The Forbidden Game

by Dan Washburn

  Who knows what else the zinc smelters have left behind? Their methods of distilling metallic zinc from its ore (the end result is used in the production of brass) were crude, not much different than the process used in China hundreds of years ago. They’ve been known to contaminate soil and waterways with lead, cadmium, mercury and other heavy metals.

  Today, the zinc plants are rubble, and other industries are eyeing the region for its rich natural resources. Villagers on the mountain say a coal company from Shandong province has expressed interest in buying their land. There is also rumored to be gold in the hills. But residents can’t agree on a selling price. And some villagers aren’t interested in selling at all. They can’t imagine living anywhere else. They feel too much of a connection to their crops. Zhou Xunshu doesn’t understand these people at all.

  *

  A word that Zhou often uses to describe his childhood is ku, which means “bitter.” Qixin didn’t have electricity until the early 1990s, and despite China’s “opening up” under Deng Xiaoping, the effects of the planned economy days lingered in the village over the next decade. Even today, the average rural family in Guizhou earns less than a hundred dollars a month – just 4,753 yuan ($780) a year. Zhou remembers sharing a bed with two of his brothers. Many days he would grow hungry looking at the family’s boxes of government-provided potatoes, knowing they wouldn’t last. How could those boxes feed two parents, six children and various in-laws, aunts and uncles through the winter?

  They were hard times. Sometimes, in the coldest months, Zhou didn’t have shoes to wear. “When we traveled into town we could see other people had better lives than us,” he said.

  The family home was a short, steep walk up a muddy trail from the road. The house had been expanded in piecemeal fashion over the years. The main structure was a single-story box made of gray concrete, twenty feet wide at the front. Two worn wooden doors were hung on either side of three wood-framed casement windows. The window frames and doors, painted red some time ago, were faded, stained, peeling. By the time Zhou left to go to the police school, this main building had been bookended by two taller brick structures with sheets of corrugated metal covering their tiled gable roofs, and growing off of both of those were two newer shelters made of cinder block. A few steps back downhill was the family pigpen, with a sloped roof and extra insulation provided by a layer of empty plastic rice sacks. In the middle of all of this sat a large cement courtyard, which also served as the roof for an ox shed dug out underneath it. At the far end of the courtyard, a crude lean-to covered two stone slabs and a hole in the ground: the family’s only toilet. Squatting there, one could gaze on a deep forest; in the winter the leafless branches revealed a view of the terraced valley. On clear days, the mountains were never-ending. Songbirds trilled in the trees.

  As a child, Zhou attended Qixin’s school, studying by the light of kerosene lamps and seeking comfort from the heat of the coal furnace in the middle of the classroom. The primary school featured two classrooms, housing up to thirty students, grades one to five. This led to a lot of downtime for the children – when the teacher was giving a lesson to first graders, for example, all the other grades, as Zhou says, “did work on their own.” Students sat on long wooden benches behind long wooden tables. Teachers wrote on boards made black by the dried sap from a sumac tree. After class, he went out to work in the fields, cutting the tall grasses with a sickle.

  Neither of Zhou’s parents had attended school, and Zhou got a late start to his education. He didn’t begin primary school until he was nine, and he took another two years off after the fourth grade. He said it didn’t feel too strange being older than most of his classmates; when he was in fifth grade one of his fellow students was twenty-five. And lots of people in the village just never went to school at all.

  After Zhou finished fourth grade, the school was torn down. “The farmers in the village didn’t think about the kids,” he said. “Parents here only view school as a way to avoid being illiterate. They don’t see education as a way to change their future and help them out of poverty. So they removed the school and split up the bricks, stone and wood among themselves.” After that, he had to walk to a school in a village two hours away.

  Zhou said his forced two-year break from school was necessary because he was “very naughty in class.” He couldn’t sit still. He had trouble concentrating.

