Te-Ping Chen is a fiction writer and journalist, who was a longtime Wall Street Journal correspondent in Beijing and Hong Kong, and now reports for the Journal from Philadelphia. Her debut short story collection, Land of Big Numbers, was released this month. These stories trace a diverse set of characters in China, from a rural inventor desperately trying to build an airplane to impress local Party cadres, to a dissident daughter posting the government’s human rights abuses online, to a young