Prisoner's Mark

Work Description:

Prison Seal

Beneath iron bars, staying alive is itself an escape.

Synopsis:

The first time Lin Jie was beaten until his head bled, he learned the rules of the cell block:

You could only eat half a bowl of prison food. You had to sleep curled against the wall like a shrimp. And before speaking, you had to say, "Permission to speak."

He thought he wouldn't make it through his three-year sentence, but while rummaging through the trash, he found an old, yellowed photograph.

On the back, a line of dark red, blood-written words leapt out at him:

"Get out alive. Find your mother."

That night, he bribed the head guard with half a bar of soap and earned the care of Old Qin from the infirmary.

Old Qin told him:

"If you want to stay alive, you have to make the prison believe you're still useful."

And so...

In his second month, Lin Jie's seal-carving skills earned the families of every prisoner regular visiting rights.

In his sixth month, a paperweight carved by him appeared on the warden's desk, bearing the words "Integrity and Self-Discipline."

In his ninth month, he carved strange symbols all over the drug dealer A Bing's arm. After that, no one in the prison dared touch A Bing.

In his thirteenth month, Lin Jie hid a sharpened toothbrush in a tube of toothpaste and sawed through the last two bars on the window in a blind spot of the surveillance cameras.

As moonlight streamed through the bars, he felt around and found a note someone had slipped onto the ground:

"The third pine tree up the back hill. Under it is money that can save your mother's life."

This is a hard-hitting novel about the rules of survival in prison.

About how, in the darkest of places, with the smallest of "seals"