Aube Rey Lescure at The Millions:
When I began writing a novel about adolescence in Shanghai, I knew rooftopping would weave into its fabric. I didn’t personally know any rooftoppers, but the mentality that drove so many young men to take up rooftopping was everywhere around me. I’d attended Chinese public schools through eighth grade and knew of boys who were deemed “problem students,” who disappeared for days and nights into cybercafe binges, who drank and fought and, once kicked out, would never be seen again. In eighth grade, a boy came to class with a knife and threatened to kill a girl—they’d been secretly dating, the girl’s parents found out and accused him of rape, and he was subsequently expelled from school and evicted by his parents. He’d been living and working in the barracks of a construction site not too far from school. I remembered his hysteria and desperation, though the knife never fell. He’d collapsed and been pulled away. But I remember thinking that this is what it meant to fall off track in this country: There was only one prescribed way forward, and once you diverged from the path, you were abandoned at the margins of a society that sped ahead and never looked back.
more here.