I walk the alleyways of an urban village in Beijing, gloomy in a late-afternoon thunderstorm. My skin is sticky in the moist air. I recently turned thirty-two, and I’ve been drifting around the country for sixteen years, sixteen dreamlike years that began in China’s land of milk and honey in the early 2000s, the southern border city of Shenzhen. A growing city where tropical steam would evaporate from the asphalt roads and fill my trouser legs, soaking me through to my skin. The heat would snatch at every strand of my hair, and remembering it now pulls me against the current of time, hauls me back to the roaring years of Shenzhen, to my coming of age, the summer I turned fifteen.

It was a few weeks after the end of the SARS pandemic in 2003. My family paid 1,000 yuan to my vocational-school teacher to shove me and my classmates into a train to Shenzhen. It was a thirty-hour ride from my village, and there were so many people heading south to look for work that it was impossible to find standing room, let alone a seat. Eventually I found a spot in a vestibule, which felt like the intestine of the train, and squatted my way to Shenzhen. By the second half of the night I was so exhausted that I could no longer keep my eyes open. But as soon as I dozed off, the thunderous noise from the train tracks would wake me again. My head felt like it was on the verge of exploding, as if it would split in half at any moment. Passing out and waking up, passing out and waking up again – this was how I survived the ride to the South, trapped between strangers’ shoulders and legs, suitcases and duffel bags.

The train stopped in Huizhou, the farthest we could go without a border pass. I got off the train, exited the station through its front gate, and gazed at the low mountains and fluffy clouds.

I can still remember the thrill and brightness of that moment. It was the first time in my life that I’d seen such a huge expanse of mountains and tall buildings. It all looked even more beautiful and lucid than what I had seen in movies. It was also the first time in my life that I’d been surrounded by so many people, but that realization wouldn’t sink in until a few days later, when I entered my first factory.

I learned many life lessons in the South – the first came shortly after my classmates and I walked the full length of the station plaza, while our teacher looked for an intercity bus to Shenzhen. A voice came from a nearby speaker: ‘Ten yuan per passenger from Huizhou to Henggang [a town in Shenzhen], only ten yuan per passenger.’ Our teacher thought it was a good deal and shoved all of us into the bus. It took only ten minutes for everything to go terribly wrong. Two men who posed as conductors began to collect ticket fares from the back of the bus. ‘You need to pay fifty,’ they told the first woman, who had taken out a ten-yuan bill, ‘or we’ll drop you off in the middle of nowhere. Come on, even an idiot knows that ten yuan can’t get you anywhere. If you want to go to Henggang, get a fifty ready.’

Nobody was prepared for this: we had become like characters in a TV show, scammed and trapped on an illegal bus. The men’s brazen attitude seemed to have an effect, and the woman decided it would be best to pay the fifty without resisting. The next passenger was a man in a dress shirt – perhaps he’d been in situations like this before. He chose his words carefully. ‘But you said it was ten yuan when we boarded the bus. Please let me out. I don’t need to go all the way.’ The taller fake conductor turned to him. ‘You’re ready to leave? Well, you can fuck off after you pay,’ he said, scornfully. ‘Let me ask you, is the problem that you don’t want to pay us a single dime? Is that right?’ Before the man could respond, the other fake conductor lost his patience. He raised his arm and slapped the man across the face. ‘You piece of shit, you thought there’s nothing we could do, eh?’ he roared. ‘Listen, if you want to get off this bus alive, pay us the goddamn money.’ He turned toward the front of the bus and hollered, ‘Everybody listen up! Get your fifty ready before we have to ask for it. Don’t make us do anything we don’t want to do.’

A few other passengers paid them, one after another. I thought I was doomed. My dad had given my teacher just about every penny he had earned from the last harvest, and all he had saved for me was 200 yuan. The two fake conductors had stopped in front of one of my classmates, who said, timidly, ‘I don’t have any money. I’ve given everything to my teacher. Could you please go ask him?’ They moved on from my classmate and stared at the young guy next to him, who also looked like a student. His response was the same: ‘I don’t have any money either. Go ask my teacher, he has everything.’ Back then, many people had opened new vocational schools. Boasting that they could teach young people useful skills and find them factory jobs, they made poor rural families like mine pay them a ransom just to bring their children to the South.

My teacher and another vocational-school teacher immediately understood what they needed to do. They made eye contact, stood up and yelled, ‘Stop the bus right now! Let us go!’ Their two dozen students also stood and joined them. Now it was the con men’s turn to worry about what they should do. They were clearly outnumbered, so the driver had no choice but to stop. We got off. One passenger pulled the key out of the ignition and suggested we call the police. He told the others to keep an eye on the two con men and not to let them get away. Back then it was rare for people to own mobile phones, so my teacher volunteered to use his to call the police. Someone who had already paid his fifty broke a thick branch from a camphor tree standing by the highway, ready to use force to get his money back.

The police picked up our call, but nobody knew where we were. As we tried to describe our location, the bus suddenly started up and sped away, leaving behind a trail of fumes. Some of the passengers sighed in dismay. One said, ‘They must have had a backup key. Well, it sure looks like I’m not getting my fifty back now.’ ‘How about we try to get out of here?’ another said. ‘We don’t know nothing about this place. What if they come back with more men before the police arrive?’ My teacher stopped another bus that was heading toward Henggang. Before we got on board, he carefully asked the conductor how much the tickets would be, and told her that we all had just been scammed. ‘Fifteen per person. We’re legal. Why did you listen to their nonsense?’ She spoke in Cantonese-accented Mandarin and smiled – she must have understood what had happened to us. With that, we boarded the new bus and stood the entire way to Henggang. I stared out the window in a daze, as if I had been rescued from catastrophe. Under the dazzling sun, rice and plantain silently grew in the fields, the last relics of Shenzhen’s rustic past.

My teacher brought me and my classmates to a cheap hostel. Everyone was given a wooden bunk without even a mattress. Perhaps all the guests this place had ever hosted were vocational-school students needing a temporary stay. We took out the blankets we had brought with us from home and lay down on the wood. We were so thoroughly exhausted that a few of my classmates immediately fell asleep.

I was in the same room as a guy from Lankao, the county next to my village. Neither of us had ever been away from home, and we thought it’d be embarrassing – and inconvenient – to eat a full meal on the train while other people watched. Both of us were starving. All we’d eaten were two packs of instant noodles, dry, through the entire thirty-hour journey. I took out the dozen hard-boiled eggs my mom had packed for me, only to discover that they had been crushed in my bag and rotted in the Southern heat. ‘They’ve gone bad,’ the guy from Lankao said. ‘You should throw them away.’ What a shame, I thought, as I tossed the eggs into the trash can. The memory of those rotten eggs always brings me a sense of bitterness and regret, which is the same thing I feel when I realize I let the best decade of my life slip away from me on the factory floor.