Everyday Lives in China

Had to read Te-Ping Chen’s debut collection of short stories in ‘Land of Big Numbers’ (2021) that talks about living in China and to a smaller extent, the Chinese diaspora. The topics aren’t new, but they're told from the author’s eye and experiences. The stories are fictional and fantastical, but all real at the same time. 

The book's first story 'Lulu' is sobering. It set the pace of the book and reminded us — that Chinese individuals, communities and the society at large that we live under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It gave us the lives of two ordinary young siblings — twins. The story was told from one twin's perspective — an unnamed average boy, and his brilliant sister Lulu. The boy graduated from a local college and worked in the kitchen of a hotel; he loves gaming and online team games and kept up with that as a serious hobby. Lulu graduated from a Beijing university and somehow got herself involved in anti-government activities and got arrested thrice, with a final ten-year sentence. The boy grew up and began winning gaming tournaments, making a living out of what used to be seen as a 'vice hobby'.  

The seasoned journalist wrote ten short stories, and eight of them are largely set in China which don’t feel like fiction. 'On The Street Where You Live' happens in a town three miles from Atlantic City, and 'Field Notes on a Marriage' happened in America and only later it ended in a small town in China. Her experiences must have contributed to her keen observation prowess as she covers stories of the mundane everyday. (Reviews here, here, here and here.)

In 'Shanghai Murmur', the author took us through a building's residents and their lives, opening the story with the death of a tenant who was only found days after. A young almost 20-year-old Xiaolei is a tenant in this building. She had moved to Shanghai from the countryside and took a job at a bottling plant first, then at a flower shop. A regular customer left his pen at the shop, but it wasn't certain that it was his. However, a woman claiming to be his wife came to look for it. Xiaolei didn't want to hand it over. She insisted on handing it over to the pen's owner personally. Then she lost the pen while she tried to look for the customer to return it to him on her off day. She then lost her job at the flower shop and the boss refused to pay her the two weeks of back wages owed. The loss of the pen and whole incident haunted her. She had no idea how much a pen could cost, and how such an expensive pen could exist, and she didn't find a similar one in the local stationery stores. 

When Xiaolei heard the amount of money the woman claimed the pen was worth, it astounded her, it was nearly twenty times her monthly salary.

"She must be lying," she said desperately. "What pen costs that much?"

Yongjie hadn't heard of such a pen before, either, Xiaolei was nearly sure of it, ut she affected an instant sense of knowingness that came down like a shield. It was a famous European brand, she said. 

"Well, then it was probably fake," Xiaolei said, feeling only briefly disloyal. "Who carries a pen like that around?"

The eponymous story It tells of the lives of how stocks and shares affected the lives of the everyday folks who got swept up in trading fever. 'Land of Big Numbers' is a social commentary. Zhu Feng's father was hardworking and didn't believe in buying stocks or exercising options. He didn't want to loan any money to Zhu Feng for him to buy some. So Zhu Feng borrowed money from his rich friend Li Xueshi. He won it all back and returned his friend the money and celebrated. He went down the route of embezzling funds from the government office he worked for. Predictably, the market crashed and he was more than 150,000 yuan in debt, and had to borrow small amounts of money from everyone. His parents weren't able to loan him any money to get through. He lived by the day, and was hopeful to recoup his losses before his office found out. 

If only he had more money to invest, he thought. Li Xueshi had recently bought a brand-new speaker set, and the two of them spent hours listening to the sounds of rappers paying frantic homage to places they'd never seen, New York, London, Sāo Paulo. They had beautiful women in their beds and the best of everything: Lamborghini, Rolex, Versace. Together, the two of them mouthed the syllables.

No, there wasn't much for men like Zhu Feng here. He had ideas. He had ambition. He had taste. He liked that phrase, taste. It was something that belonged, emphatically, to his and Li's generation. Not the shabbiness of his parents' lives, their shuffling steps, the curtailed hopes that seemed to express nothing more than a desire to chide bao, chuan de nuan — to be full in the belly, to be warmly clothed.  

If only he had more money. He could double it, triple it, in the market. Everything was going up, up, up around him. In a short time he, too, would be on his way.

It took me a while to realize the 'Gubeikou' in 'Gubeikou Spirit' refers to the railway station '古北口站' in Beijing. This is the last story in the collection. Pan was stranded overnight in Gubeikou train station with other passengers when their homebound trains got delayed at 5pm and never arrived. She was too far down in the subway to get any phone signal. She was worried about her aged father who would be waiting for her to get home to cook dinner. The passengers were bewilderingly trapped in the subway for three days, and then it turned into weeks, then two months and counting. This wasn't a normal train delay. The passengers organized themselves into a community with clean-up schedules and such. Reporters praise them for their 'Gubeikou spirit'. Yet they were captive. A microcosm of society sprung up. It was bizarre.

The train's warning chime sounded: in another moment, the doors would close. "Hurry!" she yelled, but the others stayed seated. Incredulous, she wrenched her eyes from the group and hurtled toward the train, socked feet flashing white. Farther down the platform, she heard the sound of the woman's metal chain rasping and felt a twinge of guilt, but kept running. Two of the teenage boys rose and joined her. The doors slid shut. "Pan, wait!" Jun shouted. 

She didn't hear him. She stood panting, exhilarated and afraid. She was already through the door.