Volume One Chapter 1: Original Sin

A few days ago, when I got out, I didn’t notify anyone.

Yet word still got around among my old brothers on the streets, and they all contacted me one after another.

Some are still running hotels in Dongguan, others are in Shenzhen handling import and export trades.

It’s no exaggeration to say that, if I so much as nodded, luxury cars and beautiful women would be delivered to my door at any moment.

With a single word, I could be that man of influence once again, commanding crowds with a wave of my hand.

But I refused every offer.

I didn’t even reach out to the brothers who once followed me.

All these years inside, I had plenty of time to think.

The world of the underworld is behind me now. What I want is a plain, uneventful life for the rest of my days.

If I must sum up my years in that world in a single passage, the first thing that comes to mind is a poem from Tsui Hark’s film “Swordsman.”

I dedicate this poem to myself, and to all of you, in the hope it might serve as a warning. The underworld is nothing but an illusion, a fleeting mirage.

Heroes rise amid the storm; once you step into the underworld, the years rush past.
Empires and ambitions are but idle talk, life itself a drunken haze.
Sword in hand, galloping through ghostly rains, bones piled like mountains, birds startled to flight.
Worldly affairs surge like tides, people flow like water, and one can only lament how few return from the underworld.
How few ever return…

Like so many outlaws in the stories, I wasn’t born into wealth. On the contrary, I was born in an impoverished village deep in the southern mountains.

When I was young, my grandfather passed early, and our family was poor. My mother, pregnant with me, ate nothing but plain porridge and sweet potatoes every day.

When we finally had a chance to eat pork, my father, my mother, my brother, and my grandmother would split a single piece between them.

Because of this, my mother was emaciated when she gave birth to me. Even the midwife berated my father harshly.

That very night, I came into this world—and my mother left it forever.

This has always been a knot in my heart, making me believe for a long time that my birth was a sin.

Only later did I gradually realize that it wasn’t me who caused my mother’s death—but poverty.

Poverty is the original sin.

My father named me Chen Hui. When I was a child, I thought it was a heroic name, because from martial arts novels, I’d learned the phrase “a sword’s resolve turned to ashes.”

But later, my father told me he’d given me that name because, when he couldn’t afford a proper burial for my mother, all he could do was cremate her—turning her to ashes.

I will never forget what my father said:

“A human life can be so cheap—scattered as a handful of ashes into the river, and that’s it, that’s all there is to it…”

A few years after my mother died, my father, trying to support my brother and me, decided to take my brother and head south to Dongguan to find work.

At the time, Dongguan was known as the world’s factory. The economic boom in every industry even gave the city hopes of surpassing Shenzhen.

Many of us southerners followed the trend and migrated south.

But there were too many people and too few jobs. Most people discovered, upon arrival, that they couldn’t get into the factories—not even for the dirtiest and hardest menial jobs, which hundreds would fight for just a handful of slots.

This led to a serious population overflow.

Many people spent all their savings just on travel costs for the journey south.

They all came with dreams of changing their fates, and they were unwilling to give up, but with no money left and no dignity, they couldn’t return home.

Factories wouldn’t take them, and security patrols chased them off with steel pipes.

No food, nowhere to sleep.

Bridge underpasses and back alleys became their shelters.

Over time, groups of three and five banded together, and theft, pickpocketing, kidnapping, scams, and robbery became their means of survival.

So, beneath the mighty waves of reform and opening up, Dongguan was, on the inside, a smoky, chaotic mess.

I was lucky. My first trip to Dongguan wasn’t until the late 1990s.

By then, with the Hong Kong handover in 1997, major investors poured in, and factories sprang up everywhere. Getting a job wasn’t a big issue anymore.

Yet with the rapid, almost deformed growth of every industry, the shadow over Dongguan only thickened…

Why did I head south?

After my father and brother left, there were no adult men left in our family.

In those days, a household without a man—well, even dogs would bark at you, let alone people.

