Sanmao, a thin boy with three hairs on his head and no family, scavenges, begs, and takes odd jobs to survive on the streets of old Shanghai, enduring hunger, cold, exploitation, and casual cruelty from the comfortable. The wordless strips repeatedly show his schemes for food or shelter collapsing, often because an adult with power takes what little he has gained.
A child's destitution can be communicated through purely visual action, with no dialogue or narration, so that the injustice is understood by anyone regardless of literacy or language. Stripping away words forces the reader to read consequences and body language directly, which can make the cruelty harder to rationalize away.
The protagonist retains kindness, humor, and small acts of generosity even while being robbed, beaten, and starved, so his moral character is shown as independent of his material status. The gap between his decency and his treatment is itself the indictment.
Viewing a city through the eyes of its most powerless member exposes the ordinary workings of a social order as a sequence of extractions: the well-fed, the police, and employers appear chiefly as forces that take from or ignore the vulnerable. What looks like normal life from above reads as systemic neglect from below.