Left-behind children: The 61 million who were sacrificed are now grown up

"I don't feel it. ”

Yao Yiqiu, dressed in overalls, sat on a small bench according to prison rules, trying to recall how he felt about his infant mother running away from the waddling mother.

After a pause, he added, "I will miss her." ”

After 38 years, and the long distance from the countryside of Hubei to the high walls of the coastal area, Yao Yiqiu still has not found the language to tell the emotions of his childhood. It's like a vain search when I was 20 years old: I happened to hear someone say that I saw my mother on the streets of Daye City, and he rushed to it with his dumb eldest brother, and found nothing for three days.

Within the high walls of this prison are a large number of prisoners like Yao Yiqiu, whose roles before entering prison are formidable: bikers, robbers, drug dealers, human traffickers, thieves. But moving forward, they all had a common identity in the distant and near times: left-behind children.

When we begin to notice this term, they have actually grown up, struggling to survive in various corners, and the ways of earning a living are very different but without exception trivial, lowly, and without a shining point.

When they occasionally disturb people's attention in the social news column, they mostly violate the red line of law and life. Then they entered the wall and began a longer silence. Few people's eyes fell on them, and Zhang Dandan was an exception.

As an economist at the National School of Development at Peking University, inmates with left-behind children have become a group of people she has been concerned about in recent years. She found that the inmates all had one distinct common denominator: the proportion of left-behind or single-parent backgrounds before the age of 16 was more than double that of ordinary migrant workers, reaching nearly 20 percent. This surprised Zhang Dandan, who designed a research plan for multiple prisons, trying to find the threads and turns on the path of left-behind children to the high walls.

The results show that the background of left-behind children has an important impact on prisoners' violent tendencies, emotional instability and feelings of unfairness. The trajectories of these people's lives are so rough and messy that they sink in a parabolic way, perhaps from the day their parents left home. In the context of continuous urbanization, the number of left-behind children in China is still rising, and the problem of "left-behind child crime" has also become a hot topic, but their trajectory into adulthood is still in the dark.

In this special environment, it is not easy to draw the thread of the past. But the turning points and knots of those life experiences, the conflicts and rupture between the heart and the outside world, are real, and only within the high walls of the clock of life that are forced to slow down, can we have the opportunity to look back. After serving a lengthy sentence, they walked out of the walls and re-entered the sea of people, and even the prison authorities had a hard time tracking their whereabouts.

Yao Yiqiu is the first generation of left-behind children. Through the prison walls, an invisible thread begins to pass from generation to generation: Yao and some of the inmates' children are in the distant countryside, repeating their childhood experiences.

Bricks and masks

Deng Hui's stubbornness can be seen at a glance, even in the refining furnace of this "civilized prison".

He seems to have been resisting something since he was a child, but he can't even understand himself. For example, the answer to his father's survival was that Deng Hui's father was imprisoned when he was two years old, and then escaped and disappeared. And Deng Hui repeated the answer twice: his father died half a year after he was born, and his grandparents did not inform him of the cause of death.

What caused Deng Hui to resist may be a sentence or a word. At the end of last year, a prisoner team leader scolded Deng Hui, who secretly endured until the Spring Festival, looking for an opportunity to slap the team leader's head with a brick on the ground and sew several stitches. Afterwards, Deng Hui was promoted to "strict management", and he wore a mark on his arm during the meeting. Deng Hui was in a heavy mood, but he refused to bow his head with "hard anger". Behind the "hard anger" is his disappointment in himself: "The relationship with Tongkai is not too good, withdrawn, and easy to get angry." Deng Hui was looking forward to going out early, but he was not confident that he would get his sentence commuted.

The "brick" style of recklessness lies between the former "left-behind children" and the prisoners of today.

Most of the more than a dozen prisoners interviewed by the reporter were in their 80s or 90s, and the vast majority of the crimes were related to violence:

Deng Hui, formerly known as the "Biker Party", worked as a motorcyclist in a gang robbery, developed two girls into the gang, and was convicted as the first offender at the time of the verdict;

Yao Yiqiu, who ganged up with others to rob a house, covered his face with clothes, and held a kitchen knife to force the victim who had gone to bed to sleep to hand over the key to the safe;

She Nianwu, in a gang with four other migrant workers with left-behind child backgrounds, blocked the road and robbed six times, injuring the victims who resisted;

Cui Kai, because he was bullied by his colleagues, stabbed the other party with a red wine opener;

Wu Jinsen, instigated by his cousin, organized women to use modified sand boats to smuggle out of the country for prostitution, and was convicted of the crime of abducting and trafficking women;

Wang Fei, a member of the roadblock robbery gang, extortion, armed with a murder weapon to block the road and rob, once drove down a female motorcycle driver, and temporarily started to rob the female victim, causing the female victim to suffer a seventh-degree disability.

