"I had to wash dishes eight to nine hours a day, and a day's work meant washing over two thousand dishes, rain or shine. And the pay for a dish-washing worker was just 80 a day."
"Since we lived in Suzhou, people always said, 'look… those are the scammers' children!' We didn't want to face these things anymore and wanted to leave home, to start afresh. But the train tickets from Suzhou to Beijing were a thousand dollars and we couldn't afford it! So I took all the money the family had left and headed for Nanjing first. When we didn't have money for accomodation, we'd sleep under a bridge. When we didn't have food, we'd look for a temporary job. Because I was underage, the only places that would hire me were the small shops."
"One time, the boss of a shop told me that if I could wash all the piled up dishes, he'd pay me 500."
"For the 500 promised, I worked without a break for two days and finished all the work."
