The Forbidden Game

by Dan Washburn

  Culture shock was less of an issue for Martin this time around. Like Arthur Yeo, Spring City’s developers were from Singapore, and so were many of the staffers; most spoke English, so language was not much of a problem. The most common gripe was the remoteness of the project. There were a couple of “total shithole restaurants” they’d go to in the closest village, and sometimes they’d slurp a bowl of noodles in a tent on site provided by one of the contractors, but Martin would often cook something up on the two-burner stove back at his place.

  Trips to Kunming were infrequent because the only way to the city at that time was a circuitous two-lane road that looped around most of the lake. The journey was a good ninety minutes if there wasn’t an accident. But there were often accidents. One in particular, Martin will never forget.

  The power plant was nestled on the edge of the lake because there was a coal mine nearby, and the road was often lined with creaky, overloaded blue dump trucks that created a sooty dotted line between the mine and the plant. There were tractor-trailers, too, which barely fit on the road and struggled to make it up the inclines. So Martin was used to slow traffic to and from the course, but this wasn’t the usual traffic jam. Something was wrong. When his truck finally crawled up to the scene of the accident, he cringed. There was a truck so mangled it was hardly recognizable. Another car had rolled down an embankment. For some reason, a pickup truck on the side of the road caught Martin’s eye. There was a blanket or tarp laid out in the truck’s bed, with something protruding from underneath it, hanging out over the open tailgate. Suddenly, Martin realized he was looking at a human leg. The image stuck with him for several days – as did the actual body.

  “On my way to the job site the next morning, he was still there,” Martin said. “Left the job site that evening, he was still there. He was there for three days on the back of that pickup truck.”

  It seemed things operated differently in China.

  *

  According to Arthur Yeo, the political climate surrounding golf was “pretty good” when Martin took the Kunming job. Modern China had around fifteen golf courses by this point, and it would be another decade before Beijing announced that building new golf courses was illegal. As Yeo put it, “nobody knew what golf was about” in China. And in many ways, nobody knew what China was about, either.

  Yeo said Spring City’s developer, Straits Steamship Land Limited (now known as Keppel Land), insisted on the course being legal. “Being a Singapore publicly listed company, we don’t take risks,” he said. “But it wasn’t easy. Nothing is easy in China. It took us a while to get it.” Yeo maintained that Spring City was legal in the eyes of Beijing, meaning its business license specifically mentioned the word “golf.” This is a status perhaps only a dozen courses in China today can lay claim to, although you’d be hard pressed to find anyone working in China’s golf industry who could list such super legit courses with any certainty. For what it was worth, the local Yiliang county government was quite open about its involvement in Spring City – it owned a 20 percent stake in the project.

  As Spring City was winding down, Martin knew there was something he had to do before he left: watch an execution. It wasn’t something he particularly wanted to do, but he felt obligated to do it all the same. The mayor of Yiliang county had been very persistent, and the county’s support had been instrumental to the project.

  Perhaps, Martin thought, the mayor wanted to introduce his new foreign friend to some local color that never got mentioned in the guidebooks. “He kept inviting me the whole freaking job,” Martin said. It’s estimated that China executes several thousand people per year, more than the rest of the world combined, and Yunnan province accounts for a good portion of those deaths due to its close proximity to Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle, a hotbed of heroin and opium production. Drug trafficking is a capital offense in China. “‘Come on down and watch us execute a drug dealer.’ He asked me at least twenty times during my year and a half at Spring City,” Martin said.

  They got drunk before they went out to watch the men die. Normally, Martin tried to avoid the mid-day drinkfests with local officials, but this was one liquid lunch he was happy to partake in; the beer and baijiu might dull his senses before the main event. He didn’t realize it at the time, but in a way he was watching history. Death by firing squad had been China’s modus operandi for executions since 1949, but starting in 1996 Yunnan province began experimenting with lethal injection as an alternative, and formally adopted it as its primary practice in 1997, even introducing mobile killing units called “execution vans.” One of the stated rationales for the change was to lessen the spread of HIV from blood splatter.

