Oracle Bones (43 page)

“China has been pressing upon its natural resources for the past several hundred years,” Keightley says. “They’re so successful at what they are doing that they have been pressing the borders. The landscape, it seems to me, is exhausted.”

The imaginative world, like the geography, was a trap. Ancestor followed ancestor; dynasty followed dynasty—an overpopulated history, the endless spiral of time. The Chinese tended to look farsightedly into the past, whereas Westerners, especially during periods such as the Renaissance, thought more about the future. In the Western view, even the ancient past had lessons that could serve modern progress. During the Age of Enlightenment, when contemporary political systems were changing, Europeans celebrated ancient Greek democracy. In the late 1800s, the modern Olympic Movement reflected the values of imperialism, which required an elite that was both well educated and physically capable.

But the Chinese view of history limited such redefinition. In the beginning of the twentieth century, some intellectuals attempted to explore their own past, but inevitably more Chinese turned to foreign concepts and values. It was a painful, clumsy process; inevitably they clutched at some of the worst Western ideas (such as Marxism). Today, the Chinese continue to struggle to incorporate Western traditions into their own culture. Keightley believes that this is one reason why they were so bitterly disappointed when, in 1993, they failed in their bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games. In “Clean Hands and Shining Helmets,” Keightley writes:

…Whether in the Marxism of Mao Zedong or the yearnings for democracy of student dissidents after him, the West has, for better or worse, now become, to a significant degree, China’s Greece and Rome.

The Asian Games, recently held in Beijing, like the Olympics that the Chinese hope to host…can thus be seen as the descendants of the games that Achilles held for Patroclus’s funeral…. They serve as one example of China’s attempt to appropriate part of the West’s classical and now international heritage into China’s modern culture.

LIKE CHEN MENGJIA,
David N. Keightley is an accidental oracle bone scholar. As a young man, he was determined to become a writer:

“I was contracted to do a book on the stock market. Eventually I gave that up, very happily. I wrote a novel that wasn’t published, fortunately. But after that I studied all of the short stories in the fiction magazines, got the formula, and sat down and wrote a short story and sent it to the
Saturday Evening Post
. Sure enough they sent me a check for one thousand dollars, and I had the idea that I could do this every week. But the magazine went out of business before they published it.

“I was a freelance journalist, and I felt I was spreading myself too thin. I was paying the rent by writing book reviews for
Time
magazine, which was very nice, but I realized that that wasn’t what a grown man should be doing. I wanted to find myself on one of the new frontiers. I wanted to become a freelance writer about China, so I thought I wanted to learn Chinese, and I went to Columbia. And I got sucked into a Ph.D. program. By the end of my third year I had moved back to the nineteenth century. I wanted to do something about opium smoking—what was it about Chinese society in the south that led them to this British vice? Then I had an epiphany and realized that the really big questions were far back in the past. I wanted to look at public works in the Confucian period, and then I moved back another thousand years. It was a frontier. There was an awful lot of work to be done. I was thirty years old in 1962; I was a little old to be starting. But it was a very new field and you didn’t have to worry, thank God, about the deconstructionism or the New Criticism.

“I went to Taiwan for two years, ’sixty-five to ’sixty-seven. Before returning to the U.S., I spent six weeks working in Japan, and one day I went to a bookstore in Tokyo. There was this book on the shelf—a book of oracle bone rubbings. The first entry was a character that looks like two hands raised:

“
Gong
men: ‘Raise’ men. There were seventy or eighty inscriptions, all about mobilizing a labor force. The king was making a series of forecasts—should he raise men? Raise men, three thousand; raise men, five thousand. Attack this; attack that. This was a revolutionary book. The title was
Inkyo Bokoji Sõrui
, by Shima Kunio. I dedicated my first book to him. It took him ten years to write this. I never met him.”

A chance discovery, a found book—and then three and a half decades reading oracle bones. Keightley has published two books about the Shang, and he has been honored for his work; in 1986, he was granted a MacArthur Fellowship. In retrospect, his career makes perfect sense.

Of course, stories are always easier to tell after they’re finished. It’s the same with ancient Chinese history: order, regularity, organization. Keightley emphasizes that there’s always another side to the story, and maybe we just haven’t seen the “dirty” details: the irregularities and imperfections of everyday life.

“I associate it partly with the elite nature of the artifacts that we’re getting,” Keightley says. “In Chinese writing, we don’t find the attention to ‘dirty’ detail until about the Song dynasty. But I’d say that they had that kind of literature all the time; it just wasn’t recorded by the elites. The elites wanted a much more structured view of the world, where morality is rewarded and the ancestors are honored. It’s a highly idealized picture of the world rather than a picture of the world.”

During another conversation, he tells me that he still thinks about writing fiction. “I would love to write a novel about the Shang dynasty,” he says. “But I just have these structural guides, the oracle bones and the artifacts. I’d have to make up the ‘dirty’ parts. What I mean is that we have the structure, the diagram; we have the written characters. But we don’t have the emotional impact. We have to imagine that.”

IN HIS BERKELEY
home, Keightley keeps two fragments of cattle scapula. One bone is less than two inches long, and over three thousand years old. Ten characters are inscribed into the surface:

Crack-making on guihai, divined: The king, in the ten days, will have no disasters.

A Russian émigré named Peter A. Boodberg, who also taught at Berkeley, gave the oracle bone fragment to Keightley. In China, back in the days when such artifacts were still traded freely, Boodberg had purchased it from a dealer of antiquities. Without question, it is one of the oldest cultural artifacts in the Berkeley Hills. Keightley keeps it wrapped in cotton inside an old film canister. Eventually, he intends to donate the bone to the university.

