Northeast China: Knives, Guns, and Cannons, Li Zhengguang

Winter, 1978. Daowai District, Harbin. Fifteen-year-old Li Zhengguang smashed his piggy bank in front of his father’s funeral shrine and bought the first pack of Yingchun cigarettes of his life. He had no idea that this pack would set his next forty years ablaze with bloodshed. From bricks in the courtyard of a state-owned factory’s housing compound to gunshots on the frozen Songhua River; from border markets selling knockoff dresses to demolition sites roaring with bulldozers. Li Zhengguang climbed step by step through the growing pains of Northeast China, becoming a legend and a nightmare for an entire generation in the space between black and white. He had brothers. When Lao Tie took a knife for him, he shouted, “Brother Guang, run!” The night the woman he loved got married, he buried his first love beneath the riverbank. He believed in loyalty, until he discovered that the rules of the underworld could never compete with the iron laws of the times. When the bells of the new century rang, the glories and sins of the past came due. Standing atop the tallest building he had ever built, Li Zhengguang looked out over a city both familiar and strange, and finally understood: Every gift fate bestows has already been assigned a price amid the currents of the age. This is a Northeast Chinese epic of crime and punishment, loyalty and profit. It is one man’s lifelong attempt to answer a question: When the underworld reaches its end, what is left besides snow?