by Dan Washburn
“Square meter?” Suraphan scoffed. “I pay you by linear meter.”
The man looked heartbroken. This meant he’d get paid a third of what he was owed. He tried to argue, all the while eyeing the gun on the table. He didn’t get very far.
“It’s linear meter, right?” Suraphan yelled to his staff, who were not inclined to disagree with him.
“You’re right,” they said. “Linear meter.”
The subcontractor began to cry.
“You’re getting paid per linear meter,” Suraphan said brusquely. “Here’s your money. Now get the hell out of here.”
“That guy lost his ass, probably totally went broke,” Martin recalled. “I never saw that cart path contractor again.”
Six months into the job, Martin learned that Suraphan’s gun wasn’t just for show. Several families of wild dogs lived near the golf course, and they’d dig holes in fairways and greens. Martin saw them as merely a nuisance, but Suraphan absolutely hated the dogs, and he told his staff to do whatever it took to get rid of the pests. They were costing him money.
Then, during one of his weekend visits to the job site, Martin took Suraphan on a drive around the course so he could update him on progress. Sure enough, there was a wild dog in the middle of one of the finished greens.
“Martin, I told you to fucking kill those dogs!” Suraphan said.
Martin chuckled, thinking Suraphan was just joking.
“Stop! Stop the truck!” Suraphan yelled.
Martin obliged, and in one motion Suraphan hopped out, reached into the waistband at the back of his blue jeans, pulled out his nine-millimeter and shot the dog dead. He got back in the truck, turned to Martin and said, “I don’t want to see any more dogs out here.”
Martin liked dogs. He had them as pets. And when, a couple of holes later, he spotted another dog, he started shaking his head. He knew what was coming – or at least he thought he did.
“Stop!” Suraphan screamed.
Martin stopped the truck and waited for Suraphan to hop out and shoot the dog. But this time Suraphan handed the pistol to Martin.
“You take care of this one,” Suraphan said.
Martin’s face went flush, and all the hairs on his body stood at attention. He didn’t have much experience with guns, and he had no desire to shoot anything. But he felt he couldn’t say no. Nobody could say no to Suraphan.
Martin took the gun and reluctantly left the driver’s seat. He could feel the sweat building up on his forehead. He slowly raised his right hand, hoping that, if he delayed long enough, the dog would run away.
“Shoot!” Suraphan screamed. “Shoot him!”
The shots burst out of the gun in such quick succession, Martin wasn’t sure how many there were. Five? Six? One thing was obvious: none of the shots came anywhere close to the dog, which had scampered off to safety with the first bang.
Martin was part emasculated, part relieved. Suraphan was laughing hysterically, uncontrollably, like it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen.
“It was all a joke to him,” Martin said.
Suraphan killed three dogs that day. And it only took him four shots to do it. Martin hoped he’d never see the nine-millimeter again.
He wouldn’t be so lucky. Half a year later, Martin and Suraphan were in a luxury van – yet another member of Suraphan’s fleet – returning to Khao Yai after a weekend trip to another Mission Hills project in Kanchanaburi in southwest Thailand, not far from the border with Burma. They were only four miles from the course in Khao Yai, but construction had traffic at a standstill. The road only had two lanes, but that didn’t stop some vehicles from trying to create their own, forcing themselves between and around stopped cars, making traffic move even slower. Martin had his attention focused on a ten-wheel dump truck on his side of the van trying to squeeze by them on the shoulder. Suraphan saw it, too.
“What is that asshole doing?” Suraphan roared.
The truck kept inching closer, and Suraphan kept shouting. The van couldn’t move, and the truck driver obviously didn’t know who he was messing with. He crept closer and closer, until he clipped the sideview mirror on the van and ripped it off. Suraphan was enraged.
“That fucker!” Suraphan screamed.
He reached under his seat, pulled out the pistol and leaned across Martin to slide open the van door. Then, with his arm extended in front of Martin’s frozen face, Suraphan aimed at the truck’s tires and squeezed the trigger four times. Problem solved, Suraphan closed the door and put the gun back under his seat. Martin was in shock, his face speckled with gunshot residue, his ears deafened.
