LONGWEI KISSED HIS sleeping wife goodbye. Her body lay under a single sheet, sculpted by dawn into a shape he would use one day in a film to convey unavoidable longing.

It was very early and the studio car waited outside in the Chaoyang district of Beijing. The driver was tough-looking and wore a gold link bracelet that seemed too loose to stay on.

There was little traffic, and the city was soon far behind in a cloud of yellow-and-gray smoke. The driver’s clear flask of tea tilted as the car pulled around corners. Longwei did not speak to the driver, but tried to imagine his life from the details that stood out to him.

The flight to Zurich landed early. It was a short runway, so the pilot had to slow the aircraft quickly. Longwei had slept for a few hours and dreamed he was a boy on vacation with his family in Hangzhou. In the dream, lake fishermen drifted home through evening currents, steering their narrow boats under footbridges. The water was soft and bright. There were real memories sewn into the fabric of the dream: Longwei’s father walking ahead on his own, then turning to look at them all from a distance, as though he were a ghost remembering happiness.

They lived then in a hutong alley community, where his father sold vegetables on a corner.

After a short flight to Mallorca from Switzerland, Longwei was met by the senior manager of a private villa where he planned to finish his latest screenplay, Tai Chi Flaming Fist. It was the sequel to his last film, Shao Lin Pirate Monks: Revenge of the Grasshopper.

The manager spoke several languages, but Mandarin was not one of them. Longwei noticed his expensive shirt, strong hands, and other details that suggested the man had once been a soldier.

Once outside the city of Palma, the two-lane road gradually narrowed to a dark strip that wound through the mountains. Villages had been whittled into the rock above, and stone houses dotted hillsides of wild, rough grasses.

Longwei considered Europe a living museum as it had come to terms with its past. His wife loved Paris and they often travelled there together—though after a while, Longwei would miss coffee-flavored tea, red bean buns, and the colorful sweep of ballroomers in Tiantan park. He hadn’t considered Mallorca, until one of the studio heads in Beijing told him about a luxurious villa outside the village of Deia, perfect for writing and solitude.

Over the next few days, Longwei ate in the kitchen with the house-chef and read international newspapers. He swam in the pool, then lay in the shade listening to birds, watching them drop in arcs from tall trees and fly out over the water.

He switched off the air-conditioning in his room, and slept on top of his covers with the windows open.

For almost a week, Longwei did not look at his script, nor make any notes on the story. The staff at the house found him easy to please but couldn’t tell if he was happy. He called his wife at strange hours, and was surprised by late-night burlesque scenes on the German or Dutch television channels.

He had met his wife in Ningbo at a crowded railway station. They were both sixteen. She worked in a factory and her mother and father worked there too, though at mealtimes she would sit with her friends.

One afternoon, while Longwei was exploring the gardens of the villa, he took a steep hillside path down to the bay.

There were many sheep, and they stopped eating to watch him pass. In some tall, dry grasses, he noticed a young lamb. Its mother was licking the wet skin. The lamb had no fur and its legs were shaking. Longwei wandered if eating meat would be considered barbaric by future generations.

There was no one around when he reached the sea. It was rocky but the water was calm. He took off all his clothes and swam naked for the first time since he was a boy. His body looked small and white, and made Longwei think of the pearl earrings his wife kept in a blue velvet case. He wondered if there were fish swimming near that he couldn’t see, or if a current would carry him into deeper water. He pictured his wife on the rocks wearing sunglasses, then heard her voice telling him to come in.

AFTER A WEEK at the villa, the manager showed Longwei the location of two ancient stone lookouts called miradors. He explained that people had once stood guard there, keeping watch for invading fleets. The next day, Longwei visited them on his own. Each mirador was so high on the cliffs, and the wind so strong and incessant, that the silence descending seemed holy, as though one could be cleansed by a violent experience of solitude.

There must have been periods, Longwei told the house-chef over dinner, when for whole generations nothing at all happened, and so the act of keeping watch would have become a sort of ritual meditation.

He imagined how the Mallorcan villagers must have taken turns in these ancient stone parapets, from which hundreds of miles of open water could be swallowed in a single glance. Many would have fallen asleep, especially on windless, star-filled nights.

The chef was interested in what Longwei was saying, and wondered how the stars must have looked before electric light came to the island.

When he cut the fruit for dessert, Longwei described the small mountains of bitter melon, celery, bok choy, and cabbage that used to fill the back of his father’s Shanghai Forever tricycle.

At the end of almost two weeks at the villa, Longwei decided to write something new and leave his unfinished screenplay in the Goyard duffel his wife bought him in Cannes as a late birthday present. The pattern on the bag reminded Longwei of Islamic architecture: the intricate, deliberate repetition without beginning or end, an intelligence beyond human understanding.

Shooting for Tai Chi Flaming Fist was scheduled to begin late autumn in Ningbo, then wrap up in Beijing two months later.

It was a huge budget, and the studio wanted casting decisions as soon as possible, with big stars in the lead roles, and of course Longwei’s usual grand fight scenes to ensure success in the provinces and overseas market.

After almost three weeks in Mallorca, Longwei called his wife in the middle of the night to ask about the weather in Beijing. She felt sorry for her husband, because he was far away and needed her in a way he couldn’t admit. But she had been married to him a long time, and knew that loneliness was part of his creative process.

Longwei eventually confessed to her that Tai Chi Flaming Fist was no longer the film he wanted to make; even the sight of the script on his desk at the villa, filled him with despair and boredom. His wife worried what the studio would say, but Longwei reassured her that it was the beginning of a new way for him as an artist, and that his old films seemed somehow thin to him now and relied too heavily on things he knew people would pay to see, but which had no deeper significance.

Longwei told his wife that the next picture he made would be a sort of comedy, based on the people he had known growing up in the hutong community in Beijing. The action would not come from fist or foot—but from memory, and the struggle to keep hold of our lives.

His wife asked if it would be a love story, reminding Longwei how they found each other as teenagers at the railway station. She asked if he remembered the night markets, and they laughed about sharing single bags of Ningbo fried batter, so their hands might accidentally touch.

It was almost five A.M. when they finished talking. The garden outside Longwei’s room was coming back as night drained. He lay there going over their honeymoon in Hokkaido. The tops of mountains like white fists.

His new film would be like his very first film. The one he made with a handheld camera at the Ningbo night market as a teenager. He would sit down and let the story write itself from start to finish, then send in the script without telling the studio what it meant. There would be an uproar, he knew that: people screaming, bottles of Johnnie Walker Blue Label hurled as men and women lost face with studio heads.

But in time they would see he was right. They would catch up.

There would, of course, be new conditions with a picture like this. The studio might want him to finance a portion personally, until audiences could get used to the new genre.

But Longwei believed so strongly in his vision, that with his wife’s blessing—he was prepared to finance the entire picture himself. This would almost certainly give him final say on the last scene, because, although he was yet to write the script, he knew instinctively, there could be no people in the shot:

Just a tiny hutong home,

with an old spring bed,

a vase of blue flowers,

full moon drifting. . . .