&;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 debut collection from an emerging &;fiction powerhouse,&; vivid portrayals of the men and women of modern China and its diaspora that &;entertain, educate, and universally resonate&; (Booklist, starred review).
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.
