Land of Big Numbers Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Lulu

  Hotline Girl

  New Fruit

  Field Notes on a Marriage

  Flying Machine

  On the Street Where You Live

  Shanghai Murmur

  Land of Big Numbers

  Beautiful Country

  Gubeikou Spirit

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  COPYRIGHT © 2021 BY TE-PING CHEN

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Chen, Te-Ping, author.

  Title: Land of big numbers / Te-Ping Chen.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019040493 (print) | LCCN 2019040494 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358272557 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780358275039 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3603.H4554 A6 2021 (print) | LCC PS3603.H4554 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—​dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040493

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040494

  Cover design © Mark R. Robinson

  Cover images: Paul Cowell Photography/Getty Images; L. Kramer/Getty Images; Shuoshu/Getty Images; Zenink/Getty Images

  Author photo © Lucas Foglia

  v1.0121

  To my parents

  Lulu

  The hour of our birth had been carefully forecast, a winter’s day cesarean timed to coincide with Dr. Feng’s lunch break. The doctor pulled me out first, indignant, squalling, like a hotel guest inexpertly roused and tossed before checkout. She came next, and was so perfectly quiet that at first they worried she wasn’t breathing at all. Then they thwacked her on the back and her cries joined mine and they laid us side by side, boy and girl, two underwater creatures suddenly forced to fill our lungs with cold, dry air.

  Dr. Feng had operated on my mother as a favor to my uncle, his old classmate. Otherwise we would have been born in the hospital down the street, where a woman had bled to death after a botched cesarean the previous year. The family had been in the waiting room for hours, and at last the father-to-be pounded on the doors of the operating room. When no one responded, the family pushed them open to find the lifeless woman on the table, blood pooling on the ground. She was alone: the staff had stripped the medical certificates that bore their names from the wall and fled as soon as the surgery went wrong.

  From the start we were lucky, not least because we had each other. As twins we’d been spared the reach of the government’s family-planning policies, two winking fetuses floating in utero. 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.

  We weren’t in any way an extraordinary family. My mother worked as a warehouse clerk, my father a government sanitation planner. When my father was forty-seven, his division chief—​a fanciful man who had once dreamed of being an artist—​decided to build a public toilet in the shape of a European clock tower. He’d been to Europe and had been impressed by the cleanliness of the toilets and the loveliness of the architecture and wanted to combine the two. Like most artists, the division chief had a fragile ego, and shortly after my father balked at the project’s expense, he was fired. It was the sole act of independence he’d committed in his life, and it cost him his career.

  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.

  From the time she was ten, my parents worshipped at Lulu’s altar. Her precocity was evident early on; it was like a flag being waved energetically from a mountaintop. Neither of our parents had much education, and it stunned them to find themselves in possession of such a daughter.

  When we were small, we played devotedly together. Lulu was a great inventor of games, which often incorporated whatever she’d read most recently: one day we were stinkbugs, looking for the right leaf on which to lay our eggs, another we were herdsmen fleeing Mongolian invaders. She was braver than me: once, when the elderly woman who lived opposite us had left her door ajar while retrieving the mail downstairs, my sister even snuck into her apartment.

  “It’s full of newspapers, stacked as high as your head,” Lulu said excitedly, her eyes glowing as she dashed back. “There’s a giant orange cross-stitch on her couch, with a peony and six fishes.”

  As a child she was always reading. Even at meals she would sit and scan the back of the juice box. She must have read it a million times: aspartame and xanthan gum and red no. 9. It wasn’t a conscious thing; she just seemed to feel uncomfortable when her eyes weren’t fastened to a page. She had a mania for lists, too. By age eleven she’d memorized every bone in the human body, and she used to recite their names to me at night in an eerie voice as I held a pillow over my head: sternum, tibia, floating rib.

  In high school, I rebelled against her brilliance by playing video games, lots of them, spending hours whipping a gun back and forth across dusty landscapes empty of people, except for those who wanted to kill you. Usually there were six or seven of us at my friend Xingjian’s apartment, and we would take turns and cheer one another on. We were an army, invincible, or if we weren’t invincible we could hit replay at any time, which was pretty close to the same thing.

  Lulu, meanwhile, was a model among model students. She studied so intensely that it left her physically bowed and exhausted, like an athlete running a daily marathon, and at night she dropped off to sleep without a word. My mother fed her stewed mushrooms that looked like tiny brains when their stems fell off; they would be good for Lulu’s studies, she said. She gave me some as well, though by then it was plain that any hopes for academic glory resided with her daughter, not her son, constructive effects of mushrooms be damned.

