His brother, a year older, had already left. Their mother and father could alone look after the farm of 2700 square metres, most of it rice paddies. The parents could also cope with the small shop that the boys' paternal grandfather had opened in the 1970s, when the government had begun allowing a little free enterprise.

So Chen Fan, aged 15, set off for a job in a motorcycle workshop in a nearby town, also in Sichuan, his mountainous home province in the south-west of China.

As a second child, he should not have been born. When he was, in 1990, the local authorities imposed a fine on his parents, equivalent to several months' income. Almost all families in the village paid those fines for a second child, often for a third or even more.

The village, Wuguwan, had no electricity, so houses were lit by kerosene lamps. In 1993 one set fire to the bed that Chen Fan and his brother shared. Both were badly burned.

Their 25-year-old mother, alone because her husband was working on a distant construction site, took them to the village clinic, which, lacking facilities, refused to accept them. "Take them to a city hospital," she was told.

There was no money for that. Anyway, Wuguwan had no road access to the outside world, only a track.

Instead, her father, who had trained for seven months to be a village doctor, cared for the boys. Both survived with scars. Some of Chen Fan's were on his face and in later years robbed him of confidence.

Nor was he encouraged when, at 14, he was pushed out of school and into vocational training by a teacher who probably didn't want a boy with poor marks lowering her class average.

At the motorcycle workshop, he can't have been much use, being so young and unskilled. But other parts of China were booming, with new and expanding businesses seeking workers. An uncle found a job for him in a plastics factory 1000 kilometres away in Guangdong, a busy manufacturing province.

The pay would have been about 500 yuan a month, equivalent to $100, but most importantly the factory provided simple meals and accommodation in a dormitory.

More jobs followed - too many. His next one was making and installing curtains, and for a while he sold magicians' supplies. Like so many young rural Chinese, he moved between cities whenever he saw a new opportunity, or needed one. He could carry his few possessions with him and live in an employer's dormitory or maybe share a cheap room with someone.

Along the way he picked up a skill, hairdressing, which in China is usually work for men. His brother, Chen Long, had begun informal training in the trade in Beijing and got a job for him at the same salon.

Whatever work Chen Fan did, the pay was miserable. And in a typical year he was unemployed for two or three months, at which time he'd go back to Wuguwan by bus or train.

MORE AGE OF THE DRAGON:

Chen Long married at 23, but Chen Fan remained single, even rejecting his mother's attempts to introduce him to nice girls. After a gregarious childhood, he had become introverted.

His lucky break finally came in 2019.

Since 2014 Chen Long had been working in Beijing as my personal assistant, having known me since cutting my hair in 2010. The job as my assistant did not involve much work, and it brought an opportunity - actually, a condition of employment - to use the extensive free time for study. By 2019 Chen Long had achieved a diploma in English and a degree in accounting, and he was leaving to emigrate to Australia.

So Chen Fan quit selling detergent in Chengdu, his latest job, and replaced his brother. Working personally for a foreigner was quite respectable, something he could be pleased to mention to his friends and relatives. Most importantly, he could now see a path to stable employment through education. He threw himself into studying, Japanese at first and later English.

After less than a year, it all seemed to go wrong: I had to leave China. He would have to find another job. We agreed he would keep up his studies by working only part-time while I supplemented his wage.

He had an eye on following Chen Long to Australia. Maybe he could learn a trade. Obstacles arose, however, and by October last year they hadn't been sorted out. He must have wondered whether anything would ever go right for him.

On October 21, 2022, he died alone. Video footage showed him last entering the door of his room in the early hours of that day. The post-mortem examination and the circumstances in the room allow only the possibility that some illness killed him.

His spending record of the previous few days suggests he had been sick. Always careful with money, he no doubt had been unwilling to pay to see a doctor, as poor Chinese often are. Anyway, he was very fit and usually recovered easily from illness. Being such a loner, he wouldn't have asked anyone to help him.

His ashes were interred under a traditional arrangement of rough stones beside a quiet road near Wuguwan. According to the custom of the district, he could not have a more formal burial place, because his deceased paternal grandparents didn't. So no engraved headstone tells anyone that Chen Fan lived and died.