Dandong Detention Center’s head Dai Xiaojun, 50, feels deeply about life’s value working decades with detainees who’re risking with life and death.

“No one would not fear death, including the vicious criminals,” Dai talks about what touches him most in his career, “There’re more things you can’t imagine without seeing yourself.”

Li Di, a Beijing-based detective novel writer born in 1948, has been witnessing the unthinkable during his stays there, and put them together into his latest book Stories of Dandong Detention Center, a 21-chaptered reportorial creation.

When Li was back for the book launch at the detention center in late September, he was greeted by all the people he passed by with warmth as for a family member who’s just returned from work.

Li first visited on occasion of detention houses’ first-time opening up to artists in 2009, from when the project of opening up has been extended to public visits.

“Of the 10 writers who initially came to see us, Li Di is the only one who returned and rooted his writings here,” says Wang Jing, vice-head of the center.

Li has spent eight months in the center, living in the same building with the detainees and the police on duty.

Seeing his sincere attitude, there the detainees’ simple and factual talks with him slowly developed into soul-deep sharing.

“They’re in nature ‘good’ people, some of them pushed to the extremes by poverty, illiteracy and complex social conditions,” Li says, adding he always sobbed when listening their stories.

Li finished the book with 20 stories featuring different detainees, and with abstracts from the female detainees’ diaries.

A veteran detective and public security related story writer who has established through a novella called The Woman Who Knocked the Door published in 1980s, Li combines his iconic detective-like storytelling with fresh trials in style and structure, infused with online messages, e-blogs, diaries, flashbacks to create the best suspension in restoring real-life stories.

When Yi Menglin, editor of the book with Qunzhong Publishing House, first got the book, he feared it to be another dry and rigid “role model” story.

“And when I began to read I can’t stop,” Yi says, “It’s an amazingly done sample for reportages to be so attractive and interesting.”

Li knows he has achieved that by combining his novelist’s skills and the capturing of the moments that shines with human nature in face of conflicts of evil and good, hatred and love, and crime and innocence.

“People around are the kind that writers find the hardest to pen down. Reportage writers tend to ignore sculpting characters, but I did,” he says, “The book should first be a good read to touch more.”

Peking University critic Kong Qingdong praises the book for showing respect to people formerly invisible in gray areas.

Kong says one of the most painstaking conflicts in the society is between the beauty of human nature and the toils of living. “Most of the detainees came there with limited choices in life,” he says.

“The book offers a final solution to merge the two and brings sunshine to people who’re struggling with hardships in life,” Kong says, “what I see from the book is love.”

Gao Hongbo, vice president from the Chinese Writer’s Association, says Li’s work has delved into the objects’ hearts with equal and truthful exchanges, and is a “true reflection of real scenes in the country’s detention houses”.

“Li’s work throws rare light into the dark corners and spreads warmth,” says Zhao Chunguang, an official in charge of the country's detention houses with the Ministry of Public Security, “It also reveals fundamental changes in the related management from a small angle.”

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