Sitting on a wooden bench in his spartan house in this tiny seaside village, Xue Yougui's boyish face lights up when he talks about his first trip on an aeroplane last April.
"It was my first time on the plane, it seemed like fun at the time," the 28-year-old says. "I had never seen a plane close-up so I was very excited."
Holding his 18-month-old son, despondency soon returns to Xue as his thoughts snap back to reality.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
His much-anticipated first trip abroad went badly wrong.
Like many others from his native Pingtan Island in southeastern Fujian Province, and thousands more in China's poor remote areas, Xue was determined to leave behind his mundane life as a fisherman to seek work overseas.
But instead of finding their dreams, Xue and his 30-year-old neighbor Li Guiping were abducted, along with five other Chinese hostages, soon after they arrived in war-torn Iraq -- a country they knew virtually nothing about.
They were lucky enough to be released, but talking to them, you don't see the sense of relief one might expect from someone who has escaped the clutches of militants in a far-off land. Instead, they display an air of hopelessness, weighed down by their worries of paying off family debts and making a decent living to support their wives and children.
Since they came back last April, Xue has returned to fishing while Li spends his days taxiing people on his motorcycle -- just as they did in the years before their fateful trip to Iraq. Li earns between 20 yuan and 30 yuan a day (US$2.4 and US$3.6), while his wife toils 12 hours a day collecting seaweed and shellfish for 30 yuan, and that only when there is work in the summer.
Li says the meagre income can hardly pay for the family's outgoing expenditure.
At the time he was contemplating going abroad, Li's father was suffering from glaucoma and needed to pay for an operation. The couple also had a new baby to look after.
Although government slogans emblazoned on the walls all over villages on Pingtan Island warn people against illegal migration, few pay attention to them. Villagers have their livelihoods to think about and there is little work.
Isolated Pingjiao Ziran village lies on the coast of on Pingtan, just off Fujian. In amongst a rocky landscape, a few tiny patches of cultivated land grow cabbages and sweet potatoes.
Over the rocks roam a few skinny goats, gnawing on the few patches of grass.
"There is nothing to do here," Li says, shaking his head and looking down at the floor.
There are no factories nearby and even the fishermen in the village have limited waters to work in because they tend to be occupied by larger, more powerful, family clans.
To the villagers, hunger is never far from their minds.
Their usual diet is thin rice congee and a few slices of sweet potatoes. Meat and fish is only eaten during celebrations and festivals a few times a year.
Li says he once went to find work in the southern city of Guangzhou for two months, but as an unskilled migrant worker, he only managed to save 200 yuan a month so he came home. Then he tried for a year to run a deep-fried food shop, but made a loss and ran up debts.
It was this existence that drove Li and Xue to try their luck abroad.
At that time adverts extolling work and money in Iraq -- a country they had never heard of -- started to appear around the island. According to villagers, several people from Pingtan had already been to Iraq and became construction workers and decorators. They told their friends back home that they could earn the equivalent of 7,000 yuan to 8,000 yuan (US$845 and US$966) a month in Iraq -- more than 10 times the villagers' usual income.
Li and Xue thought such an opportunity sounded too good to miss, even though they knew nothing of the war-ravaged country.
"We had no idea where it was," Li says, explaining that he had never seen a world map and had no clue which continent the country was in, let alone that it was in the middle of a war.
"We didn't know a thing about Iraq. Not everyone in the village has a television and when it is windy you can't get any reception," he says.
Nevertheless, their desperation to make quick money to pay off their debts outweighed any worries.
Ideally, Li says, he would have liked to go to a prosperous western country like the US, but neither he nor his neighbor could afford the hundreds of thousands of yuan in "agency fees" charged by people smugglers.
Talk to anyone on Pingtan Island and they can quote a price list off the top of their heads: 60,000 yuan for Singapore, 80,000 for Israel, 90,000 for South Korea, 600,000 for the US.
The cheapest on the list was Iraq -- 23,800 yuan -- and so their fates were sealed.
