When I glance back over the notes from my recent interview with expatriate fiction writer Roy Kesey in Beijing, I notice the things I’ve written in a section devoted to his early years in particular: Parents devout Christians. Father college administrator who taught him to play the stock market when he was “ten or so.” Roy deferred paying tuition to Georgetown to “work the penny stocks” and lost it during the Black Monday crash of 1987. Had to leave Georgetown. Applied for and won scholarship to Oxford University. Studied philosophy and literature.

Each factoid is rich with information, yet it is their proximity to one another—all these slightly paradoxical bits neatly aligned in a list—that makes them startling. In a scattershot interview that lasts more than an hour, Kesey never offers me a simple or a bland explanation, never allows my mind to begin to wander, never gives me a moment to jot down a general observation when a specific story is at its root. His life, like his fiction, reminds me of the murals of Zak Smith or the “combines” of Robert Rauschenberg: Its majesty derives from the confluence of the mini-units, the way the fascinating details cohere and form a whole that you can see without having to squint.

After college, the writer whose “Dispatches” from Beijing are one of the bright spots on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and who last year signed a four-book deal with Dzanc Books—the first of which, the story collection All Over, was published last October—spent time teaching at universities in France and Peru before accompanying his Peruvian wife to China. “Juan Morillo is a Peruvian writer I really respect,” Kesey says. “He’s been in Beijing for the last thirty-two years.” Kesey, together with his wife, Lu (a diplomat), and two kids, have been here for five.

Kesey answers my questions while enjoying an espresso at Beijing’s Bookworm Café, a setting that’s part-library, part-restaurant, part-performance space, part-bookstore. There are black tables, black faux-wicker chairs, spinning ceiling fans, cabinet-sized Chinese air conditioners in the corners, bookshelves lining the walls, and a mixture of bee-bop, electronica, and rock emanating at low volume from the sound system. I ask him about other Latin American writers he enjoys. “I’m a big Borges fan,” he says, “but I really love [Julio] Cortázar. He’s Argentinean, sort of a half-generation after Borges.”

Until recently, Kesey, Morillo, and others have been atypical members of Beijing’s expat writing scene. The majority of English language books published by Western writers living in China have been of the nonfiction variety. Beijing, despite its cheap food and beer—two dollars worth of Chinese yuan will buy you a nice Chinese meal or a twelve-pack of Tsingtao beer—has yet to become the Paris of the 21st century. In the expatriate cafés that radiate from the northeast hub marked loosely by the embassies and the Sanlitun strip of Western bars—places like Moré (Spanish tapas), Purple Haze (Thai menu, largely foreign clientele) and the Bookworm (French menu café)—you’ll find plenty of writers, but most of them are stringing for the local English language periodicals or posted in Beijing for short stints by one of the larger English language dailies in England or the U.S.

The journalists tend to work hard to master Mandarin—the official language of the People’s Republic of China—but move away once they become successful. For example, in 2004 Ian Johnson published Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China (Pantheon) after winning a Pulitzer for his China coverage while working for the Wall Street Journal in 2001, but he’s since been shifted to the newspaper’s Berlin bureau. Similarly, Peter Hessler won acclaim for his books Rivertown: Two Years on the Yangtze (HarperCollins, 2001) and Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present (HarperCollins, 2006) and landed a gig to write for the New Yorker about China but has since moved to Colorado.

Meanwhile, an expat fiction scene is beginning to emerge in Beijing. Kesey, whose writings range from humorous realism, a la George Saunders in Shanghai, to surrealist postmodern displacement—one of his stories, “Martin,” is the faux-report of a patient “pretending” to be a doctor “treating” an actual guitar string that she “thinks” is a man who thinks he is a guitar string—recently ran a fiction writers workshop at the Bookworm. Jenny Niven, the twenty-six-year-old Glaswegian literary events coordinator at the Bookworm (the café also includes a thirteen-thousand-volume, four-thousand-member English-language lending library), keeps a parade of visiting and local writers marching through its doors for weekly readings. From March 6 to March 21, the café hosted a full-on literary festival: two weeks of panel discussions, workshops, and book signings by China-centric novelists Adam Williams and Catherine Sampson, poets Justin Hill and Edward Ragg, translator Eric Ambrahamsen, journalists Rob Gifford and Melinda Liu, and business writers Tim Clissold and James McGregor, among others.

