A Best Book of the Year: Barack Obama · NPR · The Washington Post · The Philadelphia Inquirer ·
Esquire · Kirkus Reviews · Chicago Public Library · Electric Literature Malala Yousafzai's
Fearless Book Club Pick for Literati Dazzling...Riveting. ?New York Times Book Review ?Gripping
and illuminating . . . At the heart of Te-Ping Chen's remarkable debut lies a question all too
relevant in 21st Century America: What is freedom?? ?Jennifer Egan ?Immensely rewarding from
the first sentence to the last . . . An exceptional collection.? ?Charles Yu A ?stirring and
brilliant? debut story collection offering vivid portrayals of the men and women of modern
China and its diaspora ?both love letter and sharp social criticism ? from a phenomenal new
literary talent bringing great ?insight from her years as a reporter with the Wall Street
Journal? (Elle). 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.