  That day, Martin didn’t see much blood. He didn’t see much of anything. He and the mayor stood gazing out onto an empty field, empty save for a single wooden stool located about half a football pitch from them. Five uniformed men holding rifles waited as a prisoner wearing what looked like a white pillowcase over his head was guided to the stool and lifted on to it. (Martin was thankful he couldn’t see the man’s face.) Then the execution happened: a thud of simultaneous rifle fire followed fast by the thud of a body hitting the earth. The dead man was carried off, and another live prisoner was placed on the stool. And it all happened again. Then it was time to go back to Spring City. “We all went back to work,” Martin said. “I remember finishing up the day. It didn’t seem to bother me that much at all.”

  There was little pomp and circumstance. It all seemed unusually routine. Still, Martin was sure the viewing was bestowed upon him as an honor. “He was a very nice guy,” he said. “He was one of the reasons we didn’t have any trouble.”

  But that was not to say everything at Spring City went smoothly. As Martin’s first experience dealing with Chinese contractors, it was “an eye-opener.” “It was like, Jesus,” Martin said. “Just contractors lying to you. Lying and cheating and trying to cut every corner and, you know, just doing poor work. If you rode them hard, they’d try to backstab you. It was tough.”

  For the most part, they weren’t contractors Martin had chosen as project manager. They weren’t contractors he could replace, either. It was all pre-ordained through back-room handshakes and side deals that happened long before Martin arrived on the scene. “They’ll flat out tell you, ‘We’ve already chosen the dirt contractor. It’s a government company,’” Martin said. “It happens a lot. It’s black and white.” Occasionally a contractor seems to have a stranglehold on local business. Or maybe somebody’s cousin runs the state-owned firm. Sometimes it’s clear that certain permits or approvals are granted more swiftly to a specific contractor.

  In golf course construction, “dirt contractors” play an important role. They’re the initial earth movers. They do the bulk grading, the cut and fill. They dig out the lakes and build the hills. If they don’t do their job well, it slows the whole project down. “Usually they’re absolutely horrible,” Martin said of the Chinese crews. In Kunming, he realized, “you can’t tell them what to do – and you’re told that. They’re a government company. They hire us as the management company, but good luck managing that.”

  Martin learned rather quickly that much would be beyond his control, and that there were local rules he’d need to navigate around. Like, for example, the unofficial toll stops that would often delay truck deliveries. In China, golf courses are commonly thought to be magnets for local business development. What they don’t say is how much of that business is outside the scope of the project itself. Everyone wants a piece of the action, a fact Martin observed one day as he pondered why a large shipment of sand had yet to arrive on site. He heard the contractor’s trucks were not too far down the road, held up by the local cops. The trucks were forced to stop and negotiate for a permit to display in their windows to be allowed to complete their deliveries. Otherwise, deliveries would stop until the police moved on. “There were times when the deliveries would go good for a month and then, suddenly, they would stop again,” Martin sa
id. “Well, the trucks got stopped by the police again.” And they’d have to wait for the roadblocks to be cleared.

  It reminded Martin of Thailand, where, before major holidays, or any other time of the year when the police were running low on money, they’d set up random roadblocks that most people knew to be a kind of forced donation line. Martin learned to stay silent and keep his passport hidden. Back in Thailand, he’d just roll down his window, hand over five hundred baht and go on his way, no questions asked.

  Martin longed for the simplicity of Thailand.

  *

  Unlike at Fengjing, when Zhou Xunshu arrived at Guangzhou International Golf Club, the course was finished. There were bunkers instead of bulldozers, and more grass than Zhou had seen in his life. His first day there, Zhou inspected every corner of the course. He found the green hills and lush lawns calming, and for the first time in months he thought of Qixin, with an unusual sense of nostalgia. “It felt like I was grazing my cows in the village,” he recalled.

