"The Land of Big Numbers"

I don't feel like I know Te-Ping Chen's characters very well at the end of each story. A common theme seems to be that they all sufferred a glancing blow from misery, or are about to. There are some stories where one can tell which political issue box is being checked, perhaps too easily.

"LULU"
(online activist)

• For the first few weeks of our life, our skulls had matching indentations from where they’d been pressed against each other in the womb, like two interlocking puzzle pieces. Later in life when we were apart, I’d sometimes touch my hand to the back of my skull when I thought of her, as if seeking a phantom limb.
• The toilet still stands there today, its vaulting concrete walls stained and ridiculous, the inside chilly and damp like the inside of a pipe, a bird of poured concrete plunging from the tower’s top as if being defenestrated by rival birds inside, and indeed the whole structure smells like a foul aviary. You wouldn’t think it cost 200,000 yuan to build, and probably it didn’t, Lulu said; most of it likely ended up in the division head’s pocket, art corrupting life, life corrupting art.
• That fall, she started posting daily about someone named Xu Lei. It was a name that even I’d heard by then, enough people were talking about him. He was a college student who’d been picked up by the police outside a karaoke joint, and been beaten, and died while in custody.
• They were like dispatches from a country I had never seen, and they disturbed and confused me.
• She looked at me for a moment, a little dreamily. “Did you know in the Song Dynasty it was illegal to throw away any pieces of paper with writing on them?” she said. “People had to go to certain temples with sacred fires set up where they could burn them instead. That’s how much they revered the written word.”
• “Maybe Mao Xin could give her a job,” my mother said. It wasn’t a tactful remark, but then my mother loved Mao Xin, had come to rely on her in a way that reminded me of her relationship with Lulu before she had gone to college.

"HOTLINE GIRL"
(Government Satisfaction Office/domestic violence)
__ She didn’t apologize. She’d realized early on apologies were the surest way for Qiaoying to decide that you were ruan shizi, soft fruit, easily picked on.
__ “Oh,” she said, surprised, then stopped herself. The sleeve that would have held his right arm was folded over and fastened with a safety pin, like a doll’s blanket.

"NEW FRUIT"
(reconciliation with Wen Ge)

• The state media embraced Fan Shiyi’s tale of success. The qiguo was a symbol of grassroots ingenuity, its reporters said, “a new fruit that is a symbol of our new nation."
• Alone at home in his kitchen, Mr. Feng had cut expectantly into the fruit. After consuming a few tart pieces, though, he’d begun coughing and had to sit down, a feeling of bile rising up in him as he remembered the look of the old man in a dunce cap that he and some of his schoolmates had beaten until he’d collapsed and . . . well . . . it was many years ago and those were different times.
• The same tableaus, we heard, were happening across the country, breaking a decades-old taboo. Sometimes they ended badly; many could not forgive. But it was not unusual, either, to see old men and women in the street with tears in their eyes, embracing or eating pieces of the qiguo as they traded recollections: the mother whose hair had gone white overnight, the belts we had used on our victims, the temples we had defiled.

"FIELD NOTES ON A MARRIAGE"
(widow after her husband's suicide; high-school bullying)
__ he had a greediness for knowledge of me that I’d never experienced before, at once intoxicating and intensely flattering. He wanted to know everything from childhood nicknames to details of my school science fairs, studying me as intently as if he might have to someday defend our relationship to a panel of colleagues.
__ After an hour, we reached the hotel, a stained concrete block adorned with a sign that read GOLD PHOENIX VILLA. Tinny advertisements blared from a shop selling hosiery across the street.
__ “Okay,” I said. “Are you sure you don’t want to order some wine?” He nodded and placed his hand over mine. It was a gesture I’d noticed he’d been using more and more; lately it had stopped feeling affectionate and more like someone gently closing your mouth.

