By Audrey Fong
Today, China has the largest population of any nation in the world: over 1.4 billion people, with over 160 cities home to at least one million people. In comparison, the U.S. only has only 14 cities with over a million people. With China’s growing population, economic dominance, rapid industrialization, and status as a world power, China is consistently in the news—one of many reasons why I was drawn to Te-Ping Chen’s debut short story collection, Land of Big Numbers.
Before Chen became a Wall Street Journal correspondent based in Philadelphia (her current position), she was previously based in and reported on two densely packed Chinese cities — Beijing and Hong Kong. Given Chen’s experience abroad in China and the subject matter of her book, I wondered — what can literature and storytelling teach us about modern China, and where China is heading in the coming decades?
Consisting of 10 short stories, Land of Big Numbers covers a wide cast of characters across modern, and in some cases, future mainland China. These characters range from the relatively niche (a competitive video game player and a farmer/inventor) to the common (an activist, a flower shop employee, and parents striving to give their kids better lives). But what all of these stories have in common is a constant struggle with power, whether it’s a strained relationship between a commoner and a government official, the ongoing inequalities between the rich and the poor, or parents trying to enforce their wills on their child.
While the stories are a fast read and kept me engaged, I couldn’t help but wish that Chen had fleshed out the stories more. In several stories, she introduces a detail or plotline that feels so important that I could not help but wonder why she would introduce it if she were not going to explore it more. For example, in “Field Notes of a Marriage,” the narrator visits her deceased husband’s hometown in China and meets his parents for the first time. His parents reveal a dark secret about their son, an alternate story to what the husband had told her. Without giving it away, I will say it’s a disturbing secret that has the potential to completely change the way the narrator sees her husband. To bring up such a startling and cruel secret and then not have it further affect the plot felt odd. Perhaps Chen is speaking to the secrets laced into Chinese families or society? However, as a reader, I wanted to see how this secret would impact the narrator.
Then in “Beautiful Country,” the Chinese female narrator shares that she found another woman’s lipstick in her long-term white boyfriend’s car and that he has been unfaithful once before. In the same story, the narrator considers explaining to her boyfriend the difference between their parents – that her Chinese parents experienced hard labor and therefore are in more need of more support than his white, American parents who had white collar jobs. Both of these moments felt like they would be critical breaking points in a relationship or at least deserve an argument; the narrator should confront her boyfriend on his infidelity or his inability to recognize his privileged background. Instead, Chen has the narrator wave away her issues with her boyfriend by joking to him, “I hate that you’re so good-looking…It means you can get away with anything.” There is ultimately no confrontation.
Where Chen succeeds with her collection is in the heartbreaking stories of individuals striving in a society set up against them. In “Lulu,” we meet the narrator’s twin sister, Lulu, who posts news of police brutality on social media to pressure the Chinese government into reforming. We watch her go to jail, where she is repeatedly the victim of police brutality and yet does not waver from her ideals. Then, in “Flying Machine,” we meet a farmer named Cao Cao who desperately wants to become more than his humble origins and hopes to impress government officials by astounding them with his inventions and bringing pride to China. We watch him try multiple times to get his airplane, the focus of the story, into the air with no success.
These stories speak to the often hopeless conditions of human life in an oppressive regime. One could argue that Chen is reinforcing stereotypes of the Chinese government, but I see these stories as an added testimony from the eyes of someone who has lived in China for the majority of her life and reported there — that the Chinese government is, in fact, oppressive. And even more than that, I found these stories to serve as reminders of how creative, strong, hopeful, and resilient the Chinese people are.
To return to the original question, then: what can we learn from Land of Big Numbers about China and its future? The answer is a lot. Of course, we can be reminded of the obvious fact that while we as a country have issues with the Chinese government, it is not the individual people that are our “enemies.” Chen’s characters are imbued with such humanity and relatability that the collection reminds us of how similar humans are everywhere, that we often have the same hopes and ambitions, and that no matter where you go, we all have our own problems. We can also learn from the traumas the characters carry and the ongoing inequalities in many of the stories that the nation is still healing from its centuries of tumult (colonization, civil war, communist revolution, etc.) and that we can only hope for a brighter, safer future for all of those in China.
Land of Big Numbers is an ideal read for those interested in present-day, mainland China. Its quick stories take you through a variety of experiences, cities, social classes, and genders to provide a glimpse at a massive nation.
Land of Big Numbers is available from Barnes & Noble, Blue Cypress Books, Laguna Beach Books, The Last Bookstore, Loyalty Bookstore, Magers & Quinn Booksellers, and Powell’s City of Books.
Audrey Fong is a writer, interested in food, coming of age stories, and Asian American narratives. She earned her B.A. in English from UC Irvine and is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in creative writing from Chapman University. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.