Land of Big Numbers: Stories by Te-Ping Chen

Te-Ping Chen's debut story collection Land of Big Numbers started out strong and ended with a mind-blowing parable that knocked my socks off. 

I read the first story through BookishFirst and put in my name for the ARC. Set in China, twins go on separate life paths, the bright and driven girl challenging government repression, the boy excelling in competitive video gaming. A reversal of expectations challenges our values.

The stories are revelatory about life in modern China and the expat experience. I was unsettled by the portrait of life in China, seemingly normal people doing seemingly normal things, and yet so much at odds with American expectations. 

The generational divide shows up clearly. The older characters had lived hard lives of manual labor and poverty. Some hold onto fantasies of achievement and acceptance into the Party. Their children become teenage factory workers in the city or hope for a rich benefactor or play the stock market dreaming of easy money.

It is a world at once very familiar--and very alien. The details are different, but the human experience universal.

All around Zhu Feng, it seemed, people were buying, buying, homes and stocks and second and third houses; there was a whole generation who'd gotten rich and needed to buy things for their kids, and the same dinky things from before didn't pass muster: penny rides on those plastic cartoon figures that flashed lights and gently rocked back and forth outside of drugstores; hawthorn impaled on sticks and sheathed in frozen yellow sugar casings, a cheap winter treat. They needed to buy because they had the money and that's what everyone else was doing...Also, the government said it was the buying opportunity of a generations...China was going up and up and nobody wanted to be left behind."~from Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen

The last story Guebeikou Spirit is amazing, a parable that reaches past it's setting to alert against the lure of complacence that can become complicity. Characters are stranded on a new high-speed train station after trains pass them buy. Regulations state that passengers must depart from a different station than they entered, and so they remain.

Every day they hear the announcement that the train is delayed. The guards reassuring,"we'll get there together," as they bring in food, blankets, personal health supplies, and as weeks go on, televisions and coloring books. 

The stranded people become a media sensation and the organize to represent 'Gubeikuo Spirit.' Several dissident young men try to follow the train tracks to another station, but always return and finally give up. The outside world's hardships come through the television news. They become comfortable so that when a train finally stops, they are unwilling to leave.

Obedience to an illogical rule, becoming comfortable, leading to the loss of volition and self-determination--it's a powerful message. 

Te-Ping Chen is a marvelous writer and I look forward to reading more from her pen.

I received an ARC from the publisher through BookishFirst and an egalley through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Land of Big Numbers: Stories
by Te-Ping Chen
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Mariner Books
Pub Date: February 2, 2021
ISBN: 9780358272557
softcover $15.99 (USD)

eBook $9.99

ISBN-13/EAN: 9780358275039

ISBN-10: 0358275032

from the publisher

A debut collection from an emerging “fiction powerhouse,” vivid portrayals of the men and women of modern China and its diaspora that “entertain, educate, and universally resonate” (Booklist, starred review).

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.

About the author

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. 

Other People's Pets by R. L. Mazies

La La has crime in her blood as surely as the Flying Wallendas have acrobatics, and the Kennedys, politics. ~from Other People's Pets by R. L. Maizes

I adore Other People's Pets! It is fresh and heartfelt, a perfect read during stressful times. La La and her father Zev will win your heart.

Even if they are burglars.

LaLa's mother ran off when she was nine. She wasn't a very good mother. When they were ice skating, LaLa fell through the ice and her mother didn't notice. LaLa was rescued by a large black dog. The near-death-event left her an animal empath.

Zev was a locksmith by day and a burglar by night. He homeschooled LaLa and took her on his heists, isolating her to protect himself. He couldn't risk his daughter giving away his secret life. LaLa has a special relationship with a veterinarian who notices her insight into animals and takes her under his wing.

LaLa is in vet school, living with her fiance, when her father lands in prison, unable to make bail. He was caught after calling 911 to help the man he was robbing. LaLa makes the hard decision to put her dad first.

As LaLa's life stray further from her dreams, she takes comfort that she only robs houses with ailing pets she can help.

LaLa and Zev have never recovered from their abandonment. Zev still carries a torch for his wife and LaLa dreams of gaining her mother's approval, which brings them to a fatal meeting.

LaLa faces a series of heartbreaking losses, including her beloved dog, Black. In the end, LaLa realizes the true meaning of family and finds her place in the world.

