Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen

The author is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and I found her collection of short stories through Obama's reading list. I may not love everything, but I often find things that I wouldn't have found otherwise (I am not much for reading about books, even though I spend double digit hours reading every week) and his picks are always well written. This one is interesting and memorable. One of the challenges of reporting in China is to divine the human experience behind the peculiar or the political. Time is short, many interviews are done remotely, and people in China are often wary of opening up to a foreign journalist, even one who speaks their language, leaving unanswered questions. These are the imagined answers to those deeper questions about why someone does what they did, even in a totalitarian state. It opens strong and I was sorry to see it end.