In Zhang Dandan's research, roadblock robbery and intentional injury are the most common crimes committed by migrant workers, higher than rape and other crimes that impress the public, and the proportion of economic intelligence crimes is very low. This is consistent with the results of her research: the migrant worker crime group with left-behind background has a lower education level, is younger, and is more serious in emotional instability, violent tendencies, and unfairness, and is lower than the average level of migrant workers in terms of extroversion, affinity, and responsibility. This is closely related to the lack of human nourishment and interpersonal skills cultivation, personality formation and even lack of educational opportunities in the context of left-behind or single parents in childhood. In a questionnaire survey conducted by Dandan's research group on this population, 51% of the inmates said that they were unhappy when their parents were not around in their childhood.

Li Meijin, a professor of criminal psychology at the Public Security University, has obtained similar results to Zhang Dandan in her long-term follow-up of criminal cases: the background of a left-behind or single-parent family is closely related to violent crimes in adulthood. She has been exposed to nearly a dozen death sentence cases in which the prisoner was raised by his grandfather without his mother in his childhood, and committed violent crimes as an adult.

Zhang Dandan once organized thousands of prisoners to do a game of "partner money":

Two people are divided into groups, and each group is given a 100 yuan, and one of them plays the role of the recipient and is responsible for dividing the money, and the recipient has the right to decide how much to share and how much to leave to his companion, and the companion has the right to accept or refuse. Once the recipient's decision to distribute the money is rejected by the companion, the 100 yuan will be withdrawn, and neither will receive anything.

The results of the game show that the second partner has a high sense of self-fairness, while the first partner has less consideration for the fair treatment of his peers, resulting in nearly 40% of the convict partners eventually failing to divide the money and ending up with nothing.

In the words of Cui Kai, a left-behind child prisoner, "I feel that the whole world owes me".

Under the post-prison penitential education and psychological correction, most prisoners seem to be able to talk about their past smoothly, so that they have some kind of understanding of the connection between their own upbringing and personality defects, and some can even talk about their philosophy of life.

But this kind of reflection under the system of compulsory correction and graded commutation sometimes borders on another mask of optimism, and some of the shadows in their hearts are not really so easy to face.

Regarding the experience of participating in the burglary, Yao Yiqiu has always been reluctant to accept that he is the main culprit, emphasizing that he is "helping", although he used a knife to coerce the victim who had fallen asleep. Wu Jinsen, another convict who abducted and trafficked women abroad for prostitution, still felt that he was just "playing along" at the instigation of his cousin.

Deng Hui's role in the "Biker Party" is to drive, "I have good skills, and I can carry 4 people in the back seat of the motorcycle". After the incident, one of the main culprits escaped, and Deng Hui, who was arrested, was sentenced as the main culprit. After being imprisoned, he thought that he did not do it directly, and he couldn't figure it out, "Later, I thought that there must be an explanation for the case, and I confessed it." In fact, the reason why Deng Hui was designated as the main offender was that the two girls who were accomplices in the case were all called by Deng Hui to join the gang.

Many of the prisoners' real interactions with their families began after entering the high walls. Their parents who spent many years working outside the home as children feel guilty about their children going to prison, and the prisoners themselves feel the most guilty about their grandparents.

Deng Hui has a deep relationship with his grandparents, and when he used to work outside, he would often talk to the old people on the phone, and when he heard Deng Hui's voice, the old people were very happy and encouraged him to work hard outside. But "in the end, I disappointed them", and this guilt became a heavy mental pressure on Deng Hui in prison.

Yang Daodao, a native of Taizhou, Zhejiang, was also raised by his grandparents before he was 10 years old. When he was 24 years old, he was imprisoned for robbery, and his parents could only hide from the old and sick old man, saying that Yang Daode would soon be released from prison after a short sentence, but in fact there were still five and a half years left. Yang Daode didn't know if his grandparents would be able to wait for this day.