  When we sat for the college entrance exam, it surprised no one that Lulu scored high enough to earn a place at a university in the nation’s capital, a bus and a train and a plane ride away. My mother wept with what she said was happiness. “A scholar,” she kept saying. “A scholar.” She and my father, she liked to remind us, hadn’t studied long before going to work in the factories.

  “We are so proud,” my father told Lulu. There was an intensity to his expression that unnerved me. One of our schoolbooks had a black-and-white illustration of a long-ago eunuch serving a feast, staring hungrily at the food on the emperor’s table, and there was something of that look on my father’s face.

  The night Lulu flew out was overcast, the twilight that preceded it a peculiar mix of orange and ocher. Earlier that day, my father had given her a gift: her very own laptop. It was thick with promise, like a fat slice of cake, sheathed in blue plastic. It wasn’t like the old computer that we all shared, which stuttered and stalled, keys sticky with grease and crumbs and bits of hair. This one had keys that yielde
d obediently when you touched them. I’d stared at it enviously, too filled with longing for words. “Don’t worry—​you’ll get one, too, when you leave, the exact same,” my father said.

  At the airport, our parents assumed expressions appropriate for refugees being abandoned at a border. “Lulu, be good,” our father said. I stood there awkwardly, a little resentfully. Lulu turned and flashed a peace sign as she went through security, and we watched her pink hoodie and striped zebra baseball hat retreat into the crowd until she was gone.

  I departed for college a week later, with considerably less fanfare. The school was just an hour’s drive away and had an empty feel to it, as though it had been erected with much ambition years ago and then forgotten. In the winter the dorms were freezing, as if their concrete walls held in all the damp, cold air and kept it close to your skin; it looked like a convincing enough building, but felt like a tent.

  The best thing about college, I decided, was that the dorms were wired for the internet. There were five other boys in my room on the second floor, sharing rickety metal bunk beds draped with mosquito nets, which afforded both a thin sense of privacy and protection from bites in the summer. At night when we sat in front of our computers, you could hear the same tinny chirping of chat alerts all around us, emanating from the floorboards, the ceilings, and the walls, as though hordes of invisible, electronic crickets had stormed the building.

  I wasn’t old enough to miss Lulu. Anyway, I could see her chat statuses whenever I logged in on my new laptop, smooth and shiny and housed in a blue plastic sleeve that matched my sister’s. Studying, they might say. Going to class. At some point they got more fanciful. Floating down the green river, one read. Digging into a stone with no edges. Sometimes I tried looking them up while waiting for my gamer teammates to log on. A few belonged to old poets, but the rest, I suspected, she was inventing herself.

  I died repeatedly that semester, but amassed several hundred gold coins and was first made a warlock, then a mage. The other boys in my dorm were addicts, too, and we played fiercely into the evening, cussing, headphones on, until midnight, when the power was cut. Classes were a negligible affair: what mattered were your grades on the final exams, and those could be readily crammed for by memorizing ten or fifteen photocopied pages of notes sold by upperclassmen. Honestly, I had no idea who actually went to class: I pictured teachers sitting with their laptops in front of empty rooms, one eye on the clock, maybe playing video games of their own, maybe taking a nap.

  In our second year of school, I searched idly for one of Lulu’s statuses and found just one result: a public microblog with a profile photo of a yawning yellow cat. There were several dozen posts, mostly the same kinds of snippets of poetry Lulu had been posting to her statuses, and by the time I finished scrolling through them, I was sure the account was hers. For the bio she’d written qiushi, a reference to the old Communist maxim “to seek truth from facts,” but the name of her account was qiu zhushi, “to seek carbohydrates,” which made me laugh. You wouldn’t have suspected it to look at her, but Lulu was a glutton—​she could eat reams of noodles or fried crullers without missing a beat.

  One day in the dorm, I answered a knock at our door to find a classmate grinning at me. “Your sister’s here,” he said. I gaped and went downstairs. There she was, wearing an old-fashioned padded blue coat, the kind common in the fifties. Lulu had her hair in two braids, carried a knapsack slung over one shoulder, and was smiling. She’d joined the college debate club, she said, and they were traveling for a competition. “Big Brother,” she said—​it was an old joke of hers, since I was born only a minute or so before her—​“want to buy me dinner?”

  I suggested the cafeteria. She said she had something nicer in mind, and took me by the arm to a coffee shop by the campus entrance. The place called itself Pretty O.J.; its sign advertised Italian noodles. I’d walked by dozens of times and never gone in. Inside, the tables were topped with glass and the seats were an uncomfortable white wicker that crackled when you shifted, and there were white vases to match, filled with plastic flowers. Lulu took hold of the menu and confidently ordered a pizza and tomato pasta for us as though she’d done it many times before. “With coffee, please,” she added, “and bring us some bread.”

