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 migrant working in a flower shop and becoming enamored with her wealthy customers. In this lightly edited interview, we discussed the inspiration behind these stories, how reporting on China is different from writing fiction set in China, and how reality in China is often more whimsical than what a fiction writer could dream up. Te-Ping Chen.Illustration by Kate Copeland Q: How did you decide to write this book? A: Well, it wasn’t that I set out to write a book. When I began writing t