Huixiang was a small city, far from prosperous. With so many fugitives hiding there, public safety was poor, and the whole city could be summed up as chaotic and run-down.
After Lü Qiaolan and I got off the plane, we boarded a long-distance bus. The other passengers looked like hard-working laborers, with rough skin, cheap, shabby clothes, and mostly large cloth bags for luggage. The occasional suitcase wasn't the kind of attractive travel case you saw at the airport.
The two of us stood out among them.
The person in the seat beside us glanced at us curiously.
A student sat diagonally across from us, clutching his backpack and looking tense the whole time.
The middle-aged man in the seat ahead took off his shoes and socks as soon as he got on, filling the bus with a foul smell.
Someone in the back seats was shouting loudly, apparently playing cards.
The conditions inside the bus were hard to describe as pleasant.
The scenery outside wasn't much better.
Only a small part of the landscape was made up of rolling green hills. Most of it was a jumble of farmland and quarries exposing bare rock. The walls along the highway were painted with propaganda slogans from decades ago, their words blurred by years of wind and sun until only mottled patches of color remained.
There weren't any nice cars on this highway, either. Trucks and minivans made up most of the traffic, while the private cars were all cheap models, neither new nor particularly old. I even saw a modified three-wheeled vehicle brazenly keeping pace with the motor traffic, and it wasn't going slowly. I also spotted two or three unlicensed sedans.
The journey lasted more than three hours.
Once we left the highway and reached the city streets, we