  Zhou’s early days at Guangzhou International were carefree. For a short time, he was a man unburdened by aspiration or expectation, unencumbered by any knowledge of golf whatsoever. When a colleague brought a camera to work and suggested he and Zhou take photographs on the golf course, Zhou did what came naturally to him: in his khakis, black loafers and a bright yellow “Marlboro” windbreaker, he acted out maneuvers he had learned in his wushu training. At a tee box, he chose a “horse-riding” stance; near the main gate he did a “flying kick”; and in a sand trap he posed as “golden rooster standing on one leg,” raising the bunker rake like a weapon. “Those photos of him doing kung fu moves on the golf course make me laugh,” said Zhou’s wife Liu Yan, years later. “He’s so thin, and he has hair! It seems he lived a happy life back then. Happier than now.”

  When Guangzhou International opened, it was one of the most exclusive clubs in the region. Memberships sold for 240,000 yuan ($28,500) – more than a poor peasant boy from rural Guizhou could fathom – and mostly businessmen from Hong Kong and Taiwan snatched them up. In a way, Zhou already felt as though he had “made it,” though he was only twenty-three. He was earning more money than anyone he knew back in Guizhou; his “office” was the most beautiful place he’d ever seen. Every day, though club rules didn’t allow him to interact with the clientele, there he was, standing in close proximity to men worth millions of yuan – men worth more than everyone in Qixin, probably worth more than a dozen or so neighboring villages, combined.

  The course was one of the area’s nicest, designed by the international firm Nelson & Haworth. But it was emblematic of the Guangzhou boom, an island of luxury surrounded by industry. Guangzhou International was sixty miles east of the city, in Xiancun town, part of greater Zengcheng city, which was home to mainland China’s heaviest concentration of cement factories – and, according to some, the worst air quality in all of Guangdong province. There were hundreds of factories in the area, each spewing a noxious mixture of smoke and cement powder from their redbrick kilns. After playing eighteen holes, golfers would sometimes return to the clubhouse looking like ghosts, their bodies coated in gray dust.

  Zhou didn’t care about a little cement dust. He was taken with his new surroundings. He called back home to inform friends and relatives of the fascinating new world he had discovered. “You must come,” he said. One of Zhou’s brothers did a stint working in the club’s cafeteria. Eventually Zhou’s security force was composed entirely of Guizhou exiles. Lu Zhan, a classmate from police school, was one of them. Lu’s career move was a lateral one – he left a security guard job for the one at Guangzhou International – but he saw it as a step up. “Even though there weren’t many golf courses,” Lu said, “we all knew golf as a noble sport – a game for rich men. We all felt that by just being in that environment, we had already raised our social standing.”

  *

  Soon, just being in the environment wasn’t enough for Zhou. He was drawn to the game, and desperately wanted to be part of the action. This had nothing to do with money or fame – the concept of “pro golfer,” which had existed as an official vocation in China for less than two years, was still unknown to him. Instead, he wanted the challenge. Zhou had always been athletic – he grew up playing basketball on a dirt court in his village – and he was fiercely competitive. He wanted to give this golf thing a try. But he couldn’t: security guards were forbidden to play.

  It’s not uncommon for people from mainland China to speak openly about their distrust of the Taiwanese. Taiwan, the orthodox line goes, is a breakaway province, and the Taiwanese are traitors. This is what many are raised to believe, even if they’ve never actually encountered someone from Taiwan. Zhou thought differently. Sure, he held an irrational hatred of all people from Taiwan, but for Zhou it wasn’t political. It was personal. The one Taiwanese person he’d met in all his life – the general manager at Guangzhou International – was the only thing standing between him and golf.

