Te-Ping Chen: On How Liberating Short Stories Can Be, Reporting in China and Her Debut Collection, "Land of Big Numbers"
One of the buzziest short story collection of the new year, Te Ping Chen’s Land of Big Numbers is an exquisite work that offers vivid portrayals of the men and women of modern China. Using her year of experience as a reporter in China, Chen 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.
We spoke with Te-Ping Chen about being a journalist in China, what drew her to the short story form and why it feels liberating, writing fiction versus nonfiction and her new collection, Land of Big Numbers.
Land of Big Numbers explores the lives of men and women living in China who feel adrift in their country, often faced with their own personal moral dilemmas that have arisen out of their need to adapt to a rapidly changing environment and societal changes. Often prosperity and materialism are valued over people and landscape and your characters are forced to find a way to keep up. As someone who writes both nonfiction and fiction, how did you know you wanted to tell these stories and explore these themes through fiction?
When I wrote Land of Big Numbers, I was working as a journalist in Beijing. At every level -- emotional, sensory and intellectual -- China is such a rich and extraordinary place to live, and it’s a hard country to fully capture in print headlines. During my time there, I traveled so much and met so many people and accumulated stacks of notes full of details and imagery and characters. Many of them didn’t necessarily make sense in a news story, but they kept occupying my head, and I wanted to try and give them life somehow. And personally, I found that fiction offered another kind of outlet from journalism -- the chance to write with no brakes on, to feel this expansive sense of possibility, and I loved that.
What do you love most about the short story form?
Before I started writing these short stories, I’d been working to revise a novel, and it wasn’t going anywhere. It was one of those projects I’d set aside and then tried picking back up again, but I couldn’t sink back in, and I kept kicking myself. Then one day when I was biking home from the bureau, I had the phrase “Shanghai Murmur” randomly pop into my head, and I decided I’d try and write a short story around it. To my surprise, once I started writing short stories, they came very readily. I’d spent so much time absorbing details of life around me, and I just felt this tremendous urgency to get it all down.
For me, I think the short story form felt especially liberating because I’d been struggling with a novel for so long. The ability to play and experiment, to speak in multiple characters’ voices, to try and refract a world through different stories -- all that made the writing process come alive for me again.
“New Fruit” was one of my favorites from this collection. It was one of those stories that made me pause and think before reading on. I’m interested to know the origin of that story.
I’m so glad you enjoyed that one, it’s one of my favorites as well! That story was inspired by the neighborhood where my husband and I used to live, one of Beijing’s old hutongs, which is very much as it appears in the story, with its gossipy retirees and fruit and vegetable peddlers. Every summer, street vendors would sell these nectarines with the same deeply green leaves of the qiguo in “New Fruit,” unbelievably delicious and addicting, and at the height of the season, we’d all go home carrying bags and bags of them. They were so meltingly good that it wasn’t much of a leap to impart them with more magical properties. I wanted to pay tribute to the neighborhood, and I liked the notion of a fruit, too, that would come and disrupt peoples’ lives -- the idea of taking something ordinary and seeing its wildest and most transformative potential.
How has your experience as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and a previous correspondent for the paper in Hong Kong and Beijing impacted your fiction? How did you weave the two together in this collection?
Journalism is a different kind of discipline than fiction, but in some ways I’ve found that experience has fueled the latter. I think it’s helped me grow less afraid of a blank page, for one. And of course, so much of the book was inspired by my time living and traveling in China, including as a correspondent there with the paper. As part of my work, for example, I’d start every morning at the bureau by scanning local media, and so often you’d encounter headlines that would make you stop and reread them twice, to make sure you were understanding them correctly -- think funeral strippers, or a farmer trying to build his own airplane. You’d read them and think, oh, wow, there’s an amazing story there. I want to read that story. There were many moments like that which served in big or small ways as story prompts for the book.
What does your writing process look like? Do you write every day or keep a specific writing routine?
I tend to mostly write in the mornings as soon as I wake up, when my mind is still a little foggy and not yet tuned into the wider world, it’s easier to lose myself in the text that way. At night, I’m much more of a critic, and the mornings, I find, are when I feel least encumbered or self-conscious about what I’m working on. I don’t write every day. I have a young son and a full-time job, so there’s that to juggle, and I do think that sometimes you have to let the well fill back up.
Do you have any advice for young or aspiring journalists or fiction writers? What keeps you going when writing gets difficult?
When the writing gets difficult, often I like to just set it aside and read. Sometimes your own internal voice feels so lost or flat, and it’s refreshing to dip into another pool, to be reminded again of the possibilities out there, to be excited by someone else’s work. I also think it’s the best way to learn any kind of skill -- to make yourself an apprentice to other people’s work. For aspiring journalists, my advice mostly is the same, to read widely and try to understand what’s missing, and how you can contribute. And to not be afraid -- no one needs to give you permission!
What have you been reading and can recommend to us?
I’m reading What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, by Helen Oyeyemi, an author whose writing reliably makes your brain sit up taller, who stretches your idea of what words can do. Everything she writes is gorgeous and smart. Recommended!
TE-PING CHEN's fiction has been published in, or is forthcoming from, The New Yorker, Granta, Guernica, Tin House, and The Atlantic. A reporter with the Wall Street Journal, she was previously a correspondent for the paper in Beijing and Hong Kong. Prior to joining the Journal in 2012, she spent a year in China as a Fulbright fellow. She lives in Philadelphia.