Many more are disappointed and have traveled far distances and rarely visited by their families.

It is not easy for them to return to society outside the walls and get rid of the trajectory of life that slipped in their early years. Learning special industry operation skills such as elevators is the career preparation provided by the prison for them, but psychologically, getting out of the "shadow of left-behind" in the growth age is a heavy subject for them.

Once they get out of the high wall, the mask of "prisoners released from prison" is still worn on their faces, which contradicts the self-cleaning and identity that they have painstakingly completed, and suffers even greater frustration. It is difficult for prisons to contact released prisoners, "those who are connected are good, and those who are bad are not followed". When re-informed, it is often the case that the offender re-offends after a few years, and usually returns to the coastal city to commit the crime and is re-arrested in the prison.

This is beyond the power of the correctional system within the walls.

Doll's shadow

Yao Yiqiu's childhood world lacked a voice: his father was mute. 's mother ran away from home, the eldest of the three brothers is mute, and the second brother speaks more with his fists to the naughty Yao Yiqiu. Yao Yiqiu had just been governor when his mother left home, and although he couldn't find a photo of his mother at home, he kept carving his mother's original appearance in his mind.

The Yao family is poor, and they can only eat sweet potatoes if they don't have enough rice, and the neighbors don't look down on them. When planting rice in the spring, the oxen that ploughed the fields could not be borrowed, so they had to dig the ground with their own hoes. When Yao Yiqiu was studying, his family couldn't even get twenty yuan a semester, so he only studied for one semester and went home to collect pigweed and cook.

Growing up in an all-man environment, Yao Yiqiu was used to using his fists, but he always longed for a sister. It wasn't until he was fifteen or sixteen years old that the eldest brother found a physically disabled sister-in-law, and the family had the breath of a woman, but this made up for it too late, and Yao Yiqiu had reached the age of going out to work.

As a child, Cui Kai stayed with his grandparents in a village below Baiyin City in Gansu Province, and when he was 3 years old, he lost his father, and his mother has been selling clothes in the city to support him and his younger brother. Mother and son can only see each other for the last month. Every time they meet and separate, the distance tugs at Cui Kai's heart, and he still remembers that the most longing thing at that time was to be with his mother.

At the age of nine, he actually went to the city to live with his mother, only to find that he was still alone—his mother was too busy making ends meet to pay attention to him. He began to miss his grandparents so intensely that he missed his mother as he did when he was in the country, and he went back to the country whenever he could. Although his grandparents are not good at words, they can give him more warmth, in contrast, his mother seems to be only responsible for providing food and lodging.

Life in the countryside is not entirely pleasant. Childhood playmates would consciously or unconsciously mention Cui Kai's status as an "orphan", for which he fought more than once. After entering the city, his mother had no mental strength to control him, and Cui Kai's habit of fighting intensified, and gradually developed into a group fight between schools.

The driving force that drives Cui Kai to fight is not fearlessness, but fear: "Others beat me, I gritted my teeth and said that I fought well, you wait", in fact, I was afraid of the next encounter. Sometimes when he falls asleep, Cui Kai will dream that he is fighting with someone, and after the fight, he is caught, and he wakes up very depressed. In the year of the college entrance examination, he was assigned to the same examination room with a tall and strong classmate, and he was worried from beginning to end. Even now when he returned to Silver City, Cui Kai felt that his fear had not disappeared, and in order to overcome this fear, he wanted to take revenge.

In the relationship with his mother, Cui Kai gradually changed from being beaten after making a mistake to resisting, and later he began to push his mother. "After the third year of junior high school, she couldn't beat me anymore, so she could only scold and cry at the same time. For many years, Cui Kai even had a vague disgust and anger for his mother's widowhood and livelihood entertainment, and at the same time he hated himself.

The emotional wall between mother and son did not have a chance to dismantle until Cui Kai entered the wall of reality. While serving his sentence, the prison correctional officers learned about his psychological problems and arranged for his mother to come to visit him from afar.

"One hour on the first day and two hours on the second day. The first day I said, she listened, and basically said everything she wanted to say from childhood to adulthood, including resentment. The next day, I heard her say that she told me that my mother must not have done a good job, but her ability is there, and she can't do it well. Mom's tears are like a waterfall. I held on, and when I returned to the prison number, I was in tears. After this meeting, the knot in my heart opened. ”

After the settlement, the mother and son will communicate with each other every month, and they will call when they have the opportunity. In the letter, his mother asked Cui Kai what his plans would be in the future, and he told his mother that he would live a down-to-earth life when he went out.