And after my mother’s death, I became the one everyone in the village despised and blamed for her passing, the cursed child.

Both the young and the old bullied me.

My grandmother was old and couldn’t stand up for me, so I had to learn early to defend myself.

If they bullied me, I’d fight them. If there were too many, I’d find the ringleader and beat him senseless. If I couldn’t win, I’d bite.

On the day I came of age, according to our local customs, something happened.

Those kids who bullied me stole the newly popular electric-roasted duck that my grandmother had braved the rain to buy me from the town with the money she’d saved for ages.

It was my first time tasting roast duck. My grandmother had scrimped and saved for so long, and I’d waited so long for it.

I could have endured all of that.

What I couldn’t endure was seeing my elderly grandmother, her umbrella torn, covered in mud from a fall, sitting in the hall, rubbing her back and weeping as she spoke.

That pushed me over the edge.

I grabbed the hatchet from home and rushed into the pouring rain—headed straight for the ringleader’s house.

There were four or five adults at his house, but they couldn’t stop me.

I brandished the hatchet, forced them aside, and brought it down on the head of the boy who was gnawing on my roast duck.

The boy wet himself on the spot, clutching his bloodied head and howling.

Maybe it was just my nature, but seeing the blood on his face, I didn’t feel the slightest bit afraid. I snatched the roast duck from his hands and stuffed it into my mouth, chewing in huge bites.

It was the best roast duck I’ve ever tasted—even though it was spattered with blood. But damn, it was delicious.

Then a crowd knocked me down.

Because of this incident, my father returned with my brother.

He wouldn’t let me explain, dragging me to that boy’s house and forcing me to kowtow.

I clenched my teeth and refused to kneel, so my father beat me with a stick.

He broke two bamboo sticks as thick as three fingers. If my brother hadn’t held him back, I might have been beaten to death.

But I don’t regret it—I don’t think I was wrong.

If weakness means you deserve to be bullied, if poverty means you deserve to be bullied, then I’d rather be beaten to death by my father.

My only regret was not checking the side of the hatchet I used—the blow landed with the back, not the blade.

Later, my father had to spend a large sum to resolve the matter.

He arranged for my grandmother to stay with relatives in town, and took my brother and me south to Dongguan.

On the green trains of the 1990s, the corridors were packed—stuffy, hot, and reeking.

But looking out the window at the high-rises I’d never seen before, I couldn’t help but feel excited.

I kept counting the floors of the buildings, drawing laughter from the passengers around us.

My father didn’t care, just kept a stern face and reminded us to clutch our belongings to our chests at night and not to fall into deep sleep.

I didn’t understand why.

My brother explained that the first time he and my father went to Dongguan, the train stopped at a small town late at night. A gang of armed bandits boarded, waving knives and homemade guns, and robbed everyone.

They moved with military precision, finished the job, and got off—no one dared resist.

They meant business, too—several passengers who tried to fight back were stabbed right there.

If my father hadn’t hidden most of their money in his underwear, they would have been left begging when they reached Dongguan.

Fortunately, after two nationwide crackdowns, violent gangs like that had disappeared.

But late at night, I still noticed a few shady figures weaving through the train cars, targeting sleeping passengers carrying bags.

One of them even kept brushing up against a fashionable woman traveling alone.

She clearly noticed, but sat stiffly, saying nothing.

My brother saw it too, but gripped my hand tightly, telling me not to get involved.

He said, if there are pickpockets on this train, there are far more than just the few in our car.

If that woman got groped a few times, it wasn’t the worst that could happen.

A few years ago, a gang of pickpockets was caught in the act. They grouped together, took control of two train cars, and, in front of everyone, dragged a young woman into the restroom.

For a whole hour, the car was filled with her heart-wrenching cries.

When the train stopped at the next station, all the pickpockets trying to blend into the crowd were rounded up by the local police and executed.

But the girl never came out of that restroom alive…