Past Events in the Northeast: from Laid-Off Workers to Being Famous in the World

In 2000, in Tiexi District, Shenyang, Northeast China, chimneys exhaled the last puff of smoke amid a blizzard. When Zhao Weidong clutched his laid-off salary slip and watched the iron gate of the smelter being welded to death, he never thought that he would become the leader of the "Tiexi Gang" that everyone wanted to beat. He asked for wages for his fellow workers and disabled the foreman, took over the rusty scraper in the steam bath of the detention center, used three loads of scrap steel to level the machete of the "Zhanqian Gang", and made his first pot of gold by reselling masks during SARS. When PHS became popular on the streets in 2005, he had already planted his flag on the construction sites of Hunnan New District by relying on the pickaxes of the demolition team and gambling in discotheques. But when his wife Li Hongmei hid the threatening letter in his daughter's schoolbag, he discovered that blood-stained money could not warm the cracked windows. On the night when Xiao Wang Tiejun ran away with his gambling money, black holes were dug out of the ice of the Hunhe River Bridge by the two people's footprints; when the developer, Boss Liu, handed over the cooperation contract, the calculation in his eyes was more choking than the soot in the demolished building. From BP machines to surveillance cameras, from coal stove negotiations in unfinished buildings to the last family photo on Sanya beach, Zhao Weidong climbed up through the cracks in Northeast China's transformation period, but fell into the skynet laid out by Deputy Director Zhang in the autumn of 2010. On the day of the trial, Wang Tiejun's testimony was like that scraper, accurately piercing through the lies he had weaved for ten years. The old factories in Tiexi District have long been demolished and turned into commercial buildings. Only the bloody handprints on the wall of the bathhouse still remind you: once you step on some roads, you can never look back - even if you just want your family to wear cotton shoes that won't freeze your feet in the winter.