I love Mazies humor. Descriptions like, "The pores on his nose are big enough to house a fly" and "ears grown large from listening," and Zev's business name of "Honesty Locksmith," kept me laughing out loud.

I loved R. L. Mazies book of short stories We Love Anderson Cooper, filled with memorable, flawed, yet loveable characters.

Read an excerpt from Other People's Pets here.

I was given a free egalley by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Other People's Pets
by R.L. Maizes
Celadon Books
Pub Date July 14, 2020 
ISBN: 9781250304131
hardcover $26.99 (USD)

R.L. Mazies

about the author

R.L. Maizes was born and raised in Queens, New York. She now lives in Boulder County, Colorado. Maizes's short stories have aired on National Public Radio and have appeared in the literary magazines Electric Literature, Witness, Bellevue Literary Review, Slice, and Blackbird, among others. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Lilith, and elsewhere. Maizes is an alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop. Her work has received Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open contest, has been a finalist in numerous other national contests, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the author of the short story collection We Love Anderson Cooper.

from the publisher

R.L. Maizes's Other People’s Pets examines the gap between the families we’re born into and those we create, and the danger that holding on to a troubled past may rob us of the future.

La La Fine relates to animals better than she does to other people. Abandoned by a mother who never wanted a family, raised by a locksmith-turned-thief father, La La looks to pets when it feels like the rest of the world conspires against her.

La La’s world stops being whole when her mother, who never wanted a child, abandons her twice. First, when La La falls through thin ice on a skating trip, and again when the accusations of “unfit mother” feel too close to true. Left alone with her father—a locksmith by trade, and a thief in reality—La La is denied a regular life. She becomes her father’s accomplice, calming the watchdog while he strips families of their most precious belongings.

When her father’s luck runs out and he is arrested for burglary, everything La La has painstakingly built unravels. In her fourth year of veterinary school, she is forced to drop out, leaving school to pay for her father’s legal fees the only way she knows how—robbing homes once again.

As an animal empath, she rationalizes her theft by focusing on houses with pets whose maladies only she can sense and caring for them before leaving with the family’s valuables. The news reports a puzzled police force—searching for a thief who left behind medicine for the dog, water for the parrot, or food for the hamster.

Desperate to compensate for new and old losses, La La continues to rob homes, but it’s a strategy that ultimately will fail her.

Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami

A cold and gloomy Sunday afternoon in November was the perfect time to finish Killing Commendatore. I sat down with a cup of tea and read the last 110 pages.

I had begun the book over two weeks previous. Usually, it takes me a few days to read a book. But this one was the size of two books--the advanced reading copy is 674 pages! It took several weeks to read, with little impetus to flip pages. The style of writing felt leisurely, describing mundane things like what people were wearing or what the protagonist was cooking. These details puzzled me, for I really wasn't sure of their purpose.

Still, something drew me on; I couldn't even name it. The story was a journey that I was willing to take. I trusted the author to make it worth my while.

The narrator's wife of six years decides she wants a divorce. He has made a living by portrait painting, believing he has settled when he could have developed his contemporary art style. He believes his wife gave up on him because he had settled.

First, he gets into his car and drives around Japan. A fellow artist and friend offers him the use of his father's house in the mountains, a retreat where he had created the traditional Japanese style paintings that made him famous. The father is now in assisted living with dementia.

The narrator moves into the mountaintop house. He is in a slump, unable to paint. He teaches art classes and has liaisons with married women. He is approached by Menshiki, a mysterious man from a neighboring mountain. "Menshiki" means "avoiding color," very apt considering his pure white hair and secluded and walled-off life. Menshiki commissions the narrator to paint his portrait, and then to paint a portrait of a girl he believes to be his daughter. The girl happens to be one of the narrator's art students. He discovers a new way of painting that is intuitive, impressionistic, and powerful.

Meanwhile, otherworldly experiences arise that disturb the membrane between reality and the unreal.

Soon after moving into the house, the narrator discovers a painting in the attic,  Killing Commendatore. It is based on a scene from Mozart's Don Giovanni but also perhaps an image from the artist's experience as a student in Nazi-controlled Vienna, painted in the traditional Japanese style. No one has ever seen the painting before. A ringing bell in the forest leads the narrator to a mysterious pit. Ideas and Metaphors take a corporeal form, based on the images in Killing Commendatore. When the girl disappears our narrator goes on a quest to save her, entering another reality, crossing a river, walking through a dark wood, and crawling through a narrow tunnel.

