Land of Big Numbers: Stories

Author:Te-Ping Chen

Genre: Short Stories, Historical Fiction

Narrator: Matt Yang King, Lynn Chen, Katie Tang, Christine Lakin, Chris Naoki Lee, Fiona Rene, Eddy Lee

Playtime: 6hrs 35m

Publisher: Harper Collins

Book description (from AnyPlay): Gripping and compassionate, Land of Big Numbers depicts 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.

The stories are:

Lulu --

Hotline girl --

New fruit --

Field notes on a marriage --

Flying machine --

On the street where you live --

Shanghai murmur --

Land of big numbers --

Beautiful country --

Gubeikou spirit

Review:

This is a remarkable and multifaceted work that provides deep insights into modern China, its history, culture, social and political aspects. The stories are beautifully written, and they paint a vivid picture of flawed characters in a richly diverse range of tales that showcase the realities of contemporary China, both personal and political, while also incorporating elements of magical realism. One of the stories features the creation of a strange and fantastical fruit that is experienced positively by different people until something changes. Instead of generating an overly positive feeling it starts to makes people depressed, and even after the figure it out, the obsession people have with the fruit makes them continue to consume it.

Another story follows a brother and sister who take different approaches to their lives, with the brother becoming concerned about his sister's political activism and social media posts. He wishes to have a normal down to earth life. The whole family had high hopes for the girl as she always seems very smart and had success at school since early age. When she leaves for collage, she starts to be interested in calling out injustices and the government, that makes her get into trouble with the police and she ends up in prison.

Yet another story follows a woman who leaves her home to chase her dreams, but ends up in a call center with her abusive ex-boyfriend on her trail. Even if she ran away from him due to violence and abuse, after he manages to find her, she doubts her decision to be away. It reflects the mentality those type of men implant on their victims, and even after time away from them its a very difficult mental framework to leave.

I found Te-Ping Chen's collection of short stories to be an insightful and nuanced portrayal of life in modern China. The stories offer a window into the complex relationship between people's dreams, hopes, and desires, and the controlling government that seeks to regulate their lives. The standout story for me was "Gubeiko Spirit," which illustrates the madness that can result from government regulations. In this tale, a group of people are trapped in a station, highlighting the daily struggles, resilience, and limitations experienced by those living in China. It might sound unreal but its a great reflection on how people are living right now.

Through her writing, Chen captures the universality of human experience and the ways in which we are all connected. The stories are filled with desperation, pain, disappointment, and the battle to survive, as well as an acknowledgment of the historical hardships and poverty that have shaped the country. Overall, this collection is a beautifully written and thought-provoking work that offers deep insights into contemporary China.

This was used for the challenges:

• Read around the world: China