  Zhou eventually graduated from junior high school when he was eighteen. He spent four years studying to pass the senior high school entrance exam – his parents had hoped he would be the first family member to do so, following in the footsteps of the neighbors’ son who had got into university – but schooling had never been Zhou’s strong suit. Four years in a row he went through the motions in Bijie, and four years in a row he failed. “I just couldn’t really absorb anything,” Zhou said. “When I was studying, I always thought about other things.” He could only remember two of the English words he’d learned in school – face and apple – and claimed he “could never spell them right.” Feeling he had run out of options, in 1995 he enrolled in the military police school in Zunyi. Perhaps Zhou could become something after all.

  His family always had a chip on its shoulder. They felt picked on. They said that other people – those with power and money – were out to get them. Zhou’s grandfather had ended up in Qixin in 1931 after years of wandering, years of running. They moved to their current home – the site of it, at least – in 1948, when Zhou’s father was eleven. “They were very poor,” Zhou’s eldest brother, the only one of the family’s four brothers to still live in Qixin, explained. “The family moved from village to village trying to find a place they could afford to live. Finally, they settled here.”

  There’s a story about the family that’s been passed down from generation to generation. An ancestor named Zhou Youming, from Hunan province, was supposedly a general during the Ming Dynasty, nearly seven hundred years ago, and Emperor Zhu Hongwu asked him to go conquer Guizhou. After doing so, General Zhou, so the story goes, settled near Bijie. “After the general’s generation, we just went backwards,” Zhou’s eldest brother, known simply as First Brother to family members, said, an M-shaped crease forming between his eyebrows as he spoke.

  Zhou, also known as Fourth Brother, had never been convinced there was a general in the family. “It’s just a folk tale,” he would say. “There are no historical documents to prove it. We’ve always been peasant farmers. Always.”

  Perhaps because of the perceived fall in the family’s fortunes, they were especially conscious of the sting of rejection. “Let me tell you. It was because during my grandpa’s time, our family did not have money, and so we were always looked down upon. They were bullied all the time and that is why we moved to five different places. Over and over again. Finally, they were barely able to settle down here,” First Brother said. He took a long intense draw on his Huangguoshu cigarette, named after Guizhou’s famous waterfall, the largest in the nation. His chain-smoking, combined with his jet-black pompadour hairstyle, recalled a 1950s movie greaser transported to rural China.

  “This is why we’ve always wanted to have a policeman in this family – to avoid the family being bullied,” First Brother said. “But Fourth Brother did not want to do this.”

  Nope – Zhou Xunshu was on a train to a new life in Guangzhou.

  *

  When Zhou and his classmates boarded the train, they might have been mistaken for soldiers in their police school uniforms, but for the lack of any badges. Tickets for the thirty-hour trip to Guangzhou were one hundred yuan, and Zhou was lucky to find a seat. The train was overflowing with migrants, all hoping to find work in the city.

  Zhou was scared. He had fifty yuan in his pocket and no guarantee of a job. He desperately wanted to prove to his family that he could make it on his own. He didn’t want to have to return to Guizhou and admit he had made a poor choice. In fact, he didn’t want to return to Guizhou at all. He hugged his bag tightly. It contained all of
his belongings: a toothbrush and toothpaste, a blanket, two pairs of underwear, one collared shirt, a T-shirt and a pair of trousers.

  In Guangzhou, the boys stuck together. They booked rooms in the cheapest hotel they could find: ten yuan a night. Zhou had trouble sleeping that first evening; he knew he’d be out of money soon. There was no way he could return home a jobless, penniless dropout.

  But if there was one thing Guangzhou had in the 1990s, it was jobs. After a decade of reforms on the mainland, many firms from Hong Kong had moved production to Guangdong, creating a huge demand for unskilled labor. By 2000, the Pearl River Delta was home to an estimated 22 million migrant workers. Fewer than 3 percent of them returned home permanently. In the previous decade, Guangdong’s population had grown nearly 40 percent.

  The day after the dropouts from the Guizhou People’s Police School arrived in Guangzhou, all fourteen had jobs. “You all will start work at Dongguan Fengjing tomorrow,” their contact at the employment agency said.

