Far from being a drawback when writing about a nation as vast and diverse as China, writing in miniature proved a release. “I felt it was an apt vehicle for trying to piece together a sense of this country. It is a place that looms on such a gargantuan scale, like a monolith, certainly as conveyed in headlines. It is a country that contains so many stories, so many narrative arcs. Getting to focus on the intimate and personal is the only way you can try to tell any story.”

It isn’t hard to find connections between the two parts of Chen’s concise writing life. “Flying Machine”, a whimsical but affecting portrait of an indefatigable rural inventor, drew on two eye-catching reports. One, about the country’s love affair with artificial intelligence, focused on noodle-chopping robots. Another, Chen says, with enthusiasm, was about funeral strippers. “It was the most staid bulletin to come across my radar screen late in the bureau one night. I had to re-read it many times to make sure I understood it. Someone dies. You want to make sure there’s a good turnout, so you invite a stripper to the funeral.”

Other points of inspiration were more personal: qiguo, an irresistible “new fruit” that causes a burst of unbridled emotion in anyone who tastes it. “I had a really particular fruit in mind,” Chen says. “These nectarines which come into the street markets in Beijing in the summer – and are utterly addicting and so delicious.”

What is so impressive about the resulting story is how delicately Chen generates different possibilities: is qiguo a metaphor for a nation bewitched by consumerism, a critique of capitalistic overkill, a humane examination of nostalgia, or a fable of human yearning? Should we admire the titular heroine “Lulu” for pursuing her online protests against the government whatever the cost, or conclude that she’s a deluded, ineffective idealist? And how about Zhu Feng in the title tale: is his ambition to get rich quick, no matter the legal proprieties, satirically transgressive or in Chen’s humane portrait curiously admirable?

Chen herself isn’t saying. “I didn’t have a particular agenda. I was really writing the stories for myself. I was writing about China for my day job and coming home with my mind still teeming with images, voices and the spectacular and often very strange things that I had witnessed. It was a catharsis and a way of trying to grapple with a country that can be really difficult to try and parse. Ultimately where I wound up is where we see things in the Land of Big Numbers – you see both sides.”

For Chen, the challenges were quite literally closer to home as she struggled to accommodate her own Chinese heritage with the realities of living in China proper. Her father was born in Hong Kong (where Chen began working for The Wall Street Journal, in 2012) and emigrated to America in the 1960s; her mother was born in New York to a family with roots in Shanghai, Beijing and Hawaii. Chen herself grew up in Oakland, California, and like many children of expatriates inherited a vision of China that was out of date.

“I think about my own experience living in China, first as a student and later as a reporter. I felt like I had these shards, these impressions [of China] that I had been building up for 20 years. I didn’t know what to do with any of them.” To say her first visit to the mainland came as a surprise is an understatement. “There was a real sense of dislocation. It really bore no resemblance to what I had grown up to expect. I was raised in a household where China had been frozen in time. I arrived expecting to see essentially my grandfather’s version of the country. That was a very different time and place.”

Today, Chen recalls that first trip through a “stark feeling of loss. The city felt so alien. My grandmother had grown up in a Beijing hutong. Seeing them being razed all around me in the run-up to the Olympics, this was 2006, made it hard to find a sense of place.”

It wasn’t until Chen returned in 2014 that she began to “strip away that first instinctively emotional” impression. “Trying to make a life and also being a journalist allowed me to focus on understanding China. Getting to speak to many kinds of people all across society and across different parts of the country astounded me,” she says.

But journalism and even everyday life only go so far, which is where fiction comes in. “You are meeting people right in the middle of their stories – and often at the climax of their stories. And then you walk away. You are often left wondering how things went from there, or the histories that preceded the action. The pleasure of writing these stories was getting to answer some of those unanswered questions.”