"Post-90s" She Nianwu is a native of Guangshan County, Henan Province, his parents go to Shandong every year to work, and only return home during the Chinese New Year, and his grandparents take care of him while farming. For gathering and parting, She Nianwu felt particularly strongly in childhood. When his parents came back during the Chinese New Year, She Nianwu cried happily, and cried sadly when he left. "I cried and wouldn't let them go, they didn't say anything, and my mother cried. ”

In dreams, She Nianwu often sees his parents coming back with toys and clothes, and he will laugh in such dreams. When he was a child, She Nianwu's studies were good, he started clubbing in junior high school, skipped school, his grandparents didn't know, they only knew that he was given money, and he would give him money, giving fifty or sixty yuan a week, and She Nianwu couldn't remember how much money he spent in the Internet café.

In the first half of the third semester of junior high school, She Nianwu dropped out of school, and his parents discussed taking him to Shandong, but She Nianwu was reluctant to let his grandparents go. After arriving in Shandong, he transferred to a class to study, could not keep up with his studies, had a serious dispute with his parents, and ran away from home at the age of eighteen. His parents searched for him back, but he eventually dropped out of school and returned to his hometown in Henan. Until shortly before the crime, She Nianwu's life trajectory has been going back and forth between his grandparents' hometown in Henan and Jinan, where his parents live.

Mr. Ng's childhood looked a little more pleasant. His family lives in Heyuan, Guangdong, his parents and several relatives are working in Zhuhai, his father is an assistant policeman, his mother is a canteen, and he has built a house in the city, and his economic conditions are good. Wu Jinsen lived with his grandparents in Heyuan when he was a child, and then went to a private school in Zhuhai, and often returned to his hometown during winter and summer vacations. In the countryside, he couldn't stay still, asked his grandparents for money, took the train to walk around, and was sent home by the police when he ran out of money.

Wu Jinsen's parents are patriarchal, and their work and rest time are the opposite of his, and they don't control him much on weekdays, but just keep giving money. At school, Wu Jinsen and a group of local classmates bullied foreign classmates in Hunan and Sichuan, and these teenagers had the same fate as him: their parents both worked in Zhuhai and were left-behind children in their childhood. Wu Jinsen just "couldn't see them jumping, and when he heard them talking loudly, he went over to fight."

injured someone, and his mother lost some money and told him that he didn't suffer a loss. The notorious Wu Jinsen was blacklisted by the local school, changed three schools in four months, and led a group of people to challenge the previous "boss" every time he arrived at a new school.

In the first year of junior high school, he finally dropped out of school, which was a matter of time before he was taken by his cousin from Kaidi Bar to take methamphetamine and Magu from the sixth grade of primary school, and he had to "hemp" once in a few days. Until he was imprisoned, his parents did not know about it.

In Zhang's research, prisoners from "left-behind children" backgrounds were separated from their parents for an average of more than eight years. According to the theory of personality stage development, at that time, they were in the period of contradiction and conflict in the formation of personality, and left-behind or single-parent children were lonely and helpless in the self-conflict, and they were also psychologically hurt by the outside world, and it was almost impossible to win this "one-man war".

According to a 2009 survey conducted by the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, left-behind children in China have serious low self-esteem, low evaluation of their intelligence and appearance, but obvious self-centered tendencies; emotional instability, prone to symptoms such as terror, paranoia, and sensitivity, resentment and rebellion towards their parents; introverted personalities, easy to be bullied, and have a strong sense of unfairness; and easy to get tired of school and drop out of school. What accompanies them to grow up is not warmth and guidance, but dolls of fear and hurt. The shadow of the doll will inevitably be projected into their adult life.

Falling parabola

Yang Daodao's life trajectory as an adult is like a parabola that gradually falls.

After dropping out of high school, Yang Daode stayed at home for two years, and went to Shenzhen in 2007, initially as a mold apprentice, but did not learn for a few months. He switched to computer programming, which required a year of programming, which he found very hard, so he switched to working in a barbershop. He thought it was an easy livelihood, but his haircutting skills were never very good, and the salary he earned was not enough to spend, so he asked his family for it.