  “Dongguan Fengjing – what’s that?”

  “A golf course.”

  Silence.

  Finally, one of them asked bravely: “What’s that?”

  The boys were told golf was a game for rich people, mostly foreigners. That was it.

  Their arrival at Fengjing, forty-six miles east of Guangzhou, near the manufacturing city of Dongguan, did not enlighten the confused security team. The Chinese word fengjing translates to “hillview,” and that’s all they could see: brown hill after brown hill, plus some bulldozers. The view went on forever. How many rich foreigners does it take to play this game? Zhou wondered.

  Zhou would not find out – not at Fengjing, at least. He left after only five months, before the course was completed, before there was any grass on the ground. Five months was long enough for Zhou to prove himself as a security guard, however. He earned a reputation for being a leader, and was considered the de facto head of security, although he still earned the same six hundred yuan monthly salary as everyone else.

  Ironically for Zhou, the young man bored by the fire prevention lectures at the police school, it was his performance in helping fight brushfires in the small mountains surrounding Fengjing that would change his life. The hills were ablaze, and the fire was threatening to spread to Fengjing’s course. Zhou rounded up the team and organized a plan of attack. Armed with hand axes and machetes, they entered the smoke-filled woods, their mouths covered only by kerchiefs. For an entire day, the young men chopped and hacked, chopped and hacked. The result was a twenty-two-yard-wide firebreak that ran the length of the forest. It stopped the fire in its tracks.

  His initiative caught the eye of a Fengjing manager who had grown to like Zhou through their daily conversations. When the manager left to work at Guangzhou International Golf Club, less than an hour’s drive to the north, he suggested Zhou should have an interview for a security job there. He gave Zhou the contact details for Frank Lin, a businessman from Singapore. “It will be more money,” the manager assured Zhou. “Meet with Mr. Lin.”

  Lin hired Zhou on the spot, at a starting salary of one thousand yuan a month – three times what Zhou had been making as a security guard in Guizhou. “I just got a good feeling from talking to him,” Lin said. “The way he looked, the way he talked. He just came across as a very honest and trustworthy person.”

  Zhou had landed his second job at a golf course – and he still had no idea what golf was.

  *

  Martin Moore had already done his years of “shit duty” in rural Asia. He had paid his dues at Mission Hills Khao Yai, and was now headed for paradise. It was the summer of 1995, and Jack Nicklaus’ team had already informed Martin he’d been tapped to be the project manager at a course set to break ground in Surfers Paradise, part of Australia’s Gold Coast, starting that September or October. Martin was working a course remodel in Okayama, Japan, and he couldn’t wait to start something new. What could be better than sun and sand Down Under? His shaper in Okayama had recently left, and instead of waiting for a new person to arrive, Martin got behind the wheel of the bulldozer himself and started shaping greens. “I wanted to get that project done,” Martin said. “I was going to Surfers Paradise!” He was already daydreaming of topless beaches and snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef.

  Then Martin received a call from Lee Schmidt, one of Nicklaus’ designers back in the States. He warned Martin he should expect an unwelcome call – asking him to go to Kunming, China. Martin’s heart sank. He had no idea where Kunming was, but knew it was nowhere near Surfers Paradise. And the reports Martin had heard from colleagues working in China were not positive. Everyone talked about the filth, the crowds, the yelling, the spitting. No one seemed to enjoy it.

  “Do you remember, around two years ago, a guy named Arthur came to visit you at Khao Yai in Thailand?” Schmidt asked Martin. “Well, he wants you to be the design coordinator on a new course. He specifically asked for you.”

  Martin did recall his one and only encounter with Arthur Yeo, a businessman from Singapore. Yeo had been introduced as a future client of Jack Nicklaus, and Martin had lunch with him, answered some questions and took him on a tour of the Mission Hills Khao Yai job site. It was a pretty standard site visit. Martin had done several of them before. He spent maybe five hours with Yeo, and never thought much about him again.

  But sure enough, a few days after talking with Lee Schmidt, he received a call from Nicklaus’ right-hand man, Bill O’Leary.

