Northeast Memories: From Laid-Off Worker to a Legend of the Underworld

In 2000, in Tiexi District, Shenyang, Northeast China, factory chimneys belched out their last plumes of smoke into a blizzard. Zhao Weidong clutched his severance pay slip and watched the iron gates of the smelter being welded shut. He had no idea he would become the notorious leader of the Tiexi Gang, a man everyone loved to hate. He broke a foreman’s bones while fighting for his coworkers’ unpaid wages, then took up a rusty scraper in the steamy bathhouse of the detention center. He used three truckloads of scrap steel to beat back the Station Front Gang’s machetes, and made his first fortune selling masks during the SARS outbreak. By the time PHS phones were ringing all over the streets in 2005, he had planted his flags across construction sites in the Hunnan New District, armed with the demolition crew’s pickaxes and the dance halls’ gambling tables. But when his wife, Li Hongmei, hid a threatening letter in their daughter’s schoolbag, he realized that bloodstained money couldn’t warm the cracks in a freezing window. The night his childhood friend Wang Tiejun ran off with the gambling money, their footprints punched black holes into the ice on the Hun River Bridge. When developer Mr. Liu handed him a partnership contract, the calculation in his eyes was more choking than the coal smoke in a building marked for demolition. From pagers to surveillance cameras, from negotiations over coal stoves in unfinished buildings to the family’s final photo on a Sanya beach, Zhao Weidong climbed the cracks of Northeast China’s economic transformation, only to fall into the net Deputy Director Zhang had laid in the autumn of 2010. On the day of the trial, Wang Tiejun’s testimony struck like that old scraper, piercing with precision the lies Zhao had spun over ten years in the underworld. The old factories in Tiexi District have long since been demolished and replaced with apartment blocks. Only the bloody handprint on the bathhouse wall remains as a reminder: once you set foot on certain paths, there’s no going back, even if all you wanted at first was to give your family cotton shoes that wouldn’t let the winter cold through.