  I stared at her. “You look happy,” I said. She was. She was debating at a college an hour’s drive south, she said, and had taken a bus to come to see me. I asked her if our parents knew, if she was planning to see them as well.

  “No,” she said, smiling. “We fly back tomorrow night, but I wanted to come see you.”

  Beside her I felt very young in my rubber sandals and T-shirt and shorts. She asked me about my classes and my friends. I told her that I was watching a lot of television on my laptop and playing even more video games. Lately I’d been playing with a team of Russian teenagers who were pretty good. We didn’t speak the same language, so we communicated in a kind of pidgin English: Don’t worry guys I got phantom princess no no no, you NOOB, dafuq.

  “I know you think it’s a waste of time,” I said.

  “A lot of kids play it at my school, too,” she said, not contradicting me.

  “It’s a profession now, you know,” I said. “They have competitions, you can win big prize money.”

  It embarrasses me now to realize that up until that point, we’d spent the whole evening talking about my life. I don’t think I asked her anything about her own, and it was only at the end that she volunteered a few facts. She was pregnant, she said, two months along, and very much in love with the baby’s father.

  I choked on the coffee. Lulu waited for me to compose myself, and then she told me the rest of the story. The father, an upperclassman studying accounting, was from a poor county in the northeast. No, they weren’t keeping the baby, though she and Zhangwei would likely get pregnant again in a few years, “after we’re married,” Lulu said, with a calm matter-of-factness that astounded me. Someday, the two of them hoped to travel abroad.

  She told me more about him, choosing her words carefully. “He’s not like other people,” she said. “He’s very noble.” It was a strange word, an old-fashioned word. I just stared at her.

  “You’re sure about all this, Lulu?”

  “I’m sure.”

  I envied her for a moment, sitting there, looking so certain. When had I ever been sure of anything? For Lulu, everything had always come so easily and confidently: homework, answers on tests, college, and now, it seemed, love as well.

  When the bill arrived, I didn’t have enough money with me, so she paid. “Thanks, Big Brother,” she said when we left, and at first I thought she was being sarcastic, but she looked glad when she said it. “I haven’t told anyone else,” she confessed as we walked out into the blue twilight, the boxy concrete façades of campus around us. “I knew I could trust you.”

  It was the first time it had occurred to me that I was trustworthy, and it was a relief to hear that I had been evaluated and not found wanting. “Of course,” I said.

  In the following months, I checked her account more often. I got flashes of insight into her life that way: photos of the yellow shocks of forsythia that blossomed in the spring, more odd bits of poetry. I pictured her tapping away at her identical blue-sheathed laptop across the country, clicking send.

  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. Photos of him before his death had circulated online: skinny legs in shorts, glasses, a purple T-shirt that read LET’S GO. He and his friends had been standing outside after singing karaoke, a little drunk, and when police had told them to move along, Xu Lei got caustic and the officers took offense. His friends had filmed them beating him and then loading him into a police van. As quickly as censors took down the footage, it was uploaded again.

  Mostly Lulu w
as just recirculating other people’s messages, adding her own hashtag, #justiceforXuLei, or an indignant, frowning face. At some point she added her own commentary: This country, these police, are simply too dark.

  When the police autopsy came out, it found that Xu Lei had died of a heart attack. The conclusion was promptly met with scorn—​he was only eighteen. The coroner’s report said that prior to his death, he’d been working hard and not sleeping well. “It was a young person’s heart attack,” it concluded, a phrase that quickly trended online until censors snuffed it out. Lulu was not impressed. I have studied hard all my life and I don’t sleep well, she wrote. Will I, too, be made to have a heart attack?

  After that, Lulu’s account became more active. At first she was just reposting news from other accounts: the tainted-formula scandal that killed three babies, the college admissions administrator found to be taking cash bribes—​the kinds of things we all knew and groused about.

  A few months later, though, she began to flood her account with images and videos that were genuinely surprising. I had no idea where she was getting them. They were of scattered street protests from around the country, some just stills, others clips of perhaps a few seconds, rarely more than a minute long. Hubei, Luzhou City, Tianbei County, Mengshan Village: 10 villagers protest outside government offices over death of local woman, one might say. Or: Shandong, Caiguang City, Taining County, Huaqi Village: 500 workers strike for three days, protesting over unpaid wages.

  There were dozens of these posts, and they usually looked similar: police in pale blue shirts, lots of shouting, crowds massing in the streets, occasionally someone on the ground being beaten. In one video, several men were attempting to tip over a police van. In another, a group of villagers was shouting as something that looked horribly like a human figure smoldered on the ground.

  They were like dispatches from a country I had never seen, and they disturbed and confused me.