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Every success story ended with a personal triumph that could be tallied on an accountant’s ledger: the monthly turnover of a business, the square-footage of an apartment. In “Ambition Made Me Who I Am,” a teenage nanny taught herself to read and write and put herself and her brother through college by selling Popsicles, delivering goods, cutting hair, and peddling insurance. At the story’s end, she headed an insurance company’s sales department and owned a 1,300-square-foot apartment. In “Be Your Own Master,” a young woman worked as a hairdresser for two years without pay in order to learn the trade and set up her own shop. Turnover is more than three thousand yuan a month, six hundred yuan for rent, and one hundred yuan for taxes, and the rest is all hers. In “The Girl Who Wanted to Make Television Dramas,” a young woman worked diligently at a menial office job—she often typed for ten hours without interruption—and rose to be vice-president of an entertainment company with an eight-hundred-square-foot apartment.

The path to success was long and hard, and many strayed from it. A young woman might dream of finding a man who would love and support her. But this was always the wrong way.

When I got home, I burst into loud sobbing, not daring to believe that my own true love was a fraud.

What he saw in me was how easy it would be to deceive me.

If I leave him the way I am now, who will still want me?

Articles described the indignities of daily life as a migrant. A young woman sneaked into the bathroom at McDonald’s because her own building’s facilities were so poor: The environment inside a McDonald’s bathroom is so good. It is not only very clean, but there is toilet paper and there are hand dryers. A migrant worker was ashamed to tell his boss that he couldn’t afford a mobile phone. Those lucky enough to land office jobs found an environment as ruthless as anything described by Darwin:

Because some of my clients are behind in their payments, the company says I am responsible for collecting these debts and will withhold 30 percent of my salary every month until all the money is paid. Is this reasonable?

Our company rule is that every month the person with the worst sales record is fired. Is this legal?

Sometimes the message of self-reliance went too far. An article about a physically abused maid did not address the vulnerabilities of domestic workers but celebrated her daring escape from her employer’s apartment. The only person who could rescue Wang Li was Wang Li herself. An account of a deadly department store fire skirted the bigger issues—poor construction and prevention measures—to focus on fire survival tips: When the fire burns your body, take off your clothes or roll around on the floor to extinguish the flames.

Against the staid and preachy Chinese media, the migrant magazines broke new ground. They did not insist on upbeat endings; many of the stories ended in anguish or confusion. They described a world in which people cheated one another and did nothing to aid the lonely and the lost. They did not preach about laws that must be amended or behaviors that must be improved, and they never mentioned the Communist Party. They wrote about how to live in the world just as it was.

* * *

In the summer of 1996, Chunming wrote in her diary:

Friends, we were born into the world poor through no fault of our own. But to die poor is a sin.

In the course of life, have we not worked hard and persisted in the struggle? To be a success in network sales, we must honestly achieve these four points:

1. Have determination.

2. Have a clear goal.

3. Deeply study and thoroughly understand the company’s products and plans.

4. Study the techniques of network selling.

That summer, a friend from the factory took Chunming to a lecture that changed her life. The speaker worked for a company called Wanmei Daily Use Products. Wanmei, which means “perfect,” sold health supplements, but what it really offered was a dream of wealth and personal fulfillment