Te-Ping Chen: “Every story unfolded as a series of surprises in the writing.”

Te-Ping Chen, who spent six years in China, including two years in Hong Kong, as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, found that her desire to write about that part of the world only multiplied the longer she was there. Though she loved her job, she felt limited by it: the rigors of journalism quashed so much of the peculiarity, the human weirdness, the everyday choreography that interested her. It’s these pursuits that animate the spirit of Chen’s first short story collection, Land of Big Numbers.

As I read, I wanted to see the characters that populate these ten pieces of short fiction gather, at a hotel or on a boat or at a dinner party. These characters include a brilliant young dissident and her twin brother, a champion video-gamer; an eccentric tinkerer and Party aspirant; a deranged inventor of romantic theme-park rides; an impressionable young florist; a teen investor high on the stock market rush; and a nurse with the