Book Talk

"Cutting between clear-eyed realism and tongue-in-cheek magical realism, Chen’s stories coalesce into a portrait of a people striving for openings where mobility is limited. Twins take radically different paths: one becomes a professional gamer, the other a political activist. A woman moves to the city to work at a government call center and is followed by her violent ex-boyfriend. A man is swept into the high-risk, high-reward temptations of China’s volatile stock exchange. And a group of people sit, trapped for no reason, on a subway platform for months, waiting for official permission to leave. Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 00:00 - Show Opening 01:07 - June - Jane Migraine 01:09 - Episode Intro 02:55 - June (Cont’d) - Jane Migraine 04:17 - Interview with Te-Ping Chen, Part 1 12:06 - Every Boxing Movie Is The Same - Jane Migraine 13:02 - Interview with Te-Ping Chen, Part 2 35:20 - Sloane Peterson - Jane Migraine 35:33 - Episode Outro 37:09 - Sloane Peterson (Cont’d) - Jane Migraine 38:47 - Outr