Around the corner in contemporary China

THE title of the deeply engaging book “Oracle Bones” refers to the objects that hold China’s most ancient history. Made of animal shell and bone, they bear tiny inscriptions that now count as the oldest record of writing in Asia.

They are shards, really, offering small clues to what life was like more than 3,000 years ago. They are all that remain, the only artifacts that did not disintegrate over time, as bamboo, wood and paper inevitably did.

Listening attentively to archaeologists who weigh these oracle bones, author Peter Hessler then conveys their sense of wonder and lets it inform his own exploration of contemporary China. In fact, Hessler uses archaeology as scaffolding for this adroit narrative. The search for clues, the buried nature of history, the attempts by rulers to instill order, the chaos that actually reigns are the dynamics of life in China today, just as they have been for centuries.

Hessler quotes historian Nicholas R. Clifford, who wrote in 2001 that although China has “a far longer past than the West ... the past and history are not the same thing. Here in China’s past there was no narrative but only stories.”

Hessler clearly agrees. And he goes beyond the usual ways of evaluating so complex a culture. Instead, his focus wanders intelligently and settles into corners of China that we don’t ordinarily read about. With quiet power, his writing glues stories into a coherent whole. He sifts the morass of China’s society and winnows it to the stories that resonate.

Hessler’s first book, “River Town” (2001), was a compelling account of his experience teaching English in a small city in central Sichuan province. In “Oracle Bones,” he expands his horizon, mulling China’s past as he examines its present. He hangs out with a money changer from Xinjiang. He travels the country as a freelance writer, visiting archaeological sites for National Geographic. He keeps in touch with former students, whose tales are starkly revealing. He works for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, clipping news stories about China from other newspapers and living in a back alley where Westerners usually cannot stay legally. Residency rules, like so much else in China, are in flux.

China’s emerging economic power has prompted many Western writers to employ fantastical or alarmist views of the country as a gold mine or a fire-breathing dragon, neither of them realistic. Hessler’s writing is refreshingly free of breathless superlatives. He admits being a lousy deadline journalist, preferring to look past the daily trivia that makes headlines for the deeper phenomena and to make note of the accidental nature of history.

“The past is under construction,” Hessler writes. “It lies under houses, beneath highways, below building sites. Usually it reappears by chance -- somebody digs, something turns up. In the end, luck discovers most artifacts in China.”

His narrative is littered with intriguing observations and answers to his incisive questions. Tea drinking, for instance, is often assumed to be as old as China itself. Yet Hessler discovers that Chinese people thought of tea as a drink for barbarians until the Tang Dynasty.

Hessler reveals little about himself. He seems to thrive on what he calls the “floating life” of a writer, observing contemporary China with detachment. The power of his storytelling would be even stronger if his own personality emerged in it.

Yet Hessler has achieved something quite special in “Oracle Bones,” conveying the idiosyncrasies of China in a way that makes its people palpably human and distinctly memorable.

Seth Faison is the author of “South of the Clouds: Exploring the Hidden Realms of China.”