Land of Big Numbers

"It’s an extraordinary collection of short stories, which would be valuable for their literary merits even if they didn’t also provide a window onto China. The stories aren’t of a single genre. Some of them are what you would expect from a gifted journalist who’s taking stories in the news and putting a fictional spin on them. There is one story about a rural inventor—and I remember reading news reports about rural inventors, people in the countryside who put their energy into coming up with these amazing devices. That’s a charming story, but it’s not unexpected from a journalist. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But there are a couple of other stories that veer toward science fiction or magical realism. My favorite is one about an extraordinary fruit that appears in a local market one day. The story has a great evocation of neighborhood markets in China where you shop for fruits and vegetables. But it turns out that this particular fruit unlocks memories, getting characters to talk about things that they had been repressing. As the best science fiction often does, it takes a realistic setting and spins it out, asking, ‘What if you altered one element of a milieu? How would everything change?’ In this case, people’s relationships change. The fruit is really delightful to eat, but do people want to unlock these emotions and go in that direction? It’s a lovely and strange story. The other thing that I like about the book is that even though it’s not about this, there are some characters sprinkled in that move between China and the United States. There’s some cross-cultural understanding or misunderstanding. Te-Ping Chen is a very good journalist, and a very talented writer of fiction as well. It would be a perfect book club book. It’s part of life, maybe in the way that in very religious countries, a church or religious hierarchy might be. It also has a social welfare and a prestige-granting mechanism—as well as control."