Tales of Eastern Kyoto: My Years in the Underworld

What is the underworld? When I was sixteen, I thought it was the machetes in the hands of gangsters, brotherhood, and blood spilling five paces after a single command. Later, I learned the truth: the underworld is a chessboard. Whether you're a piece or a player isn't up to you. The underworld is a place where killing someone should be simple, but most of the time, you don't even have the right to kill. In the county town of Jidong at the turn of the millennium, Chen Haonan on VCDs taught a generation what it meant to be a gangster. And I, Chen Shi, spent ten whole years learning what it meant to pay the price. This isn't a story about rising from the bottom. It's about how our generation was swallowed and crushed by the underworld, then dragged ourselves back to our feet, gritting our teeth.