In your story “Enough for Now,” a young American woman and a Dutch man meet while backpacking around China in 1994. You were a student in China in the early nineties. Does the story draw on your own memories?

I studied for a year at Nankai University, in Tianjin. The first novel I wrote was about that year, but it had no plot, and I lost it on a first-generation iMac that died. “Enough for Now” draws more on the backpacking I did during the breaks and in the summer after my program ended, some of the most blissful experiences of my life. China then felt like it was in another century, just beginning to industrialize on a mass scale, and every day was a feast of beautiful and fascinating things. Many people had never talked to a Westerner before. It was also often annoying, and I saw sides of myself that I didn’t like. But the thing that I loved most about backpacking was that I was living as close as I’d ever been to a pure state of existence, almost egoless. No future or past. When you travel like that, no one knows you or cares about who you were before. Maybe that’s why it makes the story’s protagonist, Martha, so angry that the Chinese people she meets focus on the fact that she’s an American, even though they do so with respect.

The story begins on a train, somewhat subverts the typical strangers-on-a-train narrative in which a chance encounter leads to a love story (that is, the Linklater version rather than the Hitchcock one). It’s clear from the get-go that your two characters, Martha and Joost, are not embarking on a sentimental romance. Did you know how their connection would pan out when you started writing?

I’m interested in the provisional relationships people form in temporary circumstances, when everything gets very reduced and primal and, at the same time, becomes more free. If either person wants to leave, they can just leave, though it can actually still be quite hard to do so. I like that emotion—the tug of caring about someone you might not normally spend a lot of time with, or maybe don’t fully respect. You share these few weeks (which, when you’re backpacking, feel like years) and form a kind of marriage of convenience, moving through space together, and somehow you can’t help but love each other a little. The movie “Sirāt” (which was nominated for two Oscars this year), about a group of techno ravers going on an odyssey through Morocco, captured some of that feeling. The intensity of the experience makes it so that you can’t help but care about the people who are going through it with you.

Martha and Joost have been backpacking solo in China for months. The story never really tells us why they’ve both chosen to do this. Do you have an idea? And is there something about China in those years that made it, for you, the perfect setting for this story?

They’re travelling solo because they want freedom. For her, it’s more the freedom of not dealing with other people, except on her own terms; of not having to be someone; of being simply a phenomenological intelligence taking in the wonders of the world, “a big naked eyeball.” As soon as you’re in a relationship with another person, you take on an identity; you’re solidified into a certain role. The conflict for Martha, though, is that after being alone for so long she sometimes feels that she’s getting “weird”—i.e., detached and a bit inhuman.

For Joost, it’s the freedom to do whatever he wants and follow his own whims, before he goes back to Holland to start what he knows will be a conventional life. Joost’s backstory—in my mind, not on the page—is that this is his big walkabout before he goes back to Leiden to finish his accounting degree. I decided not to talk too much about the practical aspects of their lives—how they saved up the money to travel, what they plan to do for a living afterward—because I think it’s the one thing that Martha and Joost would not discuss. Those are parallel existences that neither is particularly excited to return to.

Martha had a confidence-shattering experience with her previous boyfriend. And she is horrified when she discovers that Joost may also not be the person she has assumed he is. She views the sexual obsessions of the men she knows as a form of culturally induced P.T.S.D. Do you agree with her?

I think that’s for men to say. Martha is just interpreting what her boyfriend (and the artist they talk about) are telling her, using an analogy she can relate to from her own experience. In other words, I am interpreting what men have told me.

You wait until almost the end of the story to tell us some fairly crucial information about the traumas in Martha’s past. Why did you want to hold off until then?

I generally follow the rule of “information as needed”—where it fits in the flow of the story. Martha hasn’t been thinking about the trauma, which relates to her last and only serious boyfriend, because there’s no pretense between her and Joost that this is going to be a relationship that lasts beyond the weeks they travel together. It’s provisional in its nature. But, when she finds out that her ex and Joost have this thing in common, then it stirs the pot. All her disappointment comes back.

This is your first story in The New Yorker, and your début novel, “A Little Bit Bad,” will be published in May. You’ve been writing reviews and cultural pieces for thirty years. When did you start writing fiction, too?

I have a fairy-tale publishing story! For three decades, from age twenty-five on, I wrote fiction without publishing a single word. There was always a feeling that it wasn’t good enough, plus it was so hard to do the selling part, so painful to keep getting rejected. But I still wrote every day because I loved it so much.

After my time in China and, later, living in Taiwan, I wanted to write about the cultural and personal baggage that people bring to their interactions and how that limits our ability to connect, but how sometimes we manage to break out of our programming and connect anyway. I didn’t want to be looking at Chinese and Taiwanese people through an exoticizing lens; I wanted to explore the space where people meet. “Enough for Now” means a lot to me because it’s a return to that unfinished project. I worked on it for—possibly?—twenty years.

In fiction, I follow E. M. Forster’s motto: “Only connect!” It’s a basic human struggle to figure out how to love instead of fear each other, whether that happens between lovers, or between people from two countries with very different cultures that are supposed to be rivals—at least, according to some greedy people at the top, who benefit from global gamesmanship, to put it politely. How do we get past all these silly ideas about one another and just understand that we’re all human? ♦