Oracle Bones (49 page)

I find the scholar in a temporary office, where he is unpacking some belongings. A native of Japan, he is a short, wispily goateed man in gold-rimmed glasses. He speaks fluent English with an accent, and his academic career has always involved crossing cultures. After studying at Japan’s Sophia University, which is run by Jesuits, he attended the University of Washington for graduate school. Originally, he researched linguistics, but he became interested in Shang writing after studying under Father Paul Serruys, a Belgian priest and accomplished oracle bone scholar.

Like Keightley, Takashima’s path to the bones was indirect, and he has often applied his background in linguistics to the study of Shang writing. Most recently, he and another scholar noticed that the inscriptions of different Shang diviners follow different grammatical patterns. This may reflect multiple dialects or languages—a possible sign that the Shang royal court involved more diversity than previously imagined.

The professor shakes my hand, and his face lights up when I mention that I’m researching the story of Chen Mengjia.

“Chen Mengjia was a great scholar,” Professor Takashima says. “His 1956 general introduction to the oracle bones is still a chrestomathy.”

From his mouth to my notes, the word mutates: “crestmathy.” I stare at what I’ve written, and then I admit, “I’ve never heard that word before. What does it mean?”

“Masterpiece,” he says. “Chen Mengjia’s book is a masterpiece.” The professor opens a dictionary, and then his face falls.

“My understanding of this word—” he mutters. “It’s not my understanding…”

He shows me the printed definition:

a selection of literary passages used to study literature or languages.

He grabs another dictionary from the shelf. “It’s the same thing,” he says. “‘A collection of passages from literature’. I wish I could find a better dictionary than this. I may have been misusing the word. I usually rely on the OED.”

He fiddles with a computer. Today was his first day teaching; he is moving
into a new office; a journalist has just dropped in unexpectedly. But at this particular moment, the word is the biggest distraction of all. He tries to go on-line; he searches the office for a better dictionary. I wait in silence. I haven’t spent much time in the company of scholars of ancient writing, but already I’ve learned that these people have a unique relationship with language. Professor Takashima speaks fluent Japanese, English, and Chinese; he reads ancient Chinese texts for a living. Words matter. Gently, I try to bring the interview back: “So Chen Mengjia’s book was a masterpiece?”

“Yes, it’s a masterpiece.” He looks up. “People still use it. It covers almost everything; it’s very comprehensive. When I’m researching something, Chen Mengjia’s book is the one that I always go to.”

Finally, the word is gone, and now he picks up another thread:

“When I was at Tokyo University, I heard some rumors about him. Some of the professors said that Chen Mengjia died fairly young, and they said it was not natural. There was something political about it. I don’t know how to verify this or not. But usually the Japanese are pretty good about this. They won’t tell rumors that aren’t true.”

He continues: “You know, he also wrote a book about Chinese bronzes. And the title, when translated into English, is something like
Chinese Bronzes Stolen by the American Imperialists.
It’s a very hard-to-get book. A professor at Tokyo University reprinted it with the original title. Chen was calling the U.S. a kind of imperialist. I don’t see why he titled it in that way.”

I explain what I’ve learned about the book, and I tell Professor Takashima that Chen Mengjia committed suicide in 1966. I mention that, although I have only begun to research the story, some people have told me that Chen’s troubles began when he opposed the reform of Chinese writing.

“Good for him,” the professor says. The response is instinctive; immediately he catches himself. “That’s not what I meant,” he says quickly. “I understand that as a result he was put in a position where he had to commit suicide. That’s terrible. I just mean that I also do not like the simplification of Chinese characters.”

TAKASHIMA LAUGHS WHEN
I mention the cracked bone. “Keightley quoted that in his book!” he says. “I couldn’t believe it.” He shakes his head, and then he tells the story:

In June of 1969, when Takashima was a graduate student, he decided to crack an oracle bone. He went to a Seattle meat shop, where he purchased some steaks and convinced the butchers to throw in a couple of meatless scapulas. (“They asked, ‘What are you doing with this?’ I said, ‘I want to crack it.’ They
gave it to me for free.”) Along with his fellow students, Takashima hosted a party, where Father Paul Serruys occupied the Shang role of the “presiding priest”—the oracle bone diviner. Takashima was the technician.

“First I tried it with the soldering iron,” he remembers. “It’s electric and the heat was not intense enough. It just made a little scorch—that’s it. So I used the electric soldering iron plus the burning charcoal. It made the bone really hot. And it made a terrible stench.”

He continues: “Apparently there are different theories about how to prepare it—maybe you soak it in vinegar, or something like that. I had just dried the bone in the oven beforehand. And it wouldn’t crack. Father Serruys and the other students were disappointed, so we just went back to eating and drinking. I gave up. I threw the scapula into the barbecue. We forgot about it, and then it started to crack like crazy. Pop pop pop! Historical linguistics are always trying to reconstruct ancient sounds. Well, that was a real reconstruction of the phonological system! It sounded like the Chinese word
bu.
”

He pauses to write a character onto a scrap of paper. It means “divine; tell fortunes,” and the shape resembles a crack in a bone:

“In modern Chinese it’s pronounced
bu
,” he explains. “But in ancient Chinese it was
buk
. And the bone sounded just like that! More like a
p
sound, though—to me, it sounded like,
Pok pok pok pok
! It was a really sharp sound. I wrote a letter to Keightley, and he reproduced this in a footnote in his book
Sources of Shang History
. I couldn’t believe it! And he said that Takashima has reconstructed the cracking in a Neolithic way!”

DESPITE THE SYMBOLIC
neatness of the ancient Chinese theory about the origins of writing—from animal tracks to words—nobody knows how it really happened. Naturally, there aren’t any records of how humans first learned to record things.

“It’s such a giant step,” Takashima says. “This step to writing, after thousands of years of oral communication. You know, the history of writing isn’t that long. But once it began, civilization progressed by leaps and bounds. It’s tremendous. Writing is really the great engine for progress in human civilization. Basically, that progress has been during the last three thousand years, whereas human history is fifty thousand, maybe seventy thousand years long. All of those years, they really didn’t do much because there was no writing. What made people first feel the necessity to write things down?”

We talk about Chinese writing, and the professor mentions that he has
published a paper about the squareness of Chinese characters. Over the centuries, their form changed: Shang words were slightly elongated, but by the Han dynasty they had been pressed into a square shape, now known as
fangkuaizi
.

“I’m interested in the cosmography,” he says. “I’m interested in the Chinese view of what the world is like. Where it comes from, I don’t know. But it seems that they looked at things as if they were square. Not only the writing, but also in terms of the geographical.”

In the oracle bone inscriptions, the Shang world is always described in terms of the four cardinal directions. Shang tombs and cities, and the walls that often surrounded them, were also arranged strictly according to the compass. Professor Takashima jots down the modern character
cheng
. It’s often used as part of two terms: “city,” and “city wall”:

He notes that the ancient form of the character contained one element that is shaped like a box:
. When written alone,
indicated a “squared area” or “demarcated area”—basically, a settlement. And the Old Chinese pronunciation of
and
sounded similar.