Reborn: From the Assembly Line to Mixed Martial Arts

After spending six years on the assembly line at an electronics factory in Dongguan, tightening screws, Chen Hu is reborn at sixteen. In his previous life, he tightened three thousand screws every day until his knuckles became deformed and his lower back gave out. By twenty-seven, he had the body of a sixty-year-old. His supervisor framed him for theft, his coworkers stabbed him in the back, and he didn’t even get to see his father one last time properly. He had only seven hundred yuan in his pocket, not even enough to buy a coffin. He had become a rusty screw, something anyone could casually throw away. In this life, the television is showing Li Jingliang’s UFC debut in 2012. Standing beneath the old locust tree in his family’s courtyard, he looks at his sixteen-year-old hands: no calluses, no deformities, young and rough, full of strength. He makes a decision. Starting out at a run-down martial arts school in Shenqiu County, Henan, he begins with the basics: straight punches and low kicks. Step by step, punch by punch, he will fight back for all the dignity that was trampled into the mud in his previous life.