After a long time, he thought that he couldn't make money from haircuts, so he left the barber shop to wander the streets, pasting advertisements for young ladies everywhere on the ground in Luohu District, introducing people to prostitution establishments and earning the difference. "At the time, I didn't think it was a good thing, as long as I could make money, sometimes it was quite a lot, five or six hundred a day. ”

During the period of small advertisements, Yang Daode met two friends, one of whom was a fellow villager. Yang Daode knew that they were engaged in roadblock robbery, but he still joined the gang, followed them to make his debut, robbed four people in one day, got 4,000 yuan, and then went to karaoke to drink together. He was arrested 10 days later and paid the price of 11 years in prison.

"I was afraid of hardship, I was favored when I was a child, and my grandparents didn't ask me to work. I feel like I've never done anything seriously, and when I fall in love, it's just a casual conversation. Yang Daode felt that this was the reason why he sank unconsciously. He rarely thought about doing things, and he didn't even think about the consequences of going to robbery, and he didn't know that he would go to jail. He regretted that he did not continue to learn to make molds in the first place, and hoped that he would have a chance to be released from prison in the future. Yang Daodao, who was born in 1987, has five and a half years left in his sentence.

A parabola similar to Yang Daode exists in most people's adult experiences. She Nianwu is one of them, during his time in Shandong, he once went to Lanxiang Technical School to learn to drive an excavator, and returned to his hometown in Henan to do urban demolition after graduation. But he thought the countryside was lonely, and operating an excavator was too boring, so he finally gave up this well-paid job after half a year.

In 2010, She Nianwu went to Guangzhou, did not look for a job, and relied on his savings and a few fellow villagers to hang around. He was 18 years old that year, and he went in and out of the K Hall bar to find a young lady. By the second year, the money of several fellow "brothers" had been spent, and no one wanted to work, so they finally thought of the "profession" of ganging up and robbing the road. Their robbery gang was composed entirely of left-behind children back then, and the more they robbed, the more daring they became, and after six crimes, they were terminated, and the "brothers" all went to prison. Because of his good brains, She Nianwu played the role of a "military advisor" in the gang, and was convicted as the main culprit and sentenced to 14 years in prison.

Cui Kai's life is like a piece of ice with a smooth surface, which suddenly bursts. In 2006, Cui Kai was admitted to the Department of Computer Science of Lanzhou University, and the relationship between Cui Kai and his classmates improved during his college years. The previous inferiority complex and sensitivity seem to have weakened, but it appears in another way - hanging out with his classmates, Cui Kai always can't let go.

Before graduation, Cui Kai did not apply for jobs everywhere, but after getting his graduation certificate, he went home for four months, looking at the factory in his relative's coal yard to "get familiar with society". The family looked anxious and arranged for him to work as a housekeeping supervisor at a hotel owned by another relative in Guangzhou, where Cui Kai met a boss from Shenzhen and asked him to work as a computer designer in the company.

In 2011, the manufacturing industry was sluggish, Cui Kai lost his job, began to run the talent market, and applied for the design department of a state-owned ocean-going trading company, with a salary of 1,500 yuan. Cui Kai does not have much money on smoking, alcohol and entertainment, and has 100,000 yuan in savings a year.

One of his employees has a bad heart for Cui Kai, this person is tall, and Cui Kai is afraid of clashing with him head-on. One night, when colleagues were singing together, the man walked up to Cui Kai after drinking: "If you don't practice, I think you're very unhappy", and then started to do it. At first, Cui Kai didn't dare to resist, but the other party refused to stop, and in an instant, the fear of facing the big classmates in the college entrance examination resurfaced: "I was very angry, and I thought that I must beat him down and let him see how I was angry." ”

Cui Kai casually picked up a red wine opener and stabbed it directly into the other party's eyes. The colleague's eyes went blind, Cui Kai walked into the prison, and gave all the savings to the other party to pretend to be a fake eye. In prison, Cui Kai often imagined beating the man after he was released from prison. It wasn't until his mother came to visit him that he calmed down the anger in his heart, and then he suddenly realized that his anger did not come from a colleague who was "nearly 1.8 meters tall", but that the fear that had been hidden in his heart since childhood exploded at that moment, causing his life to fall sharply.