I ask Kesey if there is much exchange between members of the Beijing expat literary scene and Chinese writers. “I think it’s divided, but the literary oasis where both sides meet is here,” he says with a nod around us at the Bookworm. Kesey advises me to meet with a translator friend of his, and a week later, I have tea with Abrahamsen, one of three Mandarin-to-English translators who run Paper-Republic.org, a Web site featuring Chinese fiction writers in translation. According to Abrahamsen, there is increasing overlap between the Chinese and Western creative writing communities. Many Chinese writers, put off by censorship and the Byzantine Chinese publishing system that pays no royalties to authors, are hoping to publish directly with a Western press, skipping Chinese publication entirely, he says.

Zhang Lijia is one example of this trend. A fashionable and opinionated woman who favors two-tone glasses and bright dresses, Zhang meets me for lunch in an Italian café a couple blocks north of the Bookworm, near the apartment where she lives with her two children. Zhang has parlayed her talent, tenacity, and English language skills into a recent book contract in the U.S. Her memoir, Socialism is Great! A Worker’s Memoir of the New China, was recently published by Atlas Books, but Zhang still remembers the days when her assertiveness and smart outfits caused her problems.

In 1980, at the age of sixteen, under the auspices of a government program that encouraged parents to retire early and hand their factory positions to their children, Zhang accepted her mother’s pincers, pliers, and wrench and joined the ten thousand other workers at the Chenguang missile factory in Nanjing. “When I was in the factory, poems and short stories were a way to escape my boredom. Poetry groups would meet in parks and people’s homes. The Misty Poets appealed to me because they were not allowed, and because they wrote personal poems that talked about love and were filled with rich imagery,” she says, referring to the group of poets—Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, Duo Duo, Yang Lian, and others—who reacted against the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

Zhang, who is forty-two, is friends with a number of well-known Chinese writers from her generation, but she has chosen to concentrate on writing in English. In 1988, she met her former husband, Calum MacLeod, an English investment consultant and journalist, and moved to England. She returned to China in 1993 and, fluent in English, began a career in journalism. She assisted fellow journalist Ian Johnson for a time, then embarked on her own career, eventually writing features for Newsweek, the Washington Times, South China Morning Post, and others. Together with her husband, she edited China Remembers (Oxford University Press, 1999), a collection of interviews with Chinese rank-and-file citizens—a Korean War veteran, a famine survivor, a student from the Tiananmen protests, and others—who played roles in recent history and also gave birth to two children.

After September 11, Zhang says magazines cut back on staff, so she returned to England to study. “I never had a proper degree, and I always felt sorry for myself,” she says. While earning her MA in creative and life writing at the Goldsmiths College, University of London, Zhang completed a first draft of her memoir and began her novel, Lotus, about a prostitute from Nanjing, which is currently making the rounds of Beijing’s English-language book editors. “Women’s issues are one of the things that always interests me,” she says. “I’m hoping to write a story about the kidnapping of women [who are then sold to husbands in remote provinces]. It’s so modern here, and yet these medieval practices still go on.”

Despite her decision to write in English, Zhang believes there is more freedom for Chinese writers today. “There are less concerns now than ten or twenty years ago,” she says. “For example, China Remembers was stopped at customs. Our book may be confiscated, may be burned, but I will be fine.”

With success stories like Kesey’s and Zhang’s and the cost of a Chinese meal still hovering around two dollars, it’s a good bet that the community of English language fiction writers will continue to climb.