Stories are strange things. You don’t really write them so much as take dictation—if and when they decide you’re willing to listen again.
This fall, I wasn’t listening very well. Teaching was relentless. The flu moved through classrooms and homes with mechanical efficiency, like a system test nobody authorized. When a baby spikes a high fever, the universe collapses to a single room and a single question. Everything else becomes decorative.
We were lucky. Everyone recovered.
Teaching paused. Spring Festival approached. The city slowed without stopping—still humming, still lit, but less interested in conversation. In that gap, the story returned. Not urgently. Not loudly. It didn’t need to knock. It was already inside.
I went back into the sequel to Amos the Amazing. The colors were still wrong in the right way. The logic bent as it always had. Chongqing was not a setting. It never has been. Cities like this don’t wait to be written about. They leak into you and see what survives.
I made a beat. Commissioned by the largest secret cyberpunk capital of the world – 36 million and growing, Chongqing.
It needed weight. Forward motion. Enough pressure to hold a voice without polishing it to death. Orlando recorded the rap. Ryan provided some needed levity. The city gave us everything else—the trains, the heat, the noise, the verticality.
“Chongqing’s the city where the androids dream;
The city we’re living in, where the future and past meet…” Welcome to Chongqing.
The Chinese edition of Amos the Amazing launched before the New Year. Copies moved outward from the city and then farther, into rural libraries. The book went where it started, which felt less like strategy and more like physics.
Years ago, I took my students into the countryside in Tongliang. The children there listened carefully. They always do. Many lived with their grandparents. Their parents were somewhere else, building the future at scale. The story came later. It usually does.
That is the shape of it, as far as I can tell.
I’m writing again. I’m listening. The city continues—loud, vertical, unsupervised. The work does not argue for itself. It doesn’t need to. If it’s wrong, it will collapse on its own. If it holds, you feel it in your chest and move on.
