'Forget it, Ben. The connection is too bad, let's just hang up.'

I was pissed off. When I looked up, the man with the long black hair had gone. He'd taken away his Duras. My Marguerite. He'd disappeared into Haidian with its huge population of young people and its rush of honking cars and bicycles.

Fragment Fourteen

I THOUGHT MAYBE I could write better if I got away from Beijing for a bit, so I travelled to Xi'an, an ancient city that was the capital of many dynasties. I stayed in the suburbs, to the east of the city, in a state-run hotel called the 'Just Like Home' guest house. Instead of signing myself in as a bit-part extra on 20 yuan a day plus a 5-yuan lunchbox, I said I was a 'Professional scriptwriter', and went around the hotel in dark glasses and a long black coat like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, carrying my laptop.

The air in the Just Like Home guest house was stale. A dark-red carpet ran along every corridor in the building. In the daytime, the hotel was deadly quiet. There was never anyone around. Eight hundred years could have passed and still no one would have knocked on the door asking for a room. But it was different at night. At first it was as though the entire hotel slept the sleep of the dead. I would switch off my laptop, and crawl into bed with the lamp on. The mattress was unpredictable. Some nights it would stay hard; others it would cave in and I would find myself in a crevasse. Then, as I lay trying to sleep, I would hear the sound of a woman weeping. The sound would stop and then start again. It reminded me of the wailing saxophone music they used to play in Lush Life, a jazz bar in Haidian that was a favourite hang-out for foreigners. Lush Life got knocked down one or two years ago.

So there I was at the Just Like Home guest house, only a few miles away from the grave of the Terracotta Warriors. I was trying to write my script, but the noise of the night started to get to me. I began to think the hotel was a trap, a place from which people never escaped, a place where all the guests turned into dusty warrior statues. Maybe it was old Emperor Qin Shi Huang playing tricks. I was worried that I would wake up in the morning to find that I had become a dusty clay warrior too.

It might have been said that by escaping alone like this, I was not participating in the Community. That I, Fenfang, wasn't contributing to the Greater Socialist Good. But I didn't care. I wanted to hide away and write. I wanted to meet characters who would climb up my pen. I wanted to create a completely new world, inventing everyone and everything. Yet whenever I closed the door of Room 402, opened my laptop and sat in the faded red chair, nothing would happen. My thoughts would dry up. My ideas would be impossible to pin down. Room 402 would turn into a cage, rattled by the fitful bird inside.

Every morning I would wake up and pull back the stained brown curtains. Outside was a sea of state buildings from the 1980s covered in heavy yellow dust. Okay, so Beijing had dust. But this was dust that had been lying around for 5,000 years. Everything in Xi'an was covered in dust. The houses, the people. It covered each needle of the pine trees and every petal of the red canna flowers. I could almost hear the pine trees and the flowers coughing. The first thing I'd do in the morning, I'd get into the shower. I'd try to wash away the noise of the weeping woman and the vision of dust, but it echoed in my head all day. I'd get dressed and put on my long black coat. I liked my oversized coat. It covered my body entirely, protecting me from the annoying yellow dust.

In the lobby three female employees with nothing to do would be sitting at the front desk. Behind their heads were three big clocks showing the time in London, Tokyo and New York. I couldn't see why they needed international clocks since only peasants would stay at the Just Like Home guest house. Not that it was very homely. You had to be brave walking across a lobby like that, with the eyes of three women fixed on you. Especially in dark glasses and an oversized coat. I knew what would be going through their square brains. They would be thinking I was a prostitute. Why else would a young woman rent a room alone? It's not standard in China. And, in China, anyone who does something 'not standard' is immediately suspicious.

Anyway, at the door, I'd be met by the doorman, a skinny young boy all in red like a ceremonial imperial guard. Instead of opening the door, though, he would be practising martial-arts moves in front of the mirrors. Monkey Finger. Flying Limb. Double Leg Kick. Classic moves picked up from popular martial-arts films. When he wasn't busy with his routines, his nose would be pressed to the window. He'd be staring intently outside, even though there was never anything to stare at.

I'd push open the lobby doors myself and walk out into the world of dust. About 100 metres on, in the middle of all this dust, was a shabby canteen called Little Chilli Pepper. Inside was a permanent swarm of flies and three or four middle-aged men with cigarettes glued to their lips playing mah-jong. Outside was the constant rumble of lorries and tractors carrying coal from deserted west China to crowded east China. I would look down at my feet to see my shoes covered in Xi'an dust. Usually I would give up at this point, turn around and walk back to my room. That was generally the full extent of my inspirational morning walk.

I had wanted to be in a place where I could walk around and meet interesting people. Good old people. Smiling kids. Pregnant women. Gas-canister delivery men on their bicycles. School students running home in the rain. Couples arguing. Policemen dozing in their cars. Boy racers screeching past on scooters… These were the people I wanted to draw into my stories. I had wanted to find a place where I could be myself – the real Fenfang, not just some bit-part extra.

On my last night in Xi'an I had a sudden urge to see the city centre and its famous Ming-dynasty bell tower. Before I went back to brand-new Beijing, I thought it would be good to see some 600-year-old bell. So I got up from my laptop and went down to the lobby to find a taxi. It was 11.30 at night. The taxi driver sped through the streets like a maniac and then left me. I stood alone in the middle of the road. Beside me, the bell tower loomed, solemn and silent. It was so dark I couldn't see a thing. Everything around me was shut and it was impossible to find out what the bell's story was. This made me sad. Whenever I wanted to learn more about the places I belonged to, I found myself at a dead end. I sniffed. Despite the darkness, I could sense Xi'an 's thick dust blowing in on the wind from over the old city wall. I spotted a light bulb ahead. I started to walk towards it. A barbecued fish stall. I sat on a wooden bench next to a few men with the same build as the Terracotta Warriors. Ancient bone structure must have run through the generations of Xi'an citizens.

I started eating splintered skewers of barbecued fish, one after another. I would finish one and lay the chewed wooden stick on the table before taking another one. My face was a statue too as I listened to the descendants of the Terracotta Warriors joking and laughing, drinking beer and eating barbecue. I finished 10 skewers. The sticks on the table were like dead soldiers in a Qing grave. I looked up. Unfamiliar streets extended into darkness beyond the stall. I held onto the table tightly, feeling as though I might drift off into the night if I didn't.

The ring of my mobile jolted me back to reality. Across the screen was a string of numbers with four zeros at the beginning. Ben.

'Fenfang, I've been trying to reach you at home for days. Where have you been?'