The Years I Wandered the Jianghu

The day I went to the city with the 3,000 yuan the whole village had scraped together to seek help from my cousin, I caught him kneeling and kowtowing in his rented room, calling a burly man with a fierce face “Boss.”

My first lesson in society: I thought my cousin was a respectable man who'd made it in the city. Turns out he was a thug who acted like a dog for others, and he wanted me to serve them tea and water too?

I thought the city meant factory assembly lines and shared dormitories, a stable life I could earn with my own hands.

But what I found was scheming, betrayal, steel pipes, and machetes. It was the humiliation of being ground into the dirt, a swamp where I had to be careful even how I breathed.

My cousin said, “This place eats people. You either become a wolf, or meat for the wolves.”

I remembered that.

From fistfights on the assembly line to blades flashing in nightclubs; from scraping by in an urban village to covert battles in the business district; from a country boy anyone could push around to “Brother Ye,” a name that struck fear into people's hearts.

All I wanted was to earn honest money and build a new house for my parents back home. But this city drove me, step by step, into the very thing they feared most.

These are my years in the underworld, the story of a country boy who fought his way to survival with blood and his life in the jungle of concrete and steel.