Jiang Ye was eighteen, with no father, no education, and no one to back him up. His mother ran a little general store in Hefang, and had been coughing for three years without once daring to go to the hospital. He thought he would muddle through life like that: collecting scrap, taking odd jobs, and saving enough to replace the roof that leaked whenever it rained. Then one night, the people from North City stormed into South City. Tie Zhu brought forty or fifty men across the line and smashed his mother’s shop to pieces. Jiang Ye picked up a brick and hurled it at them. That one brick hurled him into South City’s underworld. Huang Zhigang said, “This kid’s got guts. Work for me.” Brother Ma said, “You’re an interesting one.” Zhao Kun said, “A brat of eighteen can’t turn the world upside down.” They all underestimated him. South City was poor, run-down, and rotten to the core, an old place. But its people refused to accept their fate. Jiang Ye started out as a leg-breaker collecting debts and climbed step by step to the top. Brothers, women, turf, betrayal: he took everything he could and lost everything he had to. He was no hero, and no good man. He was just a wild child born on the streets of South City, living to give his mother a better life and, along the way, show everyone who had trampled him that the people of South City were not to be messed with.
