For our April book club, we read Land Of Big Numbers in preparation for our chat with the author, Te-Ping Chen.

“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.”

Purchase the book here

Speakers for the Land of Big Numbers

Te-Ping Chen

Journalist @The Wall Street Journal

Te-Ping Chen’s fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Granta, The Atlantic, O Magazine and more. A reporter with the Wall Street Journal, she was previously a correspondent for the paper in Beijing and Hong Kong. Land of Big Numbers is her first book.

Please note:
We will be hosting this event both on Zoom & Clubhouse. The first 30-minutes will be audio & video hosted on Zoom with the audio broadcast through to Clubhouse, and the second 30-minutes will audio only on both platforms. Join us on either (or both) platforms!

To join on Clubhouse, please follow Mei (@zhangmeijie) and click the bell to turn her notifications on.