 This is a book about children's journeys, usually quite alone, from villages to distant cities, about the villages they leave and the cities they reach, and about their transformation from rural subjects to something called street children along the way. It is about the individual children, but also about their numbers on mass. Where are there so many of them? But in general, what is reflected in the notion of street children is the social idea, the normative idea, that children in public spaces without adult supervision are somehow violating rules of both life stage and space. So societies tend to hide those kids away, including ours. None of these situations are good. There has to be a more creative solution, and I want people to think about that, and I feel like telling the stories of the reality of these children, of these human beings is an essential first step. Imagine a map of these children's aggregate movements. Imagine it animated, like a moving image of ships at sea, or luminous flights aloft. Ten thousand similar responses to shared conditions, flowing along common currents of human movement, each of which seems and is its own distinct journey, along an indeterminate limbo between home and the city, conducted by the railway, and drawn by history, between childhood and whatever comes next. Sometimes, but not all the time, they flow back where they started, but in that direction the threads are less dense. There's no simple end to this story, no grand-photo overcome, no clear-cut happy conclusion, to tie everything into an easily understood bundle, no easy pleasing heroism, not even a well-resolved right and wrong to give it a neat shape. It is indeed far from clear that these tales are driven by some single cause that can be identified or countered by any single strategy that would solve it.