  “Do you want to go to Kunming, China?” O’Leary asked.

  Martin had been rehearsing his response for days. “Hell no,” he said.

  O’Leary chuckled and said, “Okay, I just thought I’d ask. Arthur wanted us to ask you. I don’t blame you. I’d go to Surfers Paradise, too.”

  Three days later, Martin received another call. It was O’Leary again.

  “Arthur keeps bugging me. He really wants you to go there,” O’Leary said.

  Martin stuck to his original response. Nothing was going to keep him from the beach.

  Three more days passed, and another call from O’Leary.

  “Martin,” he said, “Arthur says he’s not going to do a Jack Nicklaus golf course unless you’re the project manager.”

  “Okay, Bill,” Martin said. “Tell Arthur I’ll do it for an extra three thousand dollars a month.”

  “Ha,” went O’Leary. “They’ll never give you that.”

  “I know. That’s the idea.”

  Twenty-four hours later, O’Leary called Martin again. Arthur Yeo had accepted Martin’s terms.

  *

  Martin didn’t know what to expect in China, “other than, there wasn’t much golf.” And if the country as a whole was a mystery, the city of Kunming was a secret. While he knew people who had worked in China, he had yet to meet anyone who had heard of Kunming.

  That wasn’t too surprising. In the mid-1990s, foreigners who found their way to the capital city of Yunnan province tended to be either students or backpackers. “Westerners were looked at as if they’d just disembarked from a spaceship,” one longtime Kunming resident said. Yunnan province borders Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, and parts of it felt like an extension of Southeast Asia. Martin figured his experience in Thailand was the reason Yeo had been so insistent.

  When Martin arrived, Kunming’s population was somewhere around two million, but it still felt more like a town than a city. A few maze-like sections of old Kunming still existed – crooked lanes lined with rickety mud and wood-framed houses with tiled roofs that sprouted grass and flowers. But it was clear where things were headed: to wider roads, taller buildings, vanishing character. The bits of tradition that lingered among the city’s attempts at modernity caught Martin’s eye: old men, their skin wrinkled and dark from the sun, inhaling tobacco smoke from large bamboo bongs; street food hawkers crushing into spaces on nearly every sidewalk, the pungent aroma of their Yunnan spices – if Martin breathed too deeply, the hot chilies made his nose run – doing battle with
the stench of the public toilets; members of Yunnan’s many minority groups walking the streets wearing traditional clothing and jewelry, styles that, in many cases, haven’t changed in centuries. Some women wore what Martin thought looked like intricately embroidered tapestries, with bold, bright colors, accented by elaborate silver jewelry that often covered large portions of their arms and chests. If the sun hit them just right, Martin suspected he might be blinded.

  Martin saw nearly no private cars on Kunming’s streets. Traffic consisted almost entirely of buses, taxis and bicycles. He slowed as a bicycle passed him, carrying a slaughtered pig, its split carcass stuck on a spike mounted above the bicycle’s rear wheel, the pig’s head and tail flopping with each push of a pedal. To be sure, Martin had not landed at a beach resort in Australia.

  In the days before construction was set to begin, Martin settled into the Holiday Inn in downtown Kunming. It was a brand he recognized. “That Holiday Inn was the only place civilized at all in Kunming,” he said. “You could actually order a pizza in there. And they had a bowling alley in there. Every couple weeks, Arthur and I would get together and bowl a few games, order pizza and drink some beer. But that was it. There wasn’t anything else.”

  He had been called to Kunming to work on Spring City Golf and Lake Resort. It was prime, undeveloped land, situated on the eastern shore of Yangzong Lake, about thirty miles east of Kunming. Across the water from Spring City, there was one floundering resort, where Martin eventually moved to be close to the construction site, but otherwise the lake was fringed by farmland and a few small villages. At the far end of the lake, Martin could see a smoke-spewing, coal-fired power plant to the north and an aluminum plant to the west. He was told that local government officials had assured Yeo that both of these eyesores would soon be closed down.