Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler

Author:Peter Hessler
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780061121319
Publisher: HarperLargePrint
Published: 2011-11-05T21:11:08+00:00

ARTIFACT G

The Uncracked Bone

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

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