The last half was intriguing and rewarding. The novel is called an "homage to The Great Gatsby," and I can see that. But I also connected it to other literary works and mythology.

In the end, the narrator states that his capacity to believe made him different from Menshiki; he is not one of T. S. Eliot's "straw men," a hollow man without feeling., for he trusts there is some guide which leads us where we need to be.

This is a story of transformation, a death and rebirth re-enacted, and yet the narrator's endpoint is to return to the life he started with, as a portrait painter, reunited with his wife, embracing her child. It is enough, now, for them both.

I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Killing Commendatore: A Novel
by Haruki Murakami
A. A. Knopf
ISBN-10: 052552004X
ISBN-13: 978-0525520047

Ahab's Return: The Last Voyage by Jeffrey Ford

Ahab's back, looking for his wife and son.

Yes, that Ahab, the crazed captain who went down with the White Whale.

He miraculously survived and has finally made his way home. He turns up at the Gorgon's Mirror, a New York City tabloid newspaper, looking for Ishmael, the writer who killed Ahab off in his novelization of their adventures. Ishmael is gone but hack writer Harrow sees dollar signs behind Ahab's improbable story.

All Ahab wants now is to find his beautiful wife and teenage son.

Harrow gets his boss to fund the quest and he and Ahab go on an adventure into the heart of New York City's Five Points, encountering a drug cartel protected by juvenile addicts and the manticore, a mythological creature (pictured on the book cover). They are joined by Ahab's harpooner Madi, stylized as Daggoo by Ishmael, the staunch street urchin Marvis, and a patchwork-coat wearing female writer and opium-eater, Arabella.

Harrow is in over his head, plunged into a world of ghoulish murders perpetrated by Malbaster and attacked by his zombie-like creature Bartleby. Harrow admits that, in a gunfight, he is as "useless as Millard Fillmore." Luckily, he has the African Madi and the plucky women to protect him.

Ahab's Return by Jeffry Ford reminded me of Terry Pratchett's Dodger, a fun blend of fantasy and literary personages in a historical fantasy. And also Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels in which literary characters exist in an alternative world.

John Jacob Aster's opium shipping empire, a forgotten multi-racial and multi-cultural village torn down to make Central Park, the Know Nothing anti-immigrant nativist movement, all figure into the story.

The plot hinges on an interesting concept of fictioneers writing plotlines that become reality.

"I am a devotee of the works of Emerson and believe he's professing that the mind is a reailty engine--it creates reality or at least in some part it helps to create reality." Arabella in Ahab's Return

I enjoyed the novel as great escapist fun. I received a free book from the publisher through a LibraryThing giveaway.

Ahab's Return or, The Last Voyage
by Jeffrey Ford
William Morrow
ISBN: 9780062679000
ISBN 10: 0062679007

Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, the Edgar Award–winning The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, The Shadow Year, and The Twilight Pariah, and his collections include The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, and A Natural History of Hell. He lives near Columbus, Ohio, and teaches writing at Ohio Wesleyan University.

Our Homesick Songs by Emma Hooper

I adored Emma Hooper's first novel Etta and Otto and Russell and James, which I read in 24 hours, and which had me in tears. I finished my review with the words "Read it."

So I was super excited to read Hooper's new novel Our Homesick Songs. I had high expectations and was not disappointed. I was enchanted by the writing.

The story is set in a small Newfoundland fishing village suffering from the impact of over-fishing by commercial ships that are "big as bergs; monster-big" and able to hold "a whole sea" of fish. Their livelihood over, the villagers leave, going West for jobs on mainland Canada.

The Connor family is hanging on. The parents Aiden and Martha share alternating monthly shifts working inland where they are surrounded by concrete, steel, and trucks, the light and noise never-ending. Martha asks a co-worker what it was like "here, before" and he tells her, "There were only trees."

Daughter Cora longs to leave the island for a 'normal' life packed with other children. She turns the empty houses into travel destinations.

Son Finn loves his home and feels at one with the land. He carries his accordion with him, even on the boat, playing traditional Newfoundland jigs and reels and airs to the open seas and clouded skies around him. He endeavors to bring back the fish, wondering if any are left in the oceans anywhere, and hoping the community will return.