Among these migrant workers, He Tuyuan is one of the few "successful people" who once co-founded a processing factory. Born in 1981 in the countryside of Qidong County, Hunan Province, He Tuyuan, his mother died of a heart attack when he was one year old, and his father and five sisters took care of him as an adult. At the age of 15, He Tuyuan dropped out of Dongguan to work on the construction site with his brother-in-law. He "doesn't like to be tired, can't endure hardship", didn't do much work, a year later went to work in Huizhou Electronics Factory, with a salary of three or four hundred yuan and felt that it was not enough to spend, boring, after returning to his hometown in Hunan for two years, he went to help in another brother-in-law's quarry.

It didn't take long for him to feel that his hometown was dull, so he wanted to run while he was young, and he arrived in Dongguan again, and at the age of 20, He Tuyuan, who "likes mixed society", tattooed a dragon on his arm. He repaired the generator with someone for a while, and gradually gained the trust of the boss. Four or five years later, he and his friends partnered to open a polishing machine wax processing factory, with a monthly income of 30,000 yuan or 40,000 yuan. During this period, He Tuyuan also became a family.

Business is booming, and the days are becoming more and more colorful - he got to know fellow villagers from all walks of life, some who open casinos, some who sell drugs, He Tuyuan mixed in, "eating, drinking, prostituting and gambling is not a problem, methamphetamine K powder also plays, and he didn't sleep for three days and two nights when he first played." He was outsourcing the house, and he didn't even go home for a month, the relationship between the husband and wife was bad, and he didn't feel anything even when the child was born. There was less effort to spend in the factory, and his business gradually declined. He Tuyuan thought about quitting drug addiction, but he couldn't extricate himself, and he had to spend 10,000 or 20,000 yuan on drugs every month. If he hadn't been arrested for hiding raw materials for drug production, he might have sucked all his family money into it.

After being imprisoned, the factory returned to a friend, and the wife took the children back to her parents' home, but fortunately, the two did not divorce, and the wife still contacted him every month, waiting for the reunion after the remaining two years of sentence. He Tuyuan's life line still has the possibility of reconnection, and now thinking back to the beginning, He Tuyuan was afraid for a while.

In this parabola, which is gradually sinking or encountering a sharp fall by external forces, the most common scenario is an imperceptible slide. Like Yang Daodao, "never thought about it" is the norm. Even after going to prison, the 23-year-old habitually avoided the police officer's request to "reflect on life", believing that he was "too young to know how to reflect."

This ignorance has already started in their childhood. According to the 2015 White Paper on the Psyche of Left-behind Children in China, the biggest problem for left-behind children is confusion and lack of confidence and direction for the future. The sense of confusion will extend all the way to adulthood, without the consciousness of entering the mainstream, tossing and turning on the fringes of society, and many people will sooner or later, stepping into the void.

Injuries that don't heal well

When left-behind or single-parent children grow up, there is always a gap in the emotional world that cannot be patched, making it impossible for them to have a fulfilling relationship. Zhang Dandan's research shows that the marriage rate of left-behind child offenders in prisons is significantly lower than that of migrant workers, especially violent and robbers, and the vast majority of them are emotionally fragmented in adulthood.

After Cui Kai was admitted to college, a female classmate from a good family took the initiative to approach him and buy him things from time to time, Cui Kai liked her in his heart, felt that it was very face-saving to take her with him, and he had a sense of psychological satisfaction, "filling the emptiness", but on the surface, he gave him a cold reception, afraid of being rejected after confessing. His logic is: "If I like you, you have to be more proactive with me." The female classmate was finally disappointed, and Cui Kai suffered a heavy blow, "more uncomfortable than ordinary things, and I can only restrain myself from studying hard."

Cui Kai always felt that he couldn't express a lot of his feelings, and he didn't know who to express or whether it was right to express it. Looking at what is written in the book and staged on TV, he can plan a hundred plots in his mind, and when he really does it, he is scared, and there is no way.

After being imprisoned, he regretted it very much: "If you meet an intentional girl again, no matter whether you succeed or not, you must take the initiative." This is what I figured out after going to jail. ”

She Nianwu met a local high school girl while driving an excavator in his hometown, and the two fell in love. During She Nianwu's unemployment, his girlfriend was admitted to a junior college and persuaded him to find a serious job, but She Nianwu couldn't listen to him at the time, so the two broke off contact.

