Mapping the 12 cities in The Speculators & Other Short Stories is an invitation to understand the collection as a literary atlas: twelve distinct urban environments, each a character in its own right, each contributing its specific atmosphere, culture, and contradictions to the stories set within it. From Shanghai's speculative towers to Changsha's chili-scented night streets, from Shangri-La's high-altitude dreamscape to Singapore's immaculate, pressure-laden corridors — this is a map of contemporary Asia as a living literary imagination.
Each of the twelve cities was chosen not merely as a location but as a narrative premise — a place with a specific character, a specific tension, and a specific quality of magic. The collection moves across mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, tracing a geography of the modern Chinese-speaking world at a particular moment of transformation.
The twelve cities trace a rough geographical arc that begins in the economic powerhouses of coastal eastern China — Shanghai, Suzhou — moves south to Guangzhou and Hong Kong, then sweeps inland to Beijing, Zhengzhou, Dalian in the northeast, and Chengdu and Changsha in the center and south. From there it reaches to the high altitude frontier of Shangri-La in Yunnan before crossing the Taiwan Strait to Taipei and descending to Singapore.
This arc is not merely geographical. It is a cultural and historical journey through different versions of the Chinese-speaking world: the mainland in its various regional expressions, the Special Administrative Region navigating its particular transition, the democratic alternative genealogy of Taiwan, and the city-state that built a new model of multicultural Chinese identity from scratch. Together they compose a portrait of the diversity within what is often treated, incorrectly, as a monolithic cultural sphere.
The choice of cities reflects our own travel history and the specific stories that each place generated in us. The criterion was not comprehensiveness — not 'which cities best represent China' — but responsiveness: which cities had something to say, which streets had generated characters, which kitchens had produced the kind of sensory memory that becomes, eventually, fiction.
Each city in the collection is a place he has spent real time in, walking its streets in the evening hours when the city's energy gathers and characters appear. The fiction that emerged from these walks is not documentation — it is imagination catalyzed by specific, irreplaceable places. A story set in Dalian could only be set in Dalian. A story set in Changsha could only smell like Changsha. The specificity of place is not decoration. It is the source.
Readers of The Speculators & Other Short Stories can approach the collection as they would approach a journey — with curiosity, without itinerary, allowing the places to dictate the emotional register. The collection is not only organized by geography but sometimes by internal logic: each story creates conditions for the next, and the movement between cities mirrors the experience of a traveler who has learned to trust the road more than the plan.
For readers who have visited some of these cities, the stories offer a particular pleasure: the recognition of something accurately rendered, followed by the small vertigo of its fictional transformation. For readers who haven't, they offer something rarer: the experience of having been somewhere, of carrying a city's specific gravity inside you, without having left home.