Land of Big Numbers: Stories

Te-Ping Chen

Feb 2021 · HarperCollins

About this ebook

A Best Book of the Year: Barack Obama · NPR · The Washington Post · The Philadelphia Inquirer · Esquire · Kirkus Reviews · Chicago Public Library · Electric Literature

Malala Yousafzai’s Fearless Book Club Pick for Literati 

"Dazzling...Riveting." —New York Times Book Review

“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 “stirring and brilliant” debut story collection, offering vivid portrayals of the men and women of modern China and its diaspora, “both love letter and sharp social criticism,” from a phenomenal new literary talent bringing great “insight from her years as a reporter with the Wall Street Journal” (Elle).

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.

Ratings and reviews

This is a fascinating selection of short stories! I really enjoyed each one though some were sad or troubled. Each one did a good job of portraying a certain aspect of China, from its political views, culture, or history. They were all thought provoking and I know I will keep thinking about certain short stories for awhile. That is definitely the mark of a good book! I think my favorite one was New Fruit which had a nice fantastical touch to it with the fruit that brings memories and how that affected the people of that area. Another good one was Gubeikou Spirit which definitely had its surreal moments with the people being stuck in the train station for months for no discernable reason. This was definitely a quick read over one day for me, even when I slowed down to try to savor each story. I will certainly read this again and I look forward to sharing it with my family because I know they would like it too.

A Unique Perspective on a Unique Culture 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?"

About the author

TE-PING CHEN's fiction has been published in, or is forthcoming from, The New Yorker, Granta, Guernica, Tin House, and The Atlantic. A reporter with the Wall Street Journal, she was previously a correspondent for the paper in Beijing and Hong Kong. Prior to joining the Journal in 2012, she spent a year in China as a Fulbright fellow. She lives in Philadelphia.