By Peter Hessler
A century in the past, outsiders observed China as a spot the place not anything ever alterations. this day the rustic has turn into essentially the most dynamic areas on the earth. In Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler explores the human part of China's transformation, viewing modern day China and its starting to be hyperlinks to the Western international throughout the lives of a handful of normal humans. In a story that gracefully strikes among the traditional and the current, the East and the West, Hessler captures the soul of a rustic that's present process a momentous swap sooner than our eyes.
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Extra resources for Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China
Example text
That was the year he talked some Russians into buying twenty thousand bogus brassieres, made in Guangdong, with labels that said Pierre Cardin. The margin on that deal was nearly a quarter a bra. I couldn’t see the money on Polat. He dressed simply, and he didn’t brag after closing a deal, unlike the other Yabaolu traders. They were businessmen The Middleman 25 of the purest sort, dealing in fakes and playing the margins, and I learned not to take their stories too seriously. But Polat seemed different.
He often used the Chinese word jiade—“fake”—and he was deeply scornful of the products that he sold. According to him, the knockoff clothes were garbage, crap, shit—jiade. Not long after we met, he mentioned that he had originally taught Uighur language and literature at a secondary school in Xinjiang. He spoke so disparagingly of his business deals that I couldn’t understand why he had left teaching. He was handsome in a rugged way, but his cheeks had lines so deep they looked like seams. He was slightly overweight.
Galambos applied, but he missed all the deadlines except one: a scholarship to study in China. He accepted, figuring that it was worth avoiding six months in the army. That was fifteen years ago. “I got sucked into this whole Chineseness,” he explains. One evening, I meet Galambos for a drink in Beijing, and the conversation turns to history. He explains that people have a natural tendency to choose certain figures and events, exaggerate their importance, and then incorporate them into narratives.