Kowloon Walled City, 1984.
Nineteen-year-old Chen Mancang was jolted awake by a beating in a back alley. Three days earlier, he had delivered a shipment for his boss. The goods arrived, but the money was gone. Two hundred thousand yuan, vanished without a trace.
His boss said, “You’ve followed me for three years, and you’re worth only two hundred thousand?”
He stubbed out his cigarette on Mancang’s trouser leg and told his men to keep hitting him. By the third blow, Mancang shouted a word he had never said in his life.
After that, he was no longer the same Chen Mancang.
He had to get the money back and stay alive. And there was a woman waiting for him to come home for dinner in a tin-roofed shack on a rooftop.
But the deeper he dug, the more he learned: the thieves weren’t outsiders, but his own brothers; and the one taking the biggest cut wasn’t some small-time thug, but the boss in charge. The waters ran deep enough to drown a man.
People urged him to let it go, saying he had nothing to lose and shouldn’t make trouble.
He said, “Even a worthless life is still a life.”
