Presented in partnership with the Center for East Asian Studies, debut short story writer, Te-Ping Chen will appear live to discuss Land of Big Numbers. 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.

This series, featuring authors and books focusing on cultural expressions related to China, Japan, and Korea, is made possible through our partnership with the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As part of the partnership, free copies of Land of Big Numbers will be distributed for free to live event attendees who sign up. During the event, there will be a link at the bottom of the screen, fill out the form, and a book will be sent to you.