Land of Big Numbers: writer Te-Ping Chen tries to make sense of China by focusing on the miniature
- Te-Ping Chen’s first short story collection, Land of Big Numbers, already counts the authors Madeleine Thien, Jennifer Egan and Charles Yu as fans
- She wrote the book ‘as way of trying to grapple with a country that can be really difficult to try and parse’
Land of Big Numbers
by Te-Ping Chen
Mariner Books
If there were a prize for the best book title describing 21st century China, Land of Big Numbers would be in the running. Those four words encapsulate the country’s dizzying scale, ambition and success, and by implication the challenge facing anyone trying to capture its infinite variety.
Just in case you are tempted to use the phrase for yourself, Land of Big Numbers is already taken. Twice. The Wall Street Journal’s Te-Ping Chen has used it as the title of both a short story and her first short story collection, which can already count the authors Madeleine Thien, Jennifer Egan and Charles Yu as fans.
Despite this rarefied praise, Chen begins our conversation by revealing that her book, Land of Big Numbers, was in one respect born from failure. “I have written fiction for a long time, interspersed with journalism,” she says from her home in Philadelphia, in the United States. “The way I started writing these stories was through a novel that I had been spinning my wheels over.”
Chen escaped the impasse of this longer work by returning to her experiences reporting from Beijing and Hong Kong. “What I love doing as a journalist, and also in fiction, is trying to find particular human ways into stories that can evoke the bigger whole.”
Far from being a drawback when writing about a nation as vast and diverse as China, writing in miniature proved a release. “I felt it was an apt vehicle for trying to piece together a sense of this country. It is a place that looms on such a gargantuan scale, like a monolith, certainly as conveyed in headlines. It is a country that contains so many stories, so many narrative arcs. Getting to focus on the intimate and personal is the only way you can try to tell any story.”
