Oracle - Chapters 4 and 5

The posts are starting to become more regular again and hopefully it continues as the work starts to pile up. There are many books I want to get to (I'll be picking up The Great Shark Hunt by Hunter S. Thompson next), so hopefully things won't slow down.

I'm really enjoying the structure of Oracle Bones. Hessler does a nice job of creating short, self-contained chapters... it almost feels like a collection of columns he wrote while in China. Sprawling books with grand unified theses are great (Guns, Germs and Steel), but they tend to get tedious towards the end. Hessler does a nice job of avoiding this problem while still conveying a general sense of Chinese culture.

This chapter deals with Shenzhen, which was once a relatively undeveloped city because it was near Hong Kong and leaders didn't want to invest much culture into a place so close to imperial influence. This mentality set up Shenzhen as a tabula rasa during the Reform and Opening, allowing leaders to use it as a petri dish for experimental initiatives. Created was a boomtown that attracted both businesses and migrant workers looking to make money.

A strange phenomenon and followed was the building of a chain-link fence around the entire city, to keep away outside influence and keep in the population. Eventually, the city proper sprung up into an upper-middle class metropolis (complete with yuppie attractions) while less reputable businesses set up shop outside the chain-link fence to escape particular ordinances and exploit cheap labor from the flock of migrant workers. The explanation of these factory-warehouse-dormitories is pretty grim, but Hessler manages to present a human face to everything, this time using one of this former students as a tour guide.

Chapter 5 is less focused but entertaining nonetheless. It starts with the delineation of parallels between Hessler's peddling of stories to publish to the peddling of bootlegged products (with accompanying narratives). This transitions into a trip to a starch factory for a writing assignment. Too long to present examples of here, the trip really shows off Hessler's sharp, comedic prose. Highlights include his encounter with illegal political pamphlets, competing brands of centrifuges and the storied history of a cornstarch scientist.