"FLYING MACHINE"
(Party-mad grass-root inventor)
__ That had been a lifetime ago, another era. For their wedding, he’d given her parents a dowry of six chickens and three bags of Shanghai milled rice. {??}
__ “It’s a car!” he gasped. “Cao Cao has invented a car!” <> The crowd turned to look at the little contraption with its wings outstretched, fat-bodied and content, more bee than butterfly. It wasn’t a very good airplane. But it might be a pretty good car.

"ON THE STREET WHERE YOU LIVE"
(confession of a jailed amusement park designer)
__ I picture myself crawling about the mess hall (except there is no mess hall in this wing) seeking out its elusive, tapered end, making soft apologies, checking behind sneakers: “Sorry, sorry, excuse me, thank you, sorry.” That’s how long I’ve been in your country, I think—apologies and gratitude spring forth from me at any opportunity.
__ But I thought—I don’t know how else to express it—that she looked kind. She laughed a lot, and easily. It wasn’t until we actually became friends that I realized she was often very sad. America is like that, I must say, free and easy until you know better.
__ The day before Lisette left, I managed to persuade her to come see our amusement park. She hadn’t wanted to, she was exhausted, she said, but after all I’d done, I’d insisted and she said yes. I wanted the day out, just the two of us, wanted her to see the place where I was host and the locals were guests, enjoying the rides that I’d made.

"SHANGHAI MURMUR"
(flower girl who kept an expensive pen)

• It seemed that days of fighting to board buses, hustling for space on the sidewalk, elbows always out, eyes half squinted, trying to see if someone was cheating her, lips pursed and ready to answer back, had left an indelible mark. She was not yet twenty but felt the years deep beneath her skin, as though Shanghai had grafted steel plates in her cheeks. Already she’d lost a teenager’s mobility of features, felt the exhausted cast of her eyes.
• Panic seized Xiaolei, irrational and strong, and she pulled the pen back, just as quickly. She put on her best functionary’s voice, a mixture of boredom and witlessness. “I’m sorry. I can’t let you take it. I can only give it back to the pen’s owner.”
• Yongjie hadn’t heard of such a pen before, either, Xiaolei was nearly sure of it, but 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?”
• Even when she got another job, this time selling shampoo and conditioner door-to-door, the pen still haunted her. She’d bought a bicycle by then and would ride it up and down the length of the city, leaping off occasionally at stationery stores to check their racks in different seasons. It was a benign quest that gave her some control over a city that otherwise threatened to wear her down.

"LAND OF BIG NUMBERS"
(embezzler whose dad got into trouble in '89)
__ The protests were happening all over the country, Junling said. Thousands of students were taking to the streets, talking about democracy, corruption, political reform. A number of taxi drivers joined them, and other workers, too. “A lot of grievances,” she said. “Too many rotten government officials.”
__ He tried to picture his father getting struck in the thigh with a bullet. What had he been thinking? What kind of man had he been then? Angrier, surely, more full of life. He pictured the scene again, only now, like Time Clock, the bullets moving backward, out of his father’s thigh, his thigh sealing up, the hole in his pants healing, the bullet reversing its trajectory through the sky, back into the barrel that fired it. His father probably still wouldn’t be rich. But maybe he’d be strong.

"BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY"
(Chinese woman suspicious of her boyfriend)
__ “I hate that you’re so good-looking,” I once told him after we’d started dating, only partly in jest. “It means you can get away with anything.” He didn’t argue.
__ I can sense Eric’s determination to overtake them all, and also that it’s not going to happen. The trailhead parking lot was packed. I don’t know why he’s always so fixated on getting Mother Nature by herself, anyway, like he’s a guy at a party trying to corner a pretty girl.

"GUBEIKOU SPIRIT"
(trapped in a subway)
__ The next day he went back in anyway, this time carrying a bag full of their trash, which he used to mark his way. He began disappearing for hours like that, every day. Occasionally the teenage boys would go with him.
__ “You’ll get us into trouble,” the woman with the perm scolded them. “Don’t you realize, we depend on them for everything?”
__ There was a sound of general assent. “We represent the Gubeikou Spirit!” he said. “We need to come together.”