Land of Big Numbers
Te-Ping Chen · 2021
Ten stories about contemporary China: surveillance, prosperity, desire, control. Written by a Wall Street Journal Beijing correspondent with the precision of a reporter and the sensibility of an artist.
The case against
Chen's reporter training cuts both ways: each story reads like a feature pitch about China (trapped metro passengers, a mood-altering new fruit) with characters assigned to carry the angle. The allegories land with both feet, and several endings simply stop, the way articles do when the word count runs out. Sharp observation; the fiction runs a step behind it.
Best of Last 10 Years · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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