“The truck driver didn’t do anything in response,” said Martin, whose hearing didn’t come back for over three hours. “He probably assumed it was a super VIP.”
And the driver would have been right. Suraphan was well connected, at the highest levels of the Thai government. Martin saw this influence firsthand. He knew the course at Khao Yai butted up against national park land – he’d seen herds of wild elephants on local roads – but he wasn’t aware that the course actually straddled the park. In fact, to get from hole No. 1 to No. 2, and then from hole No. 6 to No. 7, you had to traverse a small mountain that was protected land. Suraphan insisted a path traverse the mountain and connect the holes, and he instructed his workers to begin chiseling and dynamiting away. This effort was soon shut down by park police, and for about six months Suraphan’s team wasn’t allowed near the mountain. Suraphan was pissed off – and that was before he learned about the hefty fines he was expected to pay. But a leadership change was looming in Thailand, and the candidate Suraphan backed ended up winning.
“Within one month after that, they dynamited the fuck out of that mountain – got a road through there and everything,” Martin said. “And Suraphan only got fined five-hundred baht, or twenty bucks.”
Thailand would prove to be a perfect training ground for working in China.
*
When Wang Libo was a young boy, his grandfather would tell him stories about his years in Malaysia. He captivated Wang with descriptions of tall cement buildings with flat walls and square windows. “My grandfather told me modern buildings like that were everywhere over there,” Wang recalled. “And when he came back to Hainan all he saw were small stone houses with dirt floors and tiled roofs. He said people outside were living better than in Hainan. Hainan was very backwards back then.” Forty years had passed and Hainan villagers were still living in those one-story houses made of lava rock, just like they had for centuries. Wang, not yet a teenager at the time, dreamed of the day this would change. He thought the stone homes were dark and depressing. He wanted to live in a house where you could brush against a wall and not draw blood.
In 2000, at the age of twenty-seven, Wang realized his dream. He and his wife of three years moved out of his parents’ lava stone house, the house he had grown up in, and built a new home on a different plot of family land. The house was not large, but it had smooth walls and square windows. It was made of red brick and cement and was situated near the cement road. Cement was a status symbol in Meiqiu. People talked of saving up to build a “cement home” near the “cement road” and Wang was one of the first in Meiqiu to live in a house built using cement.
Wang said that while he admired the resiliency of the old stone homes – lava rock walls can last generations – he didn’t miss living in his old house at all. Life was easier in cement houses. And since villages were still closed to most vehicles, being close to the cement road meant he could get where he needed to go much faster. “Old stone homes are a reminder of old tough lives,” Wang said. “When everyone lived in old stone houses, we had to trade coupons for rice. There was no meat to eat. Now you can buy anything you want.”
Before passable roads were built in the late 1970s, everything was carried on the shoulders of people traveling on foot. In fact, many villagers still commonly use the unit of measurement dan, literally the amount of weight a grown man can carry ov
er his shoulder. Old men in Meiqiu recalled hauling sacks of coal to Haikou, a three-hour trek, hoping they could trade it for just one yuan. And then they began their journey back to the village, fearful that bandits would steal the only coin they had. Until the late 1980s, water was fetched from wells thirty meters deep. In the winter months, the wells would often run dry. What did the villagers do? “We didn’t use much water in the winter,” one longtime Meiqiu resident said wryly.
Meiqiu was the only home Wang had ever known. And, he figured, it would be the only home he’d ever know. Very few people leave the village, and those who do usually go just a short way down the road to Yongxing. Wang’s great-grandfather had told him that his ancestors probably arrived on the island several hundred, maybe even a thousand, years ago, from Fujian province in southeastern China. Everyone in the village, and several surrounding villages, shared this origin story. That explained why they were all ethnically Han Chinese and not part of the Li or Miao minorities native to Hainan. It also explained why everyone carried the same family name, Wang. Wang Libo assumed that if you looked far enough back in the family tree you’d find that everyone in Meiqiu was related in one way or another. And he’d later learn, as anyone with a large extended family will tell you, that this can be both a blessing and a curse.
