I once read an article written by an Englishman. The title of the article was "China is composed of thousands of identical cities", and I deeply believed it.Indeed, since most Chinese cities are new cities built among the ruins of war after the founding of New China, under specific historical conditions and under the influence of specific policies, different urban constructions and developments in China have many similarities , And what matches these thousands of similar cities is the development history of the underworld in these cities.I believe that in the 1980s, criminal gangs like the "Chopper Squad" appeared in these thousands of cities, and there were also gangs of hooligans mainly composed of children of a large state-owned factory.In the 1990s, many "debt collection companies" with unknown backgrounds appeared.

I was born in a city in northern China with a population of less than one million in the urban area, and now I am living in Shanghai as a small white-collar worker, struggling to make ends meet.Although I have never been involved in the underworld, my family has a deep connection with a certain "big brother" who has been recognized for 20 years. I have actually seen a lot of ups and downs in the past 20 years. The purpose of writing this book is absolutely not to instigate friends to be bad, I believe that 80% of my friends will make up their minds not to join the underworld after reading this book!At the same time, I hope that friends who are in the underworld or who are "big brothers" will feel less violent after reading this novel.Maybe this novel will be very long, even millions of words.Although the book is basically full of things about local hooligans and gangsters in my hometown over the past twenty years, I hope that what you see is not just these.What I hope everyone can see is what has happened and changed in our country and our society in the past two decades, and how people's spiritual and material lives have changed.

What I want to explore is: society and human nature. Last Spring Festival, when I was playing at the protagonist's home, I accidentally opened his photo album called "A Living Dictionary of Underworld Formation", and I felt a lot of emotion.There are two things that don't change: ⒈This big brother has been sitting in the middle. ⒉ When taking pictures, all the big brothers here are smiling like flowers, very bright. There are three things that change: ⒈The people in the photos are different every year. The people erased are either because they disappeared, or because they were executed, or because they ran away, or because they were lying in the hospital, or because they were serving a sentence, or It's because of a disability.

⒉The more I turn back, I think the eyes of the people inside are getting more and more complicated, even though they are all smiling happily. ⒊From fine Chinese tunic suits to woolen tunic suits to white tunic suits, and then from white shirts with red ties to black suits and black ties at the end, the clothes are getting more and more refined. I know most of the people in the photo album, and I have a general understanding of their people and things.When I see some people, I want to cry, when I see some people, I feel sorry, and when I see some people, I feel disgusted.From that day on, I decided to write something.

I am going to divide this novel into four parts, advancing according to the time of more than twenty years.The first part is about things before 1990, because I think the hooligans at that time were very innocent and classic, and they fought out of backbone and loyalty, not seeking fame and fortune.The second part is about the events between 1990 and 1996, because I think that from that stage, many hooligans changed their outlook on life and became money worshipers.The third part deals with events from 1997 to 2000, when the hooligans already had the nature of the underworld.The fourth part writes about some things from 2000 to the present.

In the following text, I will tell this story with a few young people in the 1980s as the main line.In this story, there are joys and sorrows, reunions and separations... But it is precisely because of these that our lives are made up, isn't it? In the following story, Ergou is me, and I am Ergou.