Travel inspires story ideas by delivering the writer into a productive state of not-knowing — a temporary foreignness in which the familiar rules of perception are suspended and the world becomes raw material again. For a writer of magical realism navigating the contemporary cities of mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, travel is not research. It is immersion. It is the willingness to be confused, moved, and unsettled — and to carry that disturbance back to the desk.
Travel forces attention. At home, our mind processes the familiar on autopilot, filtering out most of what it encounters. In an unfamiliar place, the senses wake up. Every detail becomes potentially significant. The arrangement of goods in a shop window, the way strangers greet each other on a street corner, the particular quality of light at four in the afternoon — all of it registers with unusual clarity.
This heightened noticing is the same faculty a writer exercises on the page. Travel, in this sense, is training for fiction. It builds the muscle of observation, the habit of asking why things are the way they are, the instinct to follow a detail until it reveals a story.
Hong Kong and Singapore offer the writer a different kind of travel experience: the encounter with places that have distilled the energy of migration, trade, and cultural collision into specific, intensely local forms.
Singapore's stories come from the tension beneath the surface. The extraordinary orderliness of the city — its famous efficiency — masks a pressure that finds expression in the most unexpected places. The hawker centres, where people from all walks of life come to grab a bite, between the busy routines of a city that never stops; the weekend shopping mall, where exhausted parents shuttle children between tuition sessions, becomes a kind of urban poem about sacrifice, ambition, and the complex arithmetic of love.
In Hong Kong, the story ideas come from compression — vertical, temporal, cultural. The cha chaan teng where a seventy-year-old proprietor serves milk tea to the same table where her mother served it decades ago. The Central highrise office where a banker in a suit conducts a meeting while the scent of incense from a nearby temple drifts through the air conditioning.
And then, Mainland China's cities are also a writer's laboratory. Each major city has a personality so distinct that traveling between them is less like moving through a country and more like moving between different imaginative registers.
Shanghai seduces with its cocktail of ambition and nostalgia. Guangzhou grounds you in the sensory abundance of Cantonese food culture — the ceaseless ritual of yum cha, the stacked bamboo steamers, the practiced choreography of a great dim sum restaurant. Dalian surprises with its Russian-influenced architecture facing a cold northern sea thick with seafood. Chengdu slows time down, folding you into the pleasures of spice and conversation. Zhengzhou offers the uncanny experience of a hyper-modern city built on the soil of China's earliest dynasties.
Of all the journeys that we have undertaken in recent years, the journey to Shangri-La in Yunnan province is among the most transformative. This high-altitude corner of China against a backdrop of alpine meadows and ancient monasteries operates by different rules of time and enchantment.
The local cuisine alone is a portal: rose cakes pressed from petals grown at altitude, highland barley bread dense with mountain cold, yak butter tea that tastes like something from before history. These are foods with stories inside them. You eat them and feel the altitude in your lungs, and you understand that you are somewhere the ordinary laws of narrative do not quite apply.
We travel to seek inspiration from our experiences: with a notebook but without an agenda, following curiosity rather than itinerary. We feel the most alive to story in the evenings — walking city streets as the light changes, experiencing the energy of the intersections where the day's energy gathers before transition to the tranquilness of night. Characters arrive in these moments as glimpses: a face at a night market stall, a particular way of walking, a gesture that suggests an entire interior life.
The twelve cities of The Speculators & Other Short Stories are cities we have walked, eaten in, gotten lost in. Each story is a report from a particular intersection of place and moment — a record of what it felt like to be in that city, at that particular confluence of history and now, when something that seemed to want to be a story made itself known.
For other writers seeking inspiration, the invitation is simple: go somewhere, pay attention, stay long enough to feel what the place is actually like beneath its tourist surface — and then follow whatever unsettles you most.