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Some fiction writers want to tell the world their secrets, and in effect produce thinly disguised autobiographies; while others try to get into the heads of characters as unlike themselves as could be. I fall into the latter category.

For instance, I've never personally dressed in a gorilla suit and ridden a bicycle around Beijing, stopping off at workplaces to sing 'Congratulations on your Promotion' to grateful employees, but I do wonder what it would be like. Hence my story, 'Year of the Gorilla', which opens the collection, The Beijing of Possibilities.

The idea occurred to me like this. Last spring I was strolling through hutongs near Qianmen, thinking about the time-honoured legend of the Monkey King, and I strove for an updated version. I envisioned the man in the gorilla suit wobbling on his Flying Pigeon bicycle in front of me, and in my imagination I followed him around the city. Without giving away too much of the plot, the hero is a migrant worker, an illegal resident in the Chinese capital. He performs a feat of valour, which grants him fame and glory, as well as getting him into hot water with the authorities.

As is my method, I went home and wrote an outline on my computer. I revised it, adding more details and scraps of dialogue, making it as detailed as I could. Similarly I outlined another dozen stories set in contemporary Beijing, seeking to describe the lives of a wide range of Beijingers – young and old, poor and rich, those born in the city and those who migrated from elsewhere in China – until I estimated I had enough to fill a book.

I put the outlines aside for several months, to let them mature. Meanwhile, I read everything relevant to the subject I could find. While much was about the modern Middle Kingdom, I also needed to research Ming dynasty underwear, Tang dynasty poetry, and a plethora of variants on the legend of The Most Beautiful Woman In China.

That autumn, in San Francisco, I read through the outlines, altering and expanding them. I conceived of a superstructure linking the stories together, making them into a kind of novel. And finally I began to write the manuscript. This only took a couple of months. The revisions, mostly connected to getting the overall structure to operate as it should, took months more. And finally, I returned to Beijing just after the Olympics. I strolled more or less at random, my camera at the ready, taking serendipitous snapshots to illustrate the text.

Each of my books has been set in a different country, and has a different structure and voice. As for my next book, all I can say is that I'm now in New York, imagining the adventures of a Chinese migrant, and moving layered stories backward and forward in time.

The Beijing of Possibilities is published by Other Press. Read an excerpt at www.otherpress.com, by searching the book name.