You call this "a story focused on character development rather than plot." I must disagree. It has plenty of plot, if, as Lawrence Block has observed, plot consists of "one damned thing after another." All manner of things happen here. What's missing is the interweaving of events with character motivation, leading to decisions and actions that will drive the events taking place.

You start off well. It's clear that your main character, Craig, is one with whom you yourself do not particularly identify with, and neither will the reader. This is refreshing. Too often main characters tend to be idealized versions of the author, and so contain no warts, flaws or personality disabilities that might make them interesting. He also comes with motivation. His internet lover suddenly stopped communicating with him a month previous, and he is now in a strange city thinking he might find out where she's gone. It's clear early on that this quest is one that hasn't spent a lot time in the planning phase. Craig is from England, his missing penpal lives in China, and without working too hard at it, you show a lot about his attitude simply by having him think of her as "oriental," rather than the currently appropriate "Asian," and he refers to the city in which he finds himself as Peking, rather than the correct Beijing, both of which betray a colonialist mentality that is hard-wired into his DNA. You let us know that he's overweight, sufficiently so that he has reached the stage of making self-deprecating jokes to himself, revealing a self-consciousness that you, again, don't seem to have to work too hard to achieve. So you would appear to have set up some nicely arranged dominoes, awaiting only a tipping point to set things in motion.

It never really happens. While the set-up is good, you falter in your development. Things simply happen, and without much explanation. The core relationship between Craig and Bing-Bing materializes for no other apparent reason than your need to have someone with whom Craig can converse. He follows her, because he has no one else to turn to, but her motivation is opaque. She has no reason that we can see for wanting to help him, so we are left to assume that she consider him a mark. But doing so requires us to do a major portion of your work for you. You haven't given us much reason to assume anything about her. The problem, I suspect, is that you have fallen for the oldest scam in the writing profession. That would be the bucketloads of bad advice contained in the timeworn adage, "Show, don't tell."

If you were a film maker, you'd have no choice: you have a camera and a microphone and while you get to decide camera angles and scene edits, it's all showing. Almost every time a director resorts to telling, as in a voice-over, or worse, flashbacks narrated in the present, you are safe in assuming that he's taken a short-cut, rather than working with his chosen vocabulary: images and sounds. I say occasionally, because there are times when voice overs are not only effective, they are essential: Showtime's Dexter, for example. Usually, they just get in the way.

You're not a film maker. You're a writer and your medium is prose. If a filmmaker can show scorn on a face, there is no need to tell us that the character is scornful. You need to provide with words all those sight and sound cues that give dimension to the cinema experience, and, unlike a film maker, you get to go inside your character's thoughts. It takes more than simply putting a camera and microphone in front of your characters and transcribing what gets recorded. All you've done is show us two people going through motions, doing this, then that, then something else. Showing isn't enough. You have to tell us what's going on. We have no access to Craig's inner life, other than the initial revelation that he's looking for his missing cyber love. The stamp scene, while potentially significant, falls flat because it has no connection to anything else. Had such connects been established, we'd forgive the fact that it appears out of nowhere. As it is, If you removed the scene, what you would be left with would not suffer one bit, a sure red flag that an element is simply inserted for effect, rather than forming an integral part of the plot.

Craig's discovery that the hotel of his quest has been demolished, while visually interesting, likewise feels like just one more thing in a sequence of one more things. It's not that any of them are necessarily wrong; they simply don't feed one to the next in a seamless arc that takes Craig from Point A to Point B, forcing him to make decisions and take actions and work his way through whatever situation you've placed him in. Right now, things simply happen to him. He's a passive observer, seeming to have no particular opinions about any of it. But it is Craig through whose vision we gain access to the story. Bing-Bing's decision to attach herself to him at the end contains no dramatic impact because you haven't provided the emotional context for us that would make the result meaningful. Having gone to the trouble to set Craig up as a potentially unreliable narrator at the beginning, you then simply feed things to us at face value; we end up just being confused.

I suspect your intent is for us to recognize Craig as somewhat pathetic, a working stiff who's foolishly given his money to a stranger who he'll never see again, and who now is getting ready to be fleeced by yet another gold digger. The problem is, there's nothing specific in the text that leads me to that conclusion. I would be equally justified in assuming that Bing Bing is a kind soul at heart, who's taken pity on the foolish Englishman and wants to protect him from further harm. Either conclusion is valid, but neither is contained in the words you've written. They're both examples of me doing your work for you. Ambiguous endings are one thing, and a most desired result when done right. Having multiple interpretations available, allowing the readers to follow the different paths, embellishing their experience of the story with their own experiences, is a way to involve the reader and draw them in. In your case, there are no paths suggested, and so any path might be correct, but none of them will be satisfying.