“Gripping and illuminating . . . At the heart of Te-Ping Chen’s remarkable debut lies a question all too relevant in 21st Century America: What is freedom?” –Jennifer Egan “Immensely rewarding, from the first sentence to the last…An exceptional collection.” –Charles Yu A debut collection from an emerging “fiction powerhouse,” vivid portrayals of the men and women of modern China and its … men and women of modern China and its diaspora that “entertain, educate, and universally resonate” (Booklist, starred review).
Gripping and compassionate, Land of Big Numbers traces the journeys of the diverse and legion Chinese people, their history, their government, and how all of that has tumbled–messily, violently, but still beautifully–into the present.
Cutting between clear-eyed realism and tongue-in-cheek magical realism, Chen’s stories coalesce into a portrait of a people striving for openings where mobility is limited. Twins take radically different paths: one becomes a professional gamer, the other a political activist. A woman moves to the city to work at a government call center and is followed by her violent ex-boyfriend. A man is swept into the high-risk, high-reward temptations of China’s volatile stock exchange. And a group of people sit, trapped for no reason, on a subway platform for months, waiting for official permission to leave.
With acute social insight, Te-Ping Chen layers years of experience reporting on the ground in China with incantatory prose in this taut, surprising debut, proving herself both a remarkable cultural critic and an astonishingly accomplished new literary voice.
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I don’t think I’ve ever read a short story collection where I loved or was impressed with each and every story, even from my favorite writers. That’s the case here as well. However, I can say that each of the stories in “Land of Big Numbers” is thoughtfully crafted and interesting, all speculative and based in contemporary China. There are ten in all, and I read them over December and January, one every few days or so. I think I enjoyed them more that way; more than I would’ve had I read them all in few sittings.
The lead story, “Lulu,” was brilliant. I also really loved “Hotline Girl,” “Land of Big Numbers” and “Guebeikou Spirit.”
One of my other favorites was “New Fruit,” which is about qiquo, or “peculiar fruit,” created through trial and error crossbreeding by a man named Fan Shiyi. It’s this miraculous fruit that leaves different, but positive impressions on the person smelling or eating it. It has a sort of Proust effect on some, making them recall memories in vivid detail. For everyone, even newborn babies, it gives them inexplicable feelings of happiness, revitalizing some, that kind of thing. It gets massively popular. The catch is that when it’s a bad season for the fruit, it has an opposite effect on people, making them feel sick, unhappy or even worse… Loved the concept and execution here and the note it ended on.
I’m more of a novel reader, and would be thrilled if Te-Ping Chen wrote one in the future. I’d also happily read more of her short stories!
*ARC received from HMH through BookishFirst
Te-Ping Chen’s debut story collection Land of Big Numbers started out strong and ended with a mind-blowing parable that knocked my socks off.
I read the first story through BookishFirst and put in my name for the ARC. Set in China, twins go on separate life paths, the bright and driven girl challenging government repression, the boy excelling in competitive video gaming. A reversal of expectations challenges our values.
The stories are revelatory about life in modern China and the expat experience. I was unsettled by the portrait of life in China, seemingly normal people doing seemingly normal things, and yet so much at odds with American expectations.
The generational divide shows up clearly. The older characters had lived hard lives of manual labor and poverty. Some hold onto fantasies of achievement and acceptance into the Party. Their children become teenage factory workers in the city or hope for a rich benefactor or play the stock market dreaming of easy money.
It is a world at once very familiar–and very alien. The details are different, but the human experience universal.
All around Zhu Feng, it seemed, people were buying, buying, homes and stocks and second and third houses; there was a whole generation who’d gotten rich and needed to buy things for their kids, and the same dinky things from before didn’t pass muster: penny rides on those plastic cartoon figures that flashed lights and gently rocked back and forth outside of drugstores; hawthorn impaled on sticks and sheathed in frozen yellow sugar casings, a cheap winter treat. They needed to buy because they had the money and that’s what everyone else was doing…Also, the government said it was the buying opportunity of a generations…China was going up and up and nobody wanted to be left behind.”~from Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen
The last story Guebeikou Spirit is amazing, a parable that reaches past it’s setting to alert against the lure of complacence that can become complicity. Characters are stranded on a new high-speed train station after trains pass them buy. Regulations state that passengers must depart from a different station than they entered, and so they remain.
Every day they hear the announcement that the train is delayed. The guards reassuring,”we’ll get there together,” as they bring in food, blankets, personal health supplies, and as weeks go on, televisions and coloring books.
The stranded people become a media sensation and the organize to represent ‘Gubeikuo Spirit.’ Several dissident young men try to follow the train tracks to another station, but always return and finally give up. The outside world’s hardships come through the television news. They become comfortable so that when a train finally stops, they are unwilling to leave.
Obedience to an illogical rule, becoming comfortable, leading to the loss of volition and self-determination–it’s a powerful message.
Te-Ping Chen is a marvelous writer and I look forward to reading more from her pen.
I received an ARC from the publisher through BookishFirst and an egalley through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.
Land of Big Numbers is a well-written collection of clever short stories about the people of a country many of us westerners have little knowledge of. Each story peels back another layer of what it is like to live in China.
At first, the characters’ lives sound similar to life in North America. Parents go to work, kids go to school and college, and teenagers go to spend their time at shopping centers. Then subtle details are mentioned that make the reader uncomfortable: the government monitoring social media posts, prisoners making Christmas lights to sell to the United States, ID cards that indicate who lives in what city. Chinese life is slowly and methodically unwrapped through these stories for the Western reader without the author revealing her intentions. Each story is written well, but the reader is left wondering, “do that many people in the world really live like this?”
Land of Big Numbers is a diverse collection of short stories depicting life in China, highlighting different singular life experiences in each story. Every one presents a different aspect of Chinese history, government, culture, and the human condition all together.
“Thank you for your cooperation, please line up, do not push
Be a civilized passenger, for your safety and that of those around you
We’ll get there together.”
One thing I must say, about reading this debut collection, is to read the stories and enjoy them for the story! Chen has constructed exactly that… great stories. Do not wait for that one defining moment (that most of us novel readers wait for) to enjoy the story, because that moment may not come to you until far after you have finished that story and moved on to the next. Don’t wait for “something” to happen because it IS happening, right now, as you read them, the stories are happening. They start and end in such unique and unexpected ways, sometimes you are thrown into the story midday or mid-situation while others you are left the same way with a striking writing style that while leaving you hanging… you are, at the same time, satisfied and content. Enjoy these stories, in the moment, as they are unfolding for you. The stories are what they are, no frills, no fuss but everything you need to keep you engaged and leave you wondering about what’s next and/or wanting more. It is a great collection, my favorite was Gubeikou Spirit by far (a solid example of the saying “Save the best for last,” it was a good ending story.) It is a short read that lends to the voices of the Chinese people in a way I have not experienced as of yet, it has my curiosity senses tingling about this foreign (to me) land of big numbers and I will be picking up more books about their politics, culture, food culture and ways of life.
“…We’ll get there together.”
[Thank you BookishFirst, Te-Ping Chen, and HMH Books for the free ARC]