The Connor parents work inland with other displaced workers. They are lonely and isolated, forever separated, seeing each other only in passing as they change places at the ferry every month. During their month home, the parents sing less. They return tired and depressed. The stress and distance wear on their marriage.

Like Hooper's first novel, there is a touch of magical realism and the characters go on journeys both physical and internal. The parent's charming backstory is sweet and magical, their courting taking place on boats at sea in the night, and includes a treacherous sea journey.

The history behind the novel caught my interest: the loss of the cod which was the basis of an entire way of life. A quick Internet search and I learned how overfishing decimated the cod, forcing the Canadian government to enact the 1992 moratorium on cod fishing that left 35,000 Newfoundlanders out of work.  The impact on community and family life is portrayed in Our Homesick Songs.

Newfoundland is central to the novel, its rocky shores and waters and snow and ice and bergs vividly described. And so is the Celtic music of Newfoundland, brought by the Irish. Social gatherings conclude with music.

Finn travels across the water to his music lessons. His elderly teacher Mrs. Callaghan captures his imagination with strange stories about snakes becoming fish and shipwrecks harboring the fish. She tells him that the songs were how the sailors and explorers remembered their homes. They are all homesick songs, even the happy ones, she says. When Finn cannot sleep at night, he calls his teacher and she tells him stories.

One song that reoccurs is The Water is Wide, an ancient song from Great Britain, which Aidan sings early in the novel. Others include the love song She's Like the Swallow and fiddle tunes Finn plays such as The Newfoundland Black Bear and The Cotton Grass Air, The Fish of the Sea.

"No, the dead can't sing, Aidan, that's why the living have to."

Aiden has a coffee cup that reads "Squidjiggingground" which is also the name of a song by Arthur Scammell about squid fishermen. The lyrics give a sense of the life that has been lost, the camaraderie and community.

Oh this is the place where the fishermen gather
Oil-skins and boots and the Cape hands batten down;
All sizes of figures with squid lines and jiggers,
They congregate here on the Squid-Jiggin' Ground.

Some are workin' their jiggers, while others are yarnin',
There's some standin' up and there's more lyin' down;
While all kinds of fun, jokes, and drinks are begun,
As they wait for the squid on the Squid-Jiggin' Ground.

The story feels like a tale told by Finn's accordion teacher, a fairy tale with magic feathers and mermaids singing. And like most folk tales, the underlying reality is terrifyingly real.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Our Homesick Songs
by Emma Hooper
Simon & Schuster
Pub Date 14 Aug 2018
ISBN 9781501124488
PRICE $26.00

from the publisher: 

From Emma Hooper, critically acclaimed author of Etta and Otto and Russell and James, a People magazine “Pick of the Week,” comes a lyrical, charming, and mystical story of a family on the edge of extinction, and the different way each of them fights to keep hope, memory, and love alive. 

The Connor family is one of the few that is still left in their idyllic fishing village, Big Running; after the fish mysteriously disappeared, most families had no choice but to relocate and find work elsewhere. Aidan and Martha Connor now spend alternate months of the year working at an energy site up north to support their children, Cora and Finn. But soon the family fears they’ll have to leave Big Running for good. And as the months go on, plagued by romantic temptations new and old, the emotional distance between the once blissful Aidan and Martha only widens. 

Between his accordion lessons and reading up on Big Running’s local flora and fauna, eleven-year-old Finn Connor develops an obsession with solving the mystery of the missing fish. Aided by his reclusive music instructor Mrs. Callaghan, Finn thinks he may have discovered a way to find the fish, and in turn, save the only home he’s ever known. While Finn schemes, his sister Cora spends her days decorating the abandoned houses in Big Running with global flair—the baker’s home becomes Italy; the mailman’s, Britain. But it’s clear she’s desperate for a bigger life beyond the shores of her small town. As the streets of Big Running continue to empty Cora takes matters—and her family’s shared destinies—into her own hands. 

In Our Homesick Songs, Emma Hooper paints a gorgeous portrait of the Connor family, brilliantly weaving together four different stories and two generations of Connors, full of wonder and hope. Told in Hooper’s signature ethereal style, each page of this incandescent novel glows with mythical, musical wonder.

See the author discuss her first book at
 https://youtu.be/5Z3hH4n0tmQ