After being imprisoned, She Nianwu missed his girlfriend, and the two resumed communication, but in front of a long sentence and a bifurcated life path, this relationship ended without a problem. Looking forward to being released from prison, what She Nianwu longs for most is a good relationship and a home. But between him and this expectation, there is still a gap of nearly 10 years in prison and a heavy prisoner's resume.

Deng Hui never seems to have let go of his hostility towards his live-in girlfriend. The two met in 1998 when Deng Hui first went to Dongguan, and they were not together until July 2005, when Deng Hui was working in a courier company and his girlfriend was a supervisor in a mobile phone factory. His girlfriend is from Deyang, Sichuan, the last of the eight brothers and sisters in the family, and when she was a child, her family couldn't afford to give her away, and she never mentioned her real surname when she grew up. The girl came from a poor background, but she was rare and cheerful and lively, and took the initiative to pursue Deng Hui, and the two often went to Bundi and had supper, and two years later his girlfriend became pregnant and gave birth to a child.

Deng Hui felt that his girlfriend was judging the two of them before and after living together, and everything had to follow her, which made Deng Hui unbearable. His girlfriend felt that Deng Hui was quiet and had a bad personality, and the two often had disputes. Deng Hui beat his girlfriend several times, and a few months after the birth of the child, the two had a conflict, Deng Hui shot again, and his girlfriend proposed to break up. Deng Hui was not sad: "She explained to me, I said you go." After the two broke up, Deng Hui sent the child home to be raised by his grandparents.

Three months before Deng Hui was arrested, his girlfriend suddenly called and said that he was recuperating in his hometown and asked Deng Hui to send her 2,000 yuan. Deng Hui thought that his girlfriend at that time was either desperate or testing whether he still missed the old love, and he gave the most "hard" answer in his life: "You can't find 2,000 yuan at home? Deng Hui recalled that although he had repeatedly used his fists in his cohabitation life, "I asked myself, I have nothing to be sorry for her." ”

After being arrested, Deng Hui even suspected that he had been reported by his girlfriend, but he knew in his heart that it was impossible. After Deng Hui was arrested, his girlfriend went to Liu's house to visit the child, but was turned away by Deng's grandparents.

The hostility towards his girlfriend may be lurking in the resentment towards his mother back then. When he was a child, Deng Hui occasionally saw other children with their parents by his side and felt inferior. When I went home and asked my grandparents: Where did my mother go? As soon as I heard this, my grandparents burst into tears, and Deng Hui didn't dare to ask more.

"At that time, I kept asking myself why you (mother) left me alone. I miss her in my heart, and I hate her. ”

Deng Hui didn't care much about his children in the past, "He was born to be seven or eight years old, and I met him once when he was three years old, when I went back to my hometown to see him. I didn't go back to my hometown for five years. But now, his son is Deng Hui's biggest thought about the world outside the high walls, "I miss him very much, and I think of dawn when I sleep." ”

Yao Yiqiu's rich experience in marriage and love can be called a "textbook". Yao Yiqiu, who longed for sisters when he was a child, fell into the emotional quagmire of "how many good sisters do you have" as an adult. While working in a Fujian shoe factory, Yao Yiqiu fell in love with a beautiful Hubei girl and won among several suitors, and four years later the two had a child and returned to their hometown to get married. He has a good relationship with his wife, but at the same time, he constantly has entanglements with other women, and even pursues his wife's brother-in-law's godsister. The rumors broke his wife's heart, and the two agreed to divorce.

His wife went to Guangzhou to work and remarried her boyfriend, while Yao Yiqiu went to Henan, and he earned hundreds of thousands of yuan from contracting projects, which was even more out of control: there were more than ten women who lived with him in those years, the shortest few months, the longest three or four years, "a lot of them were playing", but there are still four or five of them that he has "never forgotten".

Yao Yiqiu once lived with a divorced woman, and wanted to introduce her to the construction team, but was rejected by the boss on the grounds that it had a bad influence. Yao Yiqiu resigned, and later the woman introduced Yao Yiqiu to her uncle as a contractor, Yao Yiqiu was illiterate, and the contract was signed in the name of the woman's uncle, and as a result, Yao Yiqiu invested all his savings, but did not have the right to participate in the settlement. Yao Yiqiu realized that he had been cheated, even so, after the woman went to Jiujiang to work, Yao Yiqiu still rushed to see her and saw that she had another talent.