Most villagers assumed their ancestors felt the area had auspicious feng shui. Meiqiu and the neighboring communities sit slightly east of what’s now a 27,000-acre national geological park. The park surrounds an extinct volcano crater and has earned the reputation of the “green lung of Haikou.” Locals say their air is cleaner than the surrounding parts of the island, that their primitive forests are more lush, that their location is less susceptible to wind and rain. The villages are also perched on a ridge, higher than many other parts of the island, which is thought to be more advantageous for burying and honoring the dead.
Wang’s family had been farmers for as long as he or his relatives could remember. The area’s rocky terrain was not suitable for most crops, including rice, but fruit trees thrived in the black, nutrient-rich volcanic soil. Wampee, guava, jackfruit, banana and longan are grown in family farms and harvested from the wild. But it’s the local lychees that are famous, and everyone brags about how big they are. Lychee season begins in May; jackfruit and wampee start to ripen in June. And while the fruit seasons are finite, the money they produce needs to last the entire year.
There have been plenty of interruptions to life on this island paradise, some of them rather severe. Things got so bad for Wang’s grandparents, they fled to Malaysia and lived there for several years before his father was born. “At that time, Hainan was in chaos,” Wang said, recalling the story he was told. “I’m not sure, maybe it was the Japanese War.” Hainan has seen its share of chaos. It has been ruled by many masters: dynastic generals, pirates, foreign imperialists, missionaries and feudal warlords, to name just a few. And then, of course, there were the Japanese, the Nationalists and the Communists, who arrived in succession during a turbulent, often terrible three decades, starting in the late 1930s.
Before the Japanese invasion of Hainan, which began in February 1939 and didn’t end until the close of the Second World War in 1945, Wang’s family lived in a village called Cangdao, just over two miles from Meiqiu. Cangdao was the largest village in the area and its residents had a reputation, compared to other villagers at least, for having large amounts of money and land. Wang said many men in Cangdao, intent on defending their possessions, formed citizen militias and bandit gangs after the Japanese invaded. Perhaps it was Cangdao’s size that caught Japanese attention. Perhaps it was its fight. Today, many believe it was a combination of the two, coupled with its hubris: Cangdao was one of the few villages in the area not to construct a protective exterior wall. It was an easy target, and Japanese soldiers burned it to the ground. The surviving Cangdao villagers limped off to seek refuge in neighboring villages. Most ended up in Meiqiu. “Some older villagers told me there were one thousand villagers in Cangdao before the Japanese came,” Wang said. “When we moved to Meiqiu, Cangdao had no more than one hundred people.”
According to stories told in the village, Meiqiu was a comparatively safe place to be during the Japanese occupation of Hainan. It was small enough to be ignored, and a wall of lava rocks, as tall as ten feet high in some places, encircled the village. The walls also came in handy later, when Chinese Nationalist forces controlled the island. “They would rob you,” one elderly Meiqiu resident said. “And if you didn’t give them what they wanted, they would threaten you with guns. But they weren’t like the Japanese, who took all your things, burned down your village and raped your women. They were Chinese. They just took your rice and your chickens. They didn’t kill farmers.”
The Meiqiu wall was knocked down decades ago, but Wang always felt fortified by the place. This was home. His father had lived in Meiqiu his entire life; Wang had been born and raised here. Over the past century his family had survived the same horrors as everyone else in the village. He never felt like an outsider, and thought he never would. But that was before anyone in Meiqiu had heard of the “Red Line” or Project 791.
2
First Club
Zhou Xunshu’s parents had always dreamed of having a police officer in the family. In 1995, at the age of twenty-three, Zhou enrolled in the Guizhou People’s Police School in Zunyi, a large city about six hours east of Bijie by bus. The school’s name was deceiving. It had been a state-run police academy, but by the time Zhou arrived it was a privately owned vocational college that churned out security guards. Most students didn’t stay the full two years, opting instead to sign on with an agency, arranged by the school, that placed them in low paying jobs throughout southern China.
