Oracle Bones (41 page)
Authors: Peter Hessler
POLAT NEVER MENTIONED
the mugging during my visit in January of 2001. I didn’t learn about it for more than a year, when a mutual friend informed me. Afterward, I asked Polat what had happened, and he told the story. He said that both the driver and the gunman were “African.”
“At first I was frightened, but once he told me to get down I wasn’t frightened anymore,” he said. “At that point, he shoots me or he doesn’t shoot me and there isn’t anything to do. I didn’t think he was going to shoot me. He was very skinny and I think he was a drug addict.
“I didn’t tell the police, because I didn’t have asylum yet. It wasn’t worth the bother. That was an ugly scene—down on the ground like that.”
Polat shook his head and laughed ruefully. I realized why he hadn’t told me earlier: the mugging had humiliated him. Several times, he mentioned how ridiculous he must have looked on the ground beside Rhode Island Avenue. I tried to reassure him by saying that he had done the right thing; there was no reason to resist a man with a gun. But Polat disagreed.
“One of my Uighur friends was delivering for Domino’s and a man held him up at gunpoint,” he said. “He was also African. He pointed the gun at my friend, and my friend just grabbed the gun and pulled it away. There weren’t any bullets. They began to fight, and soon a police car came and picked them up. The officer put handcuffs on both of them and took them to the station.
My friend called an interpreter, and once the interpreter arrived they let my friend go.”
I told him that the Uighur had been lucky, and that it was always best to assume that guns come with bullets. Polat shook his head.
“It depends on the situation,” he said. “If they don’t seem like they know what they’re doing, you can fight. That happened to me once in Yabaolu. It was in 1997—four money changers were murdered that year. Three guys must have been watching me for a while, and one evening they tried to rob me. The leader stopped me on the street and showed me his knife. He just flashed it and said, ‘Friend, can you loan me some money?’ You know how those guys talk—‘Friend this, Friend that.’ He had a northeastern accent.”
Polat smiled proudly. “I didn’t give him anything,” he said. “I told him, ‘I’m from Xinjiang, from Urumqi, and we know about knives. That knife you have is nothing special. I have friends in this neighborhood.’ After that, they left me alone.”
AFTER TALKING WITH OLD MR. ZHAO, I SEARCH FOR THE STORY OF
Chen Mengjia’s life. The material is thin: no book-length biography of Chen has ever been published, and many of his works are out of print. The end of his life is a complete blank; there are no detailed accounts of the events that led to his suicide. In China, the Cultural Revolution is still a shadowy period. It’s permissible to write critically about those years, but there is a tacit understanding that investigations should not be pushed too far. And few people kept diaries or saved letters during that time.
The beginning of Chen’s life is clearer, because he published so precociously. He was born in 1911, in Nanjing, where his father was a schoolteacher and a Presbyterian minister. Ten Chen siblings lived to adulthood: five men, five women. Each graduated from college—an education level that was particularly unusual for women of that generation. Chen Mengjia was the seventh child, and by far the most brilliant. He published his first poem at the age of eighteen; by twenty, when his debut volume appeared, he was famous. As Chinese poets have traditionally done, he gave himself a pen name: Wanderer.
He became the youngest member of the Crescent Moon Society, a group of romantic poets who eschewed the rigid rules of classical Chinese verse. In 1932, when Japanese and Chinese armies clashed outside of Shanghai, Chen joined the resistance. The young poet sent verses back from the battlefield:
Blood flakes bloom in front of new ghosts’ tombs and drip on muddy snow
There lie our heroes—quietly…
His poetic style was simple and well metered; critics compared him to A. E. Housman and Thomas Hardy. Chen abandoned Christianity after childhood, but he sensed a mysticism about the distant past which he described as an almost religious feeling. One early poem, “Smile of the Tang Dynasty,” describes a thousand-year-old engraving of a female figure:
I peek at the side of her face
Under her dignified appearance
A cold, silent trace of a smile
Is hidden.
Artifacts have power; written characters breathe life into the distant past. In another poem, the narrator gazes at an old fort:
The tower seems content
With dignity. Listening to the sound of the river
Listening to the wind
As it writes the three-thousand-year script across a sheet of cloud
They inspire me to gratify and respect antiquity.
As a college student in Nanjing, Chen studied law, but after graduation he shifted fields. In 1932, he began to research classical Chinese literature, then religion, and finally he switched to ancient Chinese writing. The past drew closer; poetry drifted away. Verse had always seemed painful for Chen; in one poem he wrote: “I crushed my chest and pulled out a string of songs.” He explained in a book preface that at twenty-three he was already becoming disenchanted with poetry. Later, he wrote:
Since I was seventeen, I have used meter to control myself. Everything I wrote could be measured by a string…. The chain was heavy on me, and in the slavery I learned to make fine words.
By his early thirties, he had essentially stopped writing verse. At Yenching University, in Beijing, he spent hours studying the inscriptions of oracle bones and ancient bronzes. As he drifted into archaeology, the early poems seemed reminders of another life that had already passed:
Are you the one who really wants to know my story?
Embarrassed, flushed
Gently I turn over twenty blank pages. I want to write only one line:
I am a minister’s good son.
LUCY CHAO WAS
also a minister’s child who became a prodigy. At twenty-five, she published the first Chinese translation of T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
. She taught English at Yenching University, until 1937, when many Chinese fled Beijing in the wake of the Japanese invasion. Years later, in an autobiography, Lucy remembered:
We moved to the south, and my father stayed in Beijing with my brother Zhao Jingxin [Old Mr. Zhao]…. we moved to an old house in Deqing County in Zhejiang. At that time, I married Chen Mengjia. There everything was cheap and life was colorful. We had fish and shrimp every day. We didn’t need to study, so we often watched the ducks crossing the water.
