Land of Big Numbers

Land of Big Numbers, by Te-Ping Chen, is a collection of short stories blending moments of everyday Chinese life with magical elements or extreme elements, constantly reflecting on what we owe to each other, in families or communities, with wild personal joys and heavy personal secrets. And all the stories created vivid scenes in just a couple paragraphs.

New Fruit stays with me, my favorite by far in this collection. The qiguo, peculiar fruit, is a new fruit variety suddenly sold by street vendors and the kind of Chinese bodegas that might sell random lots of random surplus. The first summer, the taste of the qiguo brings to life old memories. “Today I had one that tasted like I had just told a good joke and everyone was laughing,” Lao Sui might say.

This is the mix of realism and fantastical that really works. The constant presence of fruit vendors on the streets makes it so easy to buy fruit for snacks, and I was constantly seeing new fruits sold in wheelbarrows.  Sometimes just smaller and sweeter versions of grocery store fruit, but sometimes mangosteens, durian and other new fruit.

Even the character names in this are realistic, everyday names,  Lao and Ayi paired with the Old Hundred Names. Pang Ayi is just another invisible middle-aged woman, cooking and gossiping. When a bite of the new fruit makes her blush, her inner life is revealed, or maybe it’s just the idea that an auntie has an inner life that’s revealed.

But the second year, when the new fruit is famous and now sold in the upscale supermarkets, the taste is off, evoking painful and uncomfortable memories, poking up secrets. I haven’t really read anything that deals with the aftermath of the cultural revolution’s mobs. I’ve read Chinese and Chinese-American fiction or memoir that deals with the mob justice and public denunciations in the cultural revolution, but nothing about the mob afterward. But Land of Big Numbers is a short story collection that reflects on community obligations and personal joys, so New Fruit also hints at how many quiet neighbors have dark memories from this time.

I can’t help wondering what the fruit would taste like to me that first summer, and I don’t want to think about what it would evoke the second summer.

The stories in Land of Big Numbers all raised interesting and fantastical situations, with conflicts often around the strain of individual happiness with community obligations and expectations.  A village dreamer invents strange robotic creations, a train-load of commuters is trapped in a station for weeks on end, siblings take wildly different, unpredictable paths but both discovering twists revealing different sides of current Chinese life. The stories here are all thoughtful and thought-provoking, with simple and vivid descriptions, but New Fruit just stays with me.

My submission for this month’s Booknificent linkup.