During Zhou’s first few months in Zunyi, the mornings were filled with exercises: wushu (Chinese for “martial arts”), self-defense, bodybuilding. It was akin to basic training. But there was little to do the rest of the time, and Zhou became bored. The curriculum seemed poorly managed, the school disorganized. When they did have classes – on topics like fire prevention theory – he couldn’t see how they were relevant to his career. In late October, after six months, he dropped out. He took a job guarding an aluminum factory in Guiyang for 350 yuan ($42) a month.
Zhou hated the job. It was tedious, and the fumes from the factory floor made him sick. When he learned there were jobs available in the southern boomtown of Guangzhou in Guangdong province, and that thirteen of his former classmates were dropping out and leaving for the city the following day, he saw his chance. He was desperate to escape. He didn’t tell his bosses at the aluminum factory he was leaving. He had worked there only two days.
No one in Zhou’s family knew he was heading to Guangzhou. They didn’t even know he’d left police school. Zhou had no phone at the time, and it would take at least ten days for a message to reach his remote village by regular mail. He wasn’t in a hurry to discuss this decision with his parents anyway. They had paid his tuition – five thousand yuan, a lot of money for peasant farmers in Guizhou. They had saved it up for several years, and now it was gone.
*
Qixin – stuck on the side of a remote mountain, elevation six thousand feet – is perhaps the poorest village in Guizhou, perhaps the poorest province in China. Of course, there’s no way to prove this, but although the villagers aren’t starving these days, as they were a generation or two ago, there’s no denying life in this tiny collection of crude stone homes is harsh and antiquated.
The road to Qixin is narrow, barely a single lane, with tall walls of rock and earth on one side and a steep cliff dropping off the side of the mountain on the other. There are no guardrails on the road, and storms often render it impassable. But there’s only one other way to the top of the mountain – a four-hour hike. In the past, visitors not up for the trek would hop on the back of a horse. Today they must climb into the back of a beat-up blue dump truck. It was hard to imagine why people would choose to live in su
ch a place. “In old China, life was very tough,” explained the young driver of one of the trucks as he navigated the road, which was more rutted and muddy than normal. “Those with power would just kill the people they didn’t like. So many people got scared and ran for the mountains. Later on, those with money or those who became government officials left the mountain. Now, the only people who remain are the poor ones, like us.”
In the back of the truck, the driver’s passengers stood, gripping tight to the bed’s side rails, bracing their bodies as the vehicle lurched back and forth like a rowboat in rough water. At one point, as the driver waited for a van to unstick itself from the mud, his human cargo swallowed an uncomfortable view of the valley floor as the truck leaned towards the cliff’s edge.
The landscape was bleak – everything the color of a brown paper bag. The entire mountainside had long ago been carved into a series of dramatic terraces for farming, the only way people could subsist in such a harsh environment. Down below, on one of those perches, a farmer in mud boots used an ox to work the brown earth back to life, tilling the cold soil for the first time that year. Soon, he’d be planting tomatoes. In the distance beyond the farmer there was a wall built into the mountainside – a series of uniform circular pipe openings, too many to count, stacked atop one another.
These were crucibles, remnants of the dozens – maybe hundreds – of rudimentary zinc smelting furnaces that had been active on the mountainside in the 1990s. “They did not allow them to do it in the town, so they moved to the mountains,” the driver said. “Now, the country does not allow them to do it here any more, either. Too polluted.”
Reminders of the once-booming industry are everywhere. From the heights of the road, the remains of the demolished dome furnaces look like alien crop circles – and redundant graphite and terracotta crucibles, known as retorts, are ubiquitous. Rounded cones, about the size of an adult human thigh, they are now used by the villagers to build walls, reinforce walking paths and stave off soil erosion on their terraced farms. But most retorts go unused, littering the forest in piles that resemble spent artillery shells.