…
Along with many other Chinese intellectuals, the couple eventually relocated to Kunming, a city in the remote southwestern province of Yunnan. In Kunming, the key Chinese universities reorganized into a new entity known as National Southwest Associated University, where Chen Mengjia taught. Lucy wasn’t allowed to serve on the faculty—rules forbade a couple from teaching at the same institution.
I was a housewife for eight years. I had traditional thoughts that a wife should sacrifice for her husband. But I was really well educated. While cooking, a copy of Dickens was always on my knee.
In 1944, the Rockefeller Foundation granted the couple a joint humanities fellowship, to fund research in the United States. Theirs was a unique generation: despite the Japanese invasion and the civil war, a group of promising young Chinese were developing deep intellectual links with the West. Many went to America and Europe to be educated, and most intended eventually to bring their new skills home to China.
For Chen Mengjia and Lucy Chao, the trip began with a flight from Kunming to Calcutta. The journey “over the hump” inspired Chen to write poetry for the first time in years:
I cannot see the Himalayas
Clouds pile high like mountains…
Everything looks so lonely
This is a desert of heaven.
At the University of Chicago, Lucy researched a dissertation about Henry James. For years, she had studied English from afar; now literature was suddenly right at hand. During a trip to Harvard, she met T. S. Eliot, who gave her an inscribed copy of his poems.
It was said that I became the third biggest collector of Henry James’ books.…My husband and I were determined to spare no efforts to enjoy the cultural education offered by the United States. We went to concerts, movies, and we visited all kinds of museums. We went to watch every sort of opera. When we returned from the States, our luggage was full of books and records; there wasn’t much money left.
While Lucy studied literature, Chen hunted for bronzes. Many artifacts had been taken out of China during the chaotic nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and few pieces had been studied carefully. Chen hoped to write a definitive book on the subject, combining both Western and Chinese approaches to bronze studies. In addition to his Rockefeller grant, he received support from the Harvard-Yenching Institute.
28 May, 1945
My dear Miss Hughes,
I shall be visiting Kansas City either this coming weekend or the weekend following. I would like to know the most convenient time to visit the Museum….
The Wanderer earned his name. He traveled to Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Minneapolis, New York, New Haven, Boston, Providence, Princeton, San Francisco. He went all the way to Honolulu. In every city, he contacted museums and private collectors, studying their artifacts. For two years he shifted between the worlds of ancient Chinese bronze and modern American culture:
14 June, 1945
My dear Miss Hughes,
I enjoyed myself very much during my visit to Kansas City and wish to thank you again for your kindness. If time permits I may be able to make another visit before the Fall with my wife…. I spent some time in downtown Kansas City my last evening and finally went to a movie. I feel that the trip was very enjoyable from every point of view….
Outside of the United States, Chen visited Toronto, Paris, London, and Oxford. In 1947, after a trip to Stockholm, he wrote a letter to the Rockefeller Foundation:
I was received by the Crowned Prince in his castle to see his own collection and had the honour of talking and discussing with him for two hours.
That year, Chen completed a draft of the book—photographs and descriptions of 850 vessels. Before returning to China, he sent the manuscript and photographs to Harvard; editing would be conducted by post. Langdon Warner, a Harvard professor, wrote a letter to Chen: “It takes a brave man to face the difficulties—political and financial—of Asia today and I admire you for going back at this time.”
In Chicago, Lucy stayed behind to finish her doctorate. By the time she finally headed across the Pacific, at the end of 1948, the civil war in China had passed the turning point:
While I was on the boat [to Shanghai], I heard on the loudspeaker that Tsinghua and Beijing universities had been liberated. [The Kuomintang general] Fu Zuoyi’s troops were in trouble….
The traffic between Beijing and Shanghai had stopped, so I had to find some way to get there…. Luckily, a plane that was carrying grain for Fu Zuoyi was going to Beijing, so I took it. The plane landed at the Temple of Heaven. When we passed Tianjin, the People’s Liberation Army soldiers fired at us from the ground. There was no ladder for us to descend…we just jumped onto a bunch of quilts that had been laid out on the ground….
The capital was divided, with some sections under Communist control and others still held by the Kuomintang. Chen Mengjia was in an area that had already been taken by the Communists.
I asked somebody to send a message to my husband saying that I had returned, and when the gate of the castle was open I wanted him to meet me. Three weeks later, the gate was open. Beijing was liberated.
THE GATE SHUT
almost immediately. In 1950, the Korean War broke out, and communication ended between China and the United States. In Cambridge, Harvard professors waited to hear from Chen about his book on bronzes; in Beijing, Chen waited for the political climate to soften. He kept busy by reading oracle bones. In 1956, he published
A Comprehensive Survey of the Divination Inscriptions from the Wastes of Yin
. The phrase “Wastes of Yin” refers to the Anyang region, where so many pieces of bone and shell had been excavated over the years. From these fragments, Chen re-created the Shang world: calligraphy, grammar, geography, astronomy. Warfare and sacrifice; gods and royalty. When the Beijing publishing house paid Chen, he used the fee to purchase an old courtyard home near the city center. Above the entrance, he erected an inscription:
THE ONE-BOOK HOME
. That turned out to be a sad divination: Within two years, Chen Mengjia would be banned from publishing in the People’s Republic. And in the United States, his book about bronzes never appeared.