From Laojie, Kokang, to the Chinese border: ten kilometers as the crow flies.
It took me three years.
In 2020, I was lured to Kokang in northern Myanmar by a job ad promising “20,000 yuan a month” and locked inside the Wohu Villa scam compound.
In those three years, I saw people locked in water dungeons, having their fingers chopped off, and beaten to death with iron rods. Some jumped from the seventh floor. Others were sold on three times.
On October 20, 2023, the compound gates opened. The road home was only ten kilometers long, but there were five armed checkpoints along the way, each one a matter of life and death.
This isn’t a novel. It’s what tens of thousands of Chinese people have really experienced.
