Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler

It is exceedingly difficult to write a comprehensive review of Peter Hessler's second book on China (Peter Hessler's trilogy on China: River Town; Oracle Bones; Country Driving), as it is to not take away anything from this book.  The author attempted to cover many fronts -- time wise, Oracle Bones recounts the author's experience in China around the turn of this century, roughly from 1999 to 2002, following the development of a handful of the author's acquaintances, one Uighur who eventually emigrated, and a number of the author's former students who experienced first hand China's mind-blowing development; space wise, Oracle Bones is divided roughly equally among Beijing, Anyang, and Washington D.C.

Yet this is only what the book seems at a first glance.  Beneath the seemingly disorganized journey of the book and the various topics covered between the chapters, each complex enough to merit its own books, the numbers of loose ends and leads eventually come together to pave a path, a path into the past, a quest into the past.  The book itself may be said a quest of the author himself to burrow into the tragic life story of the scholar Chen Mengjia, but to readers, it may well turn into a quest in a grander sense, a quest to look into the Chaotic Ten Years that my generation and those that follow are only too estranged with.  China is a country that tends to boast its history, yet the real history is almost always deliberately forgotten.  If the Chinese headstrongly hangs on to the atrocities of the Japanese in the 1930s, then equal attention should be given to the Chaotic Ten Years.  In essence, both were times when human qualities were reduced to nothing and men became lesser beings.  The last remnants of the Chaotic Ten Years are approaching the end of their mortal days, most are reluctantly to recall those days when they were either the victims or the fanatics -- a nightmare of heinous deeds hidden deeply in their minds that still come back and haunt when the memories are occasionally stirred. 

The scholars bore the brunt of that terrifying movement.  Really, it was an era that began with lots of hope, majority of the country's elite had studied abroad, absorbed new knowledge and ideas, and many then returned filled with passion for the newborn country, hoping to mold it into something worthy of their vision.  They tried, and most failed, and their dreams perished, very often they perished along.  The Chaotic Ten Years annihilated the grace of China.  It was a generation forever gone, and its pathetic and traumatized remains about to fade away into history.  Very little has been justified, even less has been explained.  The executioners live on, mingle into the crowd, emigrate abroad; the victims (what's left of them) live on, mingle into the crowd, count their final days.  Like the endless pages of history filled with unknowns that have been flipped, this will soon be just another page.