In Land of Big Numbers, debut author Te-Ping Chen writes of modern China. Many young characters in this short story collection are attempting to escape the countryside for the technology and modernization of the cities. Chen has fascinating set-ups to begin each plot, where citizens live within the state’s actions, remaining apolitical and not thinking outside of themselves.
There are the “twins …spared the reach of the government’s family-planning policies” whose “skulls had matching indentations from where they’d been pressed against each other in the womb.” This brother and sister move on to college in “Lulu” to take different paths: the brother/protagonist to play video games and eventually compete for big prize money while his sister begins to stream news “about protests and human rights abuses around the country.” Only when he’s reading about his sister’s political activism on her social media account does he even consider another point of view.
There’s the girl who works for the Satisfaction Office, in “Hotline Girls”—government workers “who can help you resolve any question”—while she deals with a stalker ex-boyfriend. One day, this girl’s co-worker (who is the best at her job) is seen driving a large van which “Anyone could tell was intended for the discontented, the protesters who tried to stir up trouble, usually from out of town.”
And then there’s the flower shop girl in “Shanghai Murmur” who daydreams about a favorite male customer who buys “seven roses and three lilies” on Fridays and lives in a nearby expensive residential compound. It takes days before she and the tenants of her building realize that the man upstairs has died. An expensive pen left behind by the male customer is easier to obsess over: “one should only return the lost item to its owner.” The third-person narrator argues with herself when the wife appears at the shop, demanding the pen’s return: “she was beautiful, what he deserved…there was something off-putting in her face. She looked like the sort of woman who would feed a pet expensive dog food and dock her servant’s pay.”
Land of Big Numbers consists of ten exceedingly well-crafted stories. Each is a masterfully designed enactment of understatement that reflects a character’s dissatisfaction with oneself and said interactions with Chinese society but without blunt criticism. These protagonists are not happy, often focusing on looking for something to make their lives better. What this reader finds so enlightening is how many of the protagonists have a public life that hides a secret, leading them to “spend our lives looking for someone.”
Most of these stories are realistically drawn, with the central conflict verging on actions that are extreme: a past poisoning, vicious attacks on animals (“one afternoon, he’d pulled [her] aside and showed her a streak knife. ‘I’m going to get that cat,’ he’d said, eyes glinting”). Even working on a theme park ride called The Tunnel of Love where “riders were shrouded in plastic and blindfolded…they were taken through a writhing, heated machine that would tighten…they were partly submerged in a hot, viscous liquid…Relive life’s original trauma, was how we advertised it.”
Two other tales take place in contemporary United States but continue Chen’s pattern of characters not really knowing themselves or what drives the people they’re involved with.
In two specific stories, Chen uses magical realism to set up a social parable. “New Fruit” introduces the idea of qiguo, or “peculiar fruit,” that arrives in crates marked SUNSHAN PRODUCE. It is Fan Shiyi’s efforts of crossbreeding fruit as a hobby, which is “healthy, full of vitamins, and delicious” and which state media reporters pronounce is “a new fruit that is a symbol of our new nation.” But the qiguo’s effects are variable as the seasons change: “Zhu Ayi, when she’d eaten her first piece, was swept with a feeling of shame…There was the time she’d left her son alone and he’d scalded himself on the stove, the time she’d fed her mother-in-law a piece of fish that had fallen on the floor.” Such memories surge up and reproach the consumers of the peculiar fruit.
“New Fruit” and the final story, “Gubeikou Spirit,” truly earn their surprising conclusions. “Gubeikou Spirit” is where a group of people is trapped for no reason on a subway platform. These people adapt and are provided for as months pass while being told, “Be a civilized passenger, for your safety and that of those around you. We’ll get there together.” They all wait for official permission to leave from the train system and government.
In this regard, Chen’s background as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and correspondent in Beijing, where she covered the topics of how work is changing and people find meaning in their professional lives, serves her well. A gifted observer, Te-Ping Chen shows great intuition which establishes her own unique voice.
