The Threads of Family and Resilience

Books & Ideas Audio

Te-Ping Chen’s debut fiction, Land of Big Numbers: Stories, is lauded by NPR as “as brilliant an instance of a journalist’s keen eye manifesting in luminous fiction as one can find.” Through piercing realism and tongue-in-cheek magic realism, it shares journeys of Chinese communities, their history, their government, and how all of that has tumbled into the present, where social mobility is extremely limited. Pik-Shuen Fung’s Ghost Forest reveals the resilient threads of matrilineal history and the inheritance of stories and silences in a moving story of a Chinese-Canadian astronaut family. These remarkable, perceptive writers discuss history inherited in 21st century China, and their depictions of modern day Chinese and Canadian-Chinese family dynamics, with award-winning author and columnist, Anna Ling Kaye.