"I've always wanted to get out of here. But other countries are just too expensive, I couldn't afford it," Li says.
They gritted their teeth, borrowed from loan sharks and handed over the money to the "agents," or people smugglers, and prayed the biggest investment of their lives would pay off. In just four days, they received their passports. In barely a week, they were all set to go.
With passport and airplane ticket in hand, the pair were optimistic that a bright new future was about to begin.
The only thing on Li's mind was how he could start earning as quickly as possible to pay off his 60,000 yuan of debts. "I was so excited," Li recalls. "I was in a good mood then."
Xue too thought happily about how his future was mapped out. He had also run up debts, after having to close down a loss-making eatery in Fuzhou, the provincial capital city some 80km away. His family dried fish at home but made a huge loss when SARS hit China in 2003 and they couldn't sell their stock.
"I owed about 50,000 yuan. If I didn't go abroad there was no way I could repay it," he says.
He thought, optimistically, that he would be able to make 60,000 yuan a year, and then it would only take 18 months to pay off his debts and the cost of getting there. In two years he would start making a profit.
Li and Xue took a three-hour journey to Xiamen City on April 9, where they joined five other workers to fly to Hong Kong, before jetting on to Jordan.
In Amman, they were met by a fellow Pingtan villager who had arrived in Iraq a month earlier. They got into a van which drove them to Iraq.
But as they entered Iraq on April 11, the van overturned in the flashpoint city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, and they were picked up by armed men.
Li and Xue say their kidnappers were friendly and gave them adequate food and medicine. They were not handcuffed and were free to move around the house they were taken to, although their kidnappers warned them against leaving as "they might be harmed by the Americans lurking around."
"I wasn't scared, I was just worried about how my family would react," Li says.
Back in Pingtan, Li's father was beginning to worry about him because he hadn't heard from his son since he left two days before. Then the phone rang -- a friend told him that his son had been kidnapped.
The senior Li fainted. He heard rumors that his son would be shot in two days' time.
But they were lucky.
After a flurry of activity between Chinese diplomats and the Iraqi government, the group was released after just 36 hours.
Despite their ordeal, Xue and Li told Chinese diplomats that they wanted to stay in Baghdad and find work. After all, they had paid huge sums of money to travel there.
"The financial burdens of my family was on my mind. I hadn't had the opportunity to find work yet and there were the mounting debts," Xue says.
Like Xue, Li's desperation for work outweighed any trauma he might have had. "What's the point of going home? There was nothing to do. I'd be driving my motorbike again, earning that 20, 30 yuan a day," Li sighs.
They stayed at the embassy for a week, before finally being pressured to return to China.
The fishermen were unaware of the intense press coverage over their kidnapping at home. Told by the government to stay low-profile, they were whisked back to Pingtan quickly after their arrival.
Back in their village, nothing had changed. Except that their hopes for work had been dashed, and their debts had piled even higher. They lost the few thousand yuan they had carried with them to Iraq, plus the money paid to the agents. And since their return, authorities have confiscated their passports as a warning.
But in spite of their experience, both Xue and Li say they still want to find work abroad.
"If there is another opportunity, I still want to go abroad again," Li says. "On Pingtan Island, if you don't go abroad you starve. So many people are still unemployed."
But he wouldn't recommend Iraq to anyone, although the torn-apart nation, as the cheapest option, seems to be the only choice for villagers.
Nine months later, another eight people from villages near Xue and Li's home were kidnapped in Iraq as they made their way to Jordan after completing a construction project.
Kidnappers threatened to kill them but, like Xue and Li, they were released a few days later.
When asked whether the two kidnappings had shattered villagers' dreams of earning money abroad, 22-year-old Li Mao, another young man struggling to make ends meet, says no.
"Of course I want to go, what is there to do in Pingtan? Just go somewhere where there is no war," the part-time decorator says, standing idly by the front door of his family's house, looking at the sea.
"But then I don't have any money," he says, with a rueful smile.
"There is no future here, if there is a future why would people want to run away?" he asks.
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