Asia Times, 27 May 2006

BOOK REVIEW
From River City to Overnight City
Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present by Peter Hessler

In China just about every foreigner with a backpack tries traveling over the Lunar New Year holiday at least once. Many organizations shut down for weeks - and so what better way to kill a few days than a leisurely train ride, leaving the harsh northern winter for the pleasant climes of the country's subtropical south? Very few try it twice.

In the days leading up to Spring Festival, China's rail network plays host to the largest voluntary migration in the world, as the majority of the country's 150 million migrant laborers flood station booking halls, jostling for standing-room-only tickets on the 36-hour Beijing-Hefei Express. Many are laden with gifts for family, sharing the fruits of a successful year; no one wants to go home empty-handed, so every year in January the crime rate goes through the roof.

Most are ultimately heading for towns even the Chinese haven't heard of. One such town is Fuling, the obscure Yangtze River port where Peter Hessler spent two years teaching English at the local teacher-training college, an experience he recounted in River Town, the 2001 debut that won him the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize.

Oracle Bones serves as a kind of sequel; returning to China to join the Wall Street Journal in May 1999, Hessler picks up where he left off. Some of his ex-students have disappeared into the countryside of upcountry Sichuan, to teach in the desperately underfunded schools of one of the poorest regions of China; but others (including some of the more memorable individuals from River Town) have headed for the bright lights of the east coast, joining what, as Hessler reports, some sociologists are hailing as the largest voluntary migration in human history.

He follows two of his ex-students, Nancy and the grandly styled William Jefferson Foster, to Zhejiang province; bribing a party official at Fuling Teachers' College to release their residency documents, the pair find work teaching at a shady private school. Another student named Nancy heads for Shenzhen; she abandons teaching altogether, taking work in the office of an export factory in one of the satellite towns outside the formal city limits. Hessler regularly checks up on her progress as she moves from job to job, popping in during regular the visa runs to Hong Kong demanded by his own gray working situation......

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