  Guangzhou International was a private club with a wealthy clientele, and keeping up appearances was important. Thus, the club’s manager made it a rule that non-managerial staff were not allowed to play the game or even use the driving range. Zhou, despite overseeing a large portion of the security force, was not officially a manager, and the rule proved torturous for him. One of Zhou’s duties was following playing groups around the course, and reporting their whereabouts back to the clubhouse via walkie-talkie. He studied the golfers carefully. The shapes their bodies made when they hit the ball. The way they dressed. The way they interacted. The strange etiquette of it all. He was fascinated. The more Zhou watched, the more he appreciated the nuances of the game. This was more than grown men hitting a white ball into a hole in the ground, more than trying to see who can make the ball go the farthest. There was strategy, and Zhou appreciated this. He started taking note when golfers reached into their bags to select a different club, and used his binoculars to try and make out the number printed on the bottom. He didn’t quite understand what it meant, but he knew it must be important.

  Zhou spent his days watching other people play the game. “I loved it crazily,” he said. “I even dreamed of hitting balls in my sleep.” Often, his dreams were so vivid he could feel the softness of the fairway grass beneath his feet, the texture of the club’s rubber grip in his hands. Backswings gave him goosebumps, and the moment of impact – when clubface and ball would collide – was an explosion of excitement he could feel move from his fingertips to his arms to a place deep in his chest cavity. The elation would often jolt him awake. He’d sit up in bed, out of breath and sweating. Then Zhou would spot his security guard uniform hanging in the dormitory window. He’d see the cement floor and walls, the mosquito nets, the three roommates asleep nearby, the metal fan that did little more than move hot air around the room. He’d lie back down and close his eyes, hoping to be transported once again to a world where he was allowed to play.

  “It was like having a delicious piece of meat in your mouth, but not being able to eat it,” Zhou said. “So bad.”

  For two long years, Zhou walked and watched, hoping one day he’d get a taste of the game that captivated him so. Then, in 1998, representatives from PING, an American golf club manufacturer, visited Guangzhou International. At the driving range, the PING reps, the club instructors and the club’s executive team – led by the Taiwanese general manager – tested out some top-of-the-line drivers. Zhou, dressed in his security guard uniform, looked on as the men tried to hit the ball over a tree-covered hill about fifty yards behind the yardage marker that read “225.” A small crowd had formed, including Zhou’s immediate boss, Wang Shiwen, a serious-faced but friendly northeasterner. Nobody could clear the trees. Not even the Taiwanese GM, who often boasted about his credentials as a professional golfer.

  Then, a voice from the distance. It was Zhou.

  “Leader,” he said, addressing Wang. “Can I have a try?”

  Several in the group responded by laughin
g. The security guard wants to take a swing? The general manager teased Zhou: “This is a really expensive club,” he said in a sarcastic, sing-songy tone usually reserved for children. “If you break it, can you afford to pay three thousand yuan on your salary?” Everybody in the crowd knew the answer to this question, especially Zhou, who worked the numbers over in his head: it’d take him a quarter of a year to earn the value of the club.

  Wang knew of Zhou’s desire to golf. “If he breaks it, I’ll buy it,” he jumped in. “Give the boy a try.” Based on Wang’s tone, this was not a request; it was an order.

  Years later, Wang would admit his actions that day were fueled in part by nationalistic pride. “At that time, for people like us, people from the mainland who worked at golf courses but didn’t have lots of money, it was rare to see such a good club,” Wang explained. “And if we did see one, no one would let us play with it. Usually we only played with old discarded or reassembled clubs.”

  Zhou was a fixture at the driving range. Whenever he had free time, he’d carefully watch the instructors as they practiced. But Zhou had never hit a ball before. He was very much a novice, a greenhorn. And now he was going to take his first swings of a driver in front of a crowd? A snickering, unforgiving crowd? This was a gamble, to be sure. There was little chance that anyone would be losing three thousand yuan – something would have to go horribly wrong for Zhou to actually damage the club – but a loss of face seemed guaranteed.

  This did not deter Zhou, who was just ignorant enough about golf to fail to understand how substantially the odds were stacked against him. Vegas would have had him a long shot even to make contact. But Zhou, seeing this as his only chance, stepped forward. He removed his hat. He removed his tie. He loosened the collar of his white button-down shirt. He took the three-thousand-yuan club in his hands, which were shaking.