Review: Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen

China is a country rich with culture and history. It is also a country that is so very often misunderstood by westerners. In Land of Big Numbers Te-Ping Chen brings to us a selection of stories about what life is truly like for the people that live there, those who have left, or for westerners who have married someone from China. The collection opens with Lulu, a story of a girl whose sense of right and wrong--and her need to speak out--lands her in serious trouble. From there, we move to a story of a government call centre worker who is trying to move on from an abusive relationship, a town whose hopes are inspired by, and then ruined, by a new type of fruit, and an old farmer who dreams of building his own aeroplane, and whose success comes in an unexpected way. And so the collection goes on, bringing as stories of triumph, betrayal and something in between.

What I loved most about this collection is the humanity of it all. These are the stories of the every day, ordinary people of China, who are trying to live the best life they can, in spite of the many obstacles that are thrown their way. Some, like Lulu want to make their country a better and fairer place, others are just trying to exist. Then there are the ones like Cao Cao, who does something extraordinary and wins the awe and respect of everyone around him, but for the party secretary who he wants so desperately to impress. Finally, there is Pan who finds herself stuck at the train station for an extraordinary length of time, in a series of events that would seem impossible to outsiders. Although this is Te-Ping Chen's debut collection, each of the stories have an air of wisdom and polish about them that I would expect from a far more experienced writer.

This is collection is highly recommended to anyone who wants to know what life is truly like for the people of China, past the stereotypes and the headlines that we see in the media.

Land of Big Numbers will be released by Scribner, a literary imprint of Simon and Schuster Australia of 3 March 2021.

Thank you to Simon and Schuster Australia for my copy of Land of Big Numbers.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more