Although he is not dedicated to his feelings, Yao Yiqiu still cares about his wife the most. After his wife went to Guangzhou, Yao Yiqiu still called her parents to try to get his wife back. Yao Yiqiu has a photo of his wife, which he still looks at often when he is in prison, "When I think of her, I feel uncomfortable, and it is my fault." Now, the connection with his son is Yao Yiqiu's rare comfort, and it is also the only remaining clue between him and his wife. "He has a lively personality, and when he calls, he sometimes says that he misses me, but he has a better relationship with his mother."

When the child was born, Yao Yiqiu repeatedly discussed with his wife to let the child stay by his side. "I thought about when I was a child, my mother was not around. When children are together, the relationship will be better. It's a pity that my wife had to go out to work, and the children were eventually sent back to the countryside to be raised by my grandparents.

Recalling the past, Yao Yiqiu guessed, "If the child is with him, maybe the two will not break up." ”

A chain of worries

Recently, Deng Hui received a letter from his grandparents in his hometown, saying that the family had no money and could not afford to pay for his great-grandson's primary school. The grandparents are over seventy years old and have no income, Deng Hui wrote back that he really has no money, so he should not let the children go to school.

This is what correctional officers and police officers engaged in psychological correction are most worried about. When prisoners with left-behind child backgrounds are imprisoned, not only do the children become the second generation of left-behind children, but the elderly who raise them are getting older, with greater generational spacing and worse economic conditions. The eight-year-old is likely to drop out of school in the third grade, as Deng Hui did, and continue to repeat his father's trajectory.

It is a hidden chain that is passed from generation to generation, beyond the boundaries of the prison psychological correction system.

Many of the inmates in prison are in their 70s and 80s, and the intergenerational transmission of left-behind children is taking place in their children before they enter prison. Unlike the near-silent growth of their parents, the social phenomenon of 61 million left-behind children, including crime, has become a central topic in society.

Since 2006, academic papers on left-behind children's crimes, as well as special research by political and legal organs, have appeared one after another. But this is still a new topic to most of the public, and even somewhat sensational.

In 2007, Shao Wenhong, director of the research office of the Supreme People's Court, revealed that since 2000, the number of juvenile offenders whose judgments have taken effect at all levels of Chinese courts has increased by an average of about 13 percent per year. In addition, at the beginning of this century, there was a statistic from the China Juvenile Delinquency Research Association, when the juvenile crime rate accounted for more than 70 percent of the total number of crimes. These two data, which are not directly related, have been merged by the media and the public, intentionally or unintentionally, resulting in the widespread false claim that "left-behind children account for 70% of juvenile crimes".

In fact, in some local surveys, it has been found that the crime rate of left-behind children is higher than that of ordinary children, and a 2010 sample survey of the Shandong Provincial Social Science Research and Planning Project showed that the crime rate of left-behind children in the province is as high as nearly 13%, 11 percentage points higher than that of ordinary children. However, there is no data at the national level.

Li Yifei, who presided over the completion of the 2015 White Paper on the Mental Status of Left-behind Children in China, said that the survey did not confirm that there was a direct link between the left-behind background of primary school students and the probability of crime, but that left-behind children were more likely to commit crimes when they became adults. This issue has not yet entered the public eye.

This is in line with the concerns of the prison administration. A correctional prison guard judged that crimes committed by left-behind children have not yet reached their peak, because the wave of migrant workers in China appeared around 1995, and most of the left-behind children are now under the age of 20. Compared with the early migrant workers in the 1980s, the migrant workers who moved to the city in the 90s generally did not have the opportunity for primitive accumulation, and lacked the ability to take their children to resettle or return to their hometowns to start businesses, so the problem of left-behind will be more serious for their children.

Figure | Yuan Ling (author) in front of the ruins

It is worth noting that the prisoner group studied by Zhang Dandan is generally born in the post-75s to early 90s, and the proportion of left-behind children in the ordinary migrant worker group during this time period is only 9%. In a 2011 survey of rural households in nine provinces, the rate of left-behind children had risen to 43 percent.

In connection with the above-mentioned survey conclusion that "the left-behind rate of migrant workers is much higher than that of ordinary migrant workers", it indicates that the prospects for adult crime in the future are even less optimistic.

* In order to protect the privacy of the parties, the information of the characters in the article is vague

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Written by Yuan Ling