/lit/ - Literature

>>21251853
>Japan would have more sci-fi novels if their language didn't suck so badly

>>21247905
Adding decor doesn't make it a story.
How about having the Tongs rescue him from the hard-labor camp? (But only after he's suffered sufficiently there.)
Then he finds they expect to be paid back for their "service", which involves doing terrible things on their behalf. Like beating up recent Chinese immigrants and robbing them blind, like he was.
It's part of their plan to make Chinese immigrants so hopeless and desperate that they willingly take whatever the Tongs offer. That helps to ensure their loyalty.
He considers going to the police, but they don't care about him, and if the Tongs learned of his disloyalty, they'll have worse things in mind for him than death.

I'm basing this on my memory of the first 20 or so pages I read a long time ago, but if what you have now is anything like it was, I don't think it can be rescued...it needs to be rethought from the ground up.
Goal, conflict, disaster. With disaster replaced by less-disaster near the mid-book climax, and with something resembling triumph at the end.

Ugh...if you don't write this, maybe I will. This is coming to me more easily than any of my own ideas.