Journalist Te-Ping Chen on her short fiction collection, Land of Big Numbers
Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2021
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Wall Street Journal correspondent Te-Ping Chen to talk about her just-released collection of short fiction, Land of Big Numbers: Stories. Featuring 10 short stories all set in China or featuring Chinese characters, it showcases both the author’s keen eye for detailed observation and her imaginative powers and offers an unfailingly empathetic look at China from a wide range of disparate angles. Te-Ping even reads a passage from one short story, “Lulu,” which was previously published in The New Yorker.
10:51: A real-life inspiration for her fiction
28:30: A reading from “Lulu”
37:10: The cultural disconnect between China and the U.S.
43:16: Te-Ping’s writing and publishing process
Recommendations:
Te-Ping: A short story collection titled What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, by Lesley Nneka Arimah, and My Country and My People, from a collection of essays from the 1930s by Lín Yǔtáng 林语堂.
Kaiser: The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, by Christopher Beha.
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Transcript
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| 0:45.7 | That's audible.com slash Wondery UK. Welcome to the Cynical podcast, a week of the discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with SUPChina. |
| 1:04.3 | SubChina is the best way to keep on top of all the news out of China, especially if you subscribe to our daily email newsletter, SupChina Access, or check out |
| 1:12.4 | subchina.com for all the original reported stories, opeds, great regular columns, and our |
| 1:17.8 | growing range of videos and podcasts. It's a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a |
| 1:23.5 | nation that is reshaping the world. I'm Kaiser Gwill coming today, as always, from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. |
| 1:30.3 | Jeremy Goldcorn was unfortunately too slammed with finishing up the week's work before the Chinese New Year holiday, |
| 1:34.3 | so he's unable to join. |
| 1:36.3 | Like many people who do a lot of writing, I have tried my hand at fiction, but I always find that |
| 1:43.3 | the plots or the authentic dialogue or the |
| 1:46.1 | characters or the conceits that I dream up are never as compelling on the page as they |
| 1:50.9 | are inside my head. Our guest today, though, is somebody who is actually give me a little |
| 1:55.3 | more courage because she is living proof that the skills that you hone as a journalist really |
... |
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