Te-Ping Chen - Land of Big Numbers

COPYRIGHT 2021 BY TE-PING CHEN

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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

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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 PS 3603. H 4554 A 6 2021 (print) | LCC PS 3603. H 4554 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6dc23

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

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To my parents

The hour of our birth had been carefully forecast, a winters day cesarean timed to coincide with Dr. Fengs 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 wasnt 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 wed been spared the reach of the governments family-planning policies, two winking fetuses floating in utero. For the first few weeks of our life, our skulls had matching indentations from where theyd been pressed against each other in the womb, like two interlocking puzzle pieces. Later in life when we were apart, Id sometimes touch my hand to the back of my skull when I thought of her, as if seeking a phantom limb.

We werent 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 chiefa fanciful man who had once dreamed of being an artistdecided to build a public toilet in the shape of a European clock tower. Hed 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 projects expense, he was fired. It was the sole act of independence hed 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 towers top as if being defenestrated by rival birds inside, and indeed the whole structure smells like a foul aviary. You wouldnt think it cost 200,000 yuan to build, and probably it didnt, Lulu said; most of it likely ended up in the division heads pocket, art corrupting life, life corrupting art.

From the time she was ten, my parents worshipped at Lulus 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 shed 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.

Its full of newspapers, stacked as high as your head, Lulu said excitedly, her eyes glowing as she dashed back. Theres 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 wasnt a conscious thing; she just seemed to feel uncomfortable when her eyes werent fastened to a page. She had a mania for lists, too. By age eleven shed 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 Xingjians apartment, and we would take turns and cheer one another on. We were an army, invincible, or if we werent 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 Lulus 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 nations 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, hadnt 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 emperors table, and there was something of that look on my fathers 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 wasnt 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 yielded obediently when you touched them. Id stared at it enviously, too filled with longing for words. Dont worryyoull 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.