by Te-Ping Chen
@tepingchen
“Dazzling…Riveting.” —New York Times Book Review
“Chen has one of the year’s big debut books.” —Philadelphia Inquirer
“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.
Interview with the Author
Why Is This Happening? with Chris Hayes
A Life in China with Te-Ping Chen
5/11/21 49 min

New Books Network
Te-Ping Chen, “Land of Big Numbers: Stories” (Mariner Books, 2021)
3/18/21 31 min

Lit Up
Te-Ping Chen on funeral strippers, and her collection of short stories, Land of Big Numbers
5/18/21 33 min

Sinica Podcast
Journalist Te-Ping Chen on her short fiction collection, Land of Big Number
2/18/21 53 min

ChinaTalk
Te-Ping Chen’s Short Stories of Modern China
3/20/21 33 min

The Avid Reader Show
Episode 600: Land of Big Numbers – Te-Ping Chen
2/24/21 41 min


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