One day, during my life as a foreigner in London, I received a letter from the police: "We have carefully reviewed your visa application. We regret to inform you that you cannot be granted leave to remain." I read that letter another 10 times. I could understand every word, apart from the most important bit of all: "leave to remain". Must I leave, or could I remain?

As it turned out, I had to leave. Depressed, I packed and left the UK. Carrying the heavy English clouds in my heart, I returned to dusty and noisy Beijing and tried to finish my book. The whole city was a building site; the flat where I was writing a novel about London, about the famous English poppies and climbing roses, and about the British shyness of speaking about love, was half-built. I looked out of the window - armies of construction workers were building skyscrapers, in preparation for the great 2008 Beijing Olympics. This world was completely different, almost the opposite of the world where I held an alien passport. Unsettled, waiting for my UK visa, I stopped writing the novel and made a documentary film about the construction workers instead, The Concrete Revolution. After filming, in the evening, friends tried to take me to eat some famous western food in Long Peace Street. "What kind of famous western food?" I asked. They answered: "It is fish and chips, English style, very expensive. We have to book the table first." That night, I ate a plate of tofu.

I stayed in Beijing in order to "leave to remain". Every day I consumed dumplings and tofu, I watched skyscrapers rising higher and higher, I worshipped the half-built Olympic centre and took photos of a vast empty space where the new American embassy was to be built in east Beijing. Everybody was busy, everyone was rushing, buses and trucks were running in every direction. Meanwhile, I tried to cool my blood in the red dust, under the famous Beijing poplar trees.

Months later, I returned to the west with brand new visas and a finished manuscript, but this time I got stuck in Dublin airport. My new UK visa didn't work there, neither did my Europe visa. I was detained, and the Irish police wanted to send me back to China. Why? How could I not know that Ireland was an independent country? The airport official started to lecture me on the IRA. Why should a UK visa be valid here, he asked. Ireland is part of the EU, but a migrant has to be a specialist, it seems: Ireland is not part of the Schengen zone. So none of my shining visas worked.

In the end, the Dublin officials were kind; they didn't send me back to China, they put me on a plane to London. Fastened in my seatbelt back in the sky, I proceeded to re-educate myself. But the flight was too short to learn much about the IRA. In no time, I arrived in the land of the Queen. Have a good night, Queen, you must be sleeping in some Windsor Castle or Beckenham Palace, I whispered to myself, in reasonable English. But dearest Queen, how uncomfortable it must be for you to have a Chinese communist desperately trying to enter your country, eager to share a cup of tea, and perhaps even some afternoon cake.

Then one lucky day, I was granted a short-term visa for France. I was very happy: the French embassy website said that I could go to Tahiti or the Marquesas Islands with the same visa. At the time I was planning a novel set in the Pacific Ocean. I decided I was not going to live in Paris. I would go to French Polynesia, or even Haiti. I would stay on the islands and drink coconut milk while polishing my novels. It didn't matter where I ended up, as long as I didn't have to beg for another visa. The only things I needed to change were the names of the vegetation in my book.

Day to day, I live in this "leave to remain" state, working on my new novels set in all kinds of foreign lands. I even shot a feature film with a digital camera because my "leave to remain" bag is too small to carry anything apart from a diary, a pen, a novel, a laptop, a tooth-brush and a passport. Whatever country I go to, I stay in "leave to remain" mode. In order for those sometimes melancholy, sometimes happy moments to remain in my memory, each time, I choose to leave.

· Xiaolu Guo's novels include A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, and Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth