In 2010, I fell thirteen points short of passing the college entrance exam.
My dad went around to four places and borrowed 6,000 yuan for me to retake it. I said it wasn't worth it and turned it down. Then I pulled 500 yuan from my parents' old wardrobe and got on a bus heading south.
On my first day in Guangdong, my money was stolen. That first night, I sat in the bus station waiting room. Early the next morning, I went through the trash. Thirty-seven bottles and a bundle of wet cardboard. The buyer said the weight had to be adjusted: what should have been 5.9 yuan became 4.1.
A girl who bought scrap never even looked up. "Has the cardboard been left out to dry?"
The money in this business isn't in the hard labor. It comes down to two things: information and the scales. The same load can be called copper, aluminum, or mixed scrap, and the price can differ threefold. Aluminum plated with copper gives itself away after a couple of strokes with sandpaper. A box of cutting bits sold as scrap iron made a short, dull sound when tapped. They were tungsten carbide. I resold them for 47,000 yuan.
I took losses, too. Once, I got it badly wrong and lost 470,000 yuan. My own 210,000 was wiped out. Uncle Sangui, who had brought me into the business, put up the 120,000 yuan he'd saved over more than a decade. That money had been set aside for his son, who had gone missing twenty-seven years earlier. He had never stopped looking for him.
Twelve years later, people called me the "King of Garbage." I had more than five thousand people working under me, and we handled over 300,000 tons a year.
I turned a business that paid by the pound into one that earned billions.
