Author Q&A: Interview with Te-Ping Chen, Land of Big Numbers
Debuting a new section: interviews with authors; interview edited for clarity and brevity
Land Of Big Numbers is a debut story collection from former China Journalist Te-Ping Chen. The ten riveting stories are largely set in China, with a dash of magical realism sprinkled in.
On Fiction and Magical realism
Fiction felt like it allowed for such a wider lens, and in many ways, a more human one.
As far as magical realism goes – China is truly a place of such extremes and extraordinary, over-the-top details, many of which felt like they’d been lifted from a Gabriel García Márquez novel. When I was living there, one corrupt official was caught stealing money from the public. When his rooms of stolen cash were eventually discovered, it required 16 cash-counting machines to try and count up all his loot, and four of those machines burned out and broke in the process! Or closer to home, a restaurant in my neighborhood where dishes were served by robot waiters, which the owner touted as a cost-saving measure. Every day, there was some detail like that you’d encounter in the news, or in day-to-day life, and magical realism was a way of capturing some of that feeling for readers.
On balancing the "surrealness" of certain phenomena native to China while not exoticizing it
Some of the details in the book – noodles-chopping robots, a farmer building his own airplane – are absolutely in the realm of the surreal. They strike me as strange and wonderful and unusual, but not 'exotic,’ at least no more so than a ranch filled with trees made from old soda bottles, or restaurants where people eat in pitch-dark rooms to mimic the experience of being blind. The U.S. is full of people pursuing their own highly particular lives; China is, too, and that felt important to recognize in this book – all the ways that people have their own individual ambitions, loves, and pursuits. It’s absolutely what you encounter in China. And the fact that it’s such a dynamic, fast-changing country makes it more fertile ground in that way, to feel like there are so many possibilities inherent in living there, and also strikes me as just the extraordinary nature of being human, too.
On Chinese State influence and its perception in the West
One misconception I often encounter is the perception that the Party, and the government, controls all aspects of life in China in a kind of totalitarian fashion. That isn’t the case – for many people, if you stay apolitical, within strictly drawn lines, it’s possible to live a life in which the state is much more out of sight, not the coercive force it can be for others. And that’s part of the tension: the feeling of so much expansiveness and choice that exists in some ways, those apolitical freedoms, which exist alongside such stark political repression. This duality is so much a part of life in modern China and is in many ways at the core of the book.
What impression of China do you want your readers to leave with after finishing the book?
I hope readers walk away with a deeper sense of what it’s like to live in a country like China, a place that’s complex and full of humor and beauty in so many ways; a society that can be so rife with absurdities and cruelties, yes, but also one full of people who are incredibly creative and clever and resourceful, constantly finding ways to live their own lives and create meaning, even in the face of often extraordinary repression and stifling odds. It’s a country I love deeply and have so much affection for, and after reading the book, I hope more people who might not have spent time there themselves will understand why.
Originally published 2/24/2021 in Cosmos Book Club; Interview conducted by Ina Yang