Hsi-Ping Chen Knihy

"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 A debut collection from an extraordinary new talent that vividly gives voice to the men and women of modern China and its diaspora Gripping and compassionate, Land of Big Numbers depicts 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.

Pearl Zhi Ping Chen always wanted to be a person who 'had rich life experiences'. And it seems she got her wish. Born in China 1950, Pearl was part of the generation who grew up during the rise of the Chinese Communist Party's rule which deeply affected her young life. After having her education cut short in the Cultural Revolution, Pearl had to work even harder to improve her employment prospects. Working in a variety of roles around China, it was her hard work teaching herself English that gave her the opportunity to change her life, going from the daughter of a 'class-enemy' to a qualified teacher. Pearl expanded her horizons, going on to not only gain employment and education in several other countries, but to also gain citizenship, for herself and her family, in two other continents, including her current home: Canada. Follow Pearl through her extraordinary life and see how one can overcome any limits through perseverance and the support of others.