Jiudong Outside the Road

In the twelfth lunar month of 1997, Shen Qing was released from prison. Twenty-seven years old, with nothing. Four years ago, I went in to take the blame for someone else. When I came out, my wife was with someone else, and I didn't know if the child was my own. The enemy became a prominent figure in the street. He didn't make a fuss. It was just that morning, sitting on the broken sofa in the rental house, waiting for his ex-wife to give him a bowl of noodles. The sun shone on his face, and no one knew what this silent man was thinking. Everyone on the road knows what happened next - Shen Qing spent eight years starting from a shantytown in Daowai District and working his way to the top of the city's power. He is thoughtful and ruthless, but he never bullies ordinary people. He is only cruel to those who are equally cruel. Some people say that he is the last Jianghu person in the Northeast, adhering to those rules that have long been worthless. Some people say that he is the most undesirable anomaly in this era where people laugh at poverty but not at prostitution. Some people also say that every step he took was forced out of him. Only Shen Qing himself knew that that winter, when he walked out of prison and stood in the wind of the twelfth lunar month, he was not thinking about being a big brother at all. He just wants to live. This is a story about winter, about human nature, and about the 1990s that we can never go back to. One million words describe the passion and desolation in the black land of Northeast China.