There’s a Carlos Fuentes line that’s always stuck with me: “Extreme attention is the creative faculty, and its condition is love.” Living there as a reporter, being immersed in the language and everything around me, meant paying a lot of attention, and that’s what led to this book.
Are there themes in the collection that carry through the full book? What unifies the pieces in Land of Big Numbers as a collection?
All the stories are linked in some way to China, of course. Beyond that, one of the themes in the first story, ‘Lulu’ – and I think the collection more broadly – is the different ways we try and make meaning as individuals. For Lulu, it’s becoming an online dissident; for her brother, becoming a professional video gamer. Elsewhere in the book, it’s a farmer building an airplane to win the respect of his fellow villagers, or as in the title story, a young bureaucrat bilking the government in pursuit of masculinity and self-worth.
One question that weighs on my mind a lot these days is what it’s like to grow comfortable, and even thrive, in a repressive system. It’s something you particularly see in the book’s final story, ‘Gubeikou Spirit,’ in which a group of commuters gets stranded in a subway tunnel and establish a cozy community they ultimately don’t want to leave. It’s also what inspired ‘Lulu’: I was interested in her story, but in some ways I was more interested in the experience of her brother, who is so much more ordinary and like the rest of us.
This is a book about China, and you are a Chinese-American writer. Did you always know you wanted to write about China?
No. To be honest, I chafe a little at expectations that I ought to write about China or stories that have to do with my ethnic identity. I grew up in Oakland, Calif, and I have always envied other writers’ seeming
freedom to tell stories that aren’t rooted in one particular experience. I love fiction and wanted to try writing short stories, and at the time I was living in Beijing and in a country that I know well. My hope is that the stories are just that – stories, though ones that happen to be set in China.
That said, I’m very grateful to have been able to live in China for as many years as I have and to have been a writer there. This year, all my American colleagues at the Wall Street Journal were kicked out of the country, along with reporters from the New York Times and the Washington Post. The chance to have lived there and gotten to channel any part of that experience into this book now feels like part of a lost world.
Throughout the collection you move between clear-eyed realism and tongue-in-cheek, satirical magical realism. What do each of those styles offer you, as a writer?
It’s often said that reality in China is stranger than fiction–certainly it is more outsized, surreal and outrageous than anything you’d expect to encounter, even in the pages of a novel. It wasn’t a deliberate decision to mix styles, but China is a place that seems to demand different tones to try and evoke both the absurdity and tragedy of life there–and also the tenderness.
As someone who’s written about China as a journalist, I’m used to writing about it in very sober terms. But it’s also a place I have incredible affection for, and think there’s so much joy and humor and wryness that can be found in living there, notwithstanding all the headlines. I wanted to try and capture that, as well.
Your background as a writer is primarily in journalism. What brought you to fiction? What is the origin story of this collection?
I’ve always loved fiction and poetry & had spent a long time working on a few things, none of them very good. While living in Beijing, I had been trying and failing to revise a novel I’d written years ago. One night when biking home from work, the phrase “Shanghai Murmur” came to mind, out of nowhere. The phrase stuck with me and I thought I’d try and write something new around it; it eventually became the title of one of the first short stories I wrote.
As a writer, I’m a little bit of a magpie. When I was living in China as a journalist, there were so many details that I wanted to put in stories and never did. The part of me that abhors waste wanted to find a place for them; the part of me that loves fiction kept musing on them and trying to find a way to give them life. Once I started writing about the country in a different genre there was so much that I had been storing up, it just came pouring out. It was liberating, and also really fun.
Who are some of your biggest inspirations as a writer?
As a child, I was obsessed with L. Frank Baum, L.M. Montgomery and C.S. Lewis, and spent a lot of time trying to imitate them. Enchanted lands and 19th-century heroines definitely exerted a strong pull on me growing up. I stopped reading fiction for awhile in college, but dove back in once I graduated, which just felt like such a homecoming, fiction is something I’m so deeply grateful for. There are too many writers to name as inspirations, but Richard Yates, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, Maile Meloy, Lesley Nneka Arimah and George Saunders are some who come to mind. When writing this collection, I also spent a lot of time with Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories, taking notes and trying to understand how they worked and why they were so magical.
