A debut collection from an extraordinary new talent, vividly giving voice to the men and women of modern China and its diaspora.

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 with 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 as well as an astonishingly accomplished new literary voice.

Item Information Item Information

Format: TradePaperback
Author: Chen, Te-Ping
ISBN: 9780358272557
Condition: Used
Dimensions: 7.90 x 0.90
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Year: 2021

Land of Big Numbers: Stories

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