His second cattle scapula is circa 1978. Back then, Keightley was a research fellow at Cambridge University, and he decided to crack a bone in the Shang style. To his knowledge, this experiment had not yet been successfully accom
plished by a modern scholar. He went to a butcher’s shop and purchased the object that, nowadays, is better known as a t-bone steak.

“A professor in material science said that this is a simple problem,” Keightley says. “He told me to bring it in, and we boiled it. Two hours later, the place stank. The score was Shang one, Modern Science, zero.”

Today, that’s still the score. Scholars have interpreted so much Shang music—the royal lineage, the patterns of warfare, the fears about weather—but they still don’t know the simplest question of all: how to crack an oracle bone in the traditional manner.

“Ken Takashima and some graduate students tried it,” Keightley says, referring to a scholar who now teaches at the University of Vancouver. “They tried to re-create Shang cracking with a soldering iron. And it didn’t work. One of the problems is that you take a red-hot poker and apply it to the bone and the bone just sucks away the heat. Maybe the Shang heated the bone in the oven itself. I don’t know.”

Keightley’s second bone is pale—whiter than old ivory. Three scorch marks scar the surface, but the bone is uncracked. Upon the surface nothing has been written.

13

The Games

February 21, 2001

THE CABBIE SMILED AND SAID “GOOD MORNING,” IN ENGLISH, WHEN
I got into his car. It was 3:30
P
.
M
. He had tiny eyes in a cramped dark face and his yellow teeth showed when he smiled. He also knew how to say “hello” and “OK.” Whenever he spoke English, the language gained a physical dimension—he leaned forward and gripped the wheel, pursing his lips, while the pitch of his voice rose and wavered. He said “Good morning” twice and then switched to Chinese. We were heading north, looking for the Olympics.

That was a good week to be a foreigner in Beijing. The International Olympic Committee’s inspection commission was in town for a four-day tour to evaluate Beijing’s bid to host the Summer Games in 2008. This would be the I.O.C.’s final assessment; half a year later, they would choose between Beijing and the other finalists: Paris, Toronto, Osaka, and Istanbul. Every day, special announcements were broadcast on the cabbies’ radios, reminding them to be polite to foreign fares. The drivers had also been provided with a free two-cassette taped English course designed specifically for the inspection. The course consisted of useful sentences, including “The sun is shining,” “The city will be more beautiful when it hosts the Olympic Games,” and “Lacquerware was introduced to Japan from China during the Tang dynasty.”

Every Beijing cabbie knew about Meng Jingshan, a driver who, just last year, had spoken about China’s Olympic dreams to a reporter from the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution
. The Atlanta article was only 335 words long, but it caught the eye of the Chinese authorities, probably because it quoted Meng as having said, “The Olympics is not the venue for talking about human rights.” Meng also
mentioned that if Beijing had succeeded in its 1993 bid to host the Games, the city would have demolished his neighborhood in order to construct new sporting facilities. The American newspaper quoted the man: “I kept my house, but I really want to move out so I was doubly disappointed that we lost.”

Foreign journalists were obsessed with human rights and
hutong
preservation, and the Beijing government had rewarded Meng by designating him one of the capital’s “Hundred Best Taxi Drivers.” He received a bonus of a few hundred dollars, and the city’s newspapers portrayed him as an exemplary common man (he reportedly gave some of the money to charity). The message was clear: every citizen must do his part for the Olympics.

My own role, I figured, was simply to ride the wave. All week, I told everybody that I was writing stories about the Olympics, and it was as if the city had suddenly been bathed in a soft light. Conversations were friendlier; people smiled more. When I requested interviews with government officials, they agreed, and then they actually answered questions. In China, I had learned to be discreet about notebooks, but now I flourished them shamelessly. When I got into the cab, I took out paper and pad and told the driver that I was a reporter who needed to visit potential Olympic sites. He promised that we would find them along the highway that leads to the Great Wall. He kept glancing over at the blank page. “The Olympics can help the Chinese people,” he said. “I don’t really know how to say it right, but it would improve our status in the world.”

His name was Yang Shulin—he said I could call him
Yang Siji
, Driver Yang. He told me that two days earlier, at the airport, his fare had been a Chinese stewardess who had personally witnessed the arrival of the I.O.C. inspection commission.

“She saw them get off the plane,” Driver Yang said. “She was at the door at the airport.”

“What were they like?”

“She didn’t tell me anything else about them,” he said. “But
she
was pretty. All of the stewardesses are pretty.”

I told Driver Yang that in three days I planned to accompany the I.O.C. commission on the final leg of its tour, and he nodded approvingly. The man was a throwback: he wore cloth shoes, white cotton driving gloves, and a polyester olive-green military uniform with brass buttons. He was fifty-three years old. A Mao Zedong pendant dangled from his rearview mirror. Beneath the Chairman’s photograph were two sentences:

MAY THE ROAD BE SMOOTH

PROTECTION AGAINST ONE HUNDRED CURSES

We cruised along the Second Ring Road, where the old city wall used to stand. The pavement was lined with bright-colored banners that had been installed in honor of the visiting inspectors. According to the statistics of the Beijing Olympic Bid Committee, twenty thousand banners had been erected around the capital. In English, the banners read:
NEW BEIJING, GREAT OLYMPICS.
In Chinese, they proclaimed: