argument if you consider that these remains are still the subject of research.