The Forbidden Game

by Dan Washburn

  Beer, Zhou said, was a necessary ingredient to a good night’s sleep. “The night before last I couldn’t sleep because I did not drink any beer that night,” he said during one tournament. “I need alcohol to relax.” Another time, he complained of a restless night, this time not because he didn’t consume any beer, but because the beers he drank only had a 2.8 percent alcohol content. The next night, when a call to the front desk confirmed the hotel had cold beers available for purchase, he celebrated like it was Christmas. When the bottles arrived at his door, he inspected the labels carefully. The brand was Sedrin, and the alcohol content was 3.6 percent. These would do.

  “He pijiu, hao shuijiao,” Zhou said with a smile as he opened his first bottle. “Drink beer, sleep well.” A little less than an hour later, he was snoring, the TV remote control still in his hand.

  *

  Zhou was friendly and polite with many of his fellow players, but he rarely let anyone get close. He admitted to being a bit of an introvert, and on tour he often appeared to be a loner, but he had cultivated a reputation for being honest and straightforward. The worst thing anyone said about him was that he was the loudest snorer on the China Tour.

  Secretly, Zhou found most golfers on the tour to be arrogant or “putting on airs.” He wasn’t too concerned with clothing, and was perturbed by golfers who seemed to treat the China Tour as a fashion show. “If it looks okay and is comfortable, that’s enough,” he said. “I do not need to think about what to wear or how to dress to attract the camera everyday. Not necessary!”

  He had personal grudges against several other players, some of whom he felt were two-faced, and others he believed had slighted him in some way. He didn’t always like how they passed time after the day’s play had ended, either. At one tournament, when a fellow golfer asked Zhou if he wanted to go into town with him to get a massage, Zhou politely declined. After the other golfer left, Zhou said, “Frankly speaking, he is going out to find a prostitute, and that is why I never go with those golfers, no matter where they say they are going. In a rural town like this, it is hard to find a real massage parlor, because only bosses go to places like that. Here there are only farmers.”

  Zhou felt he had more in common with those farmers, or with the workers picking weeds on the course. “I like pure, simple people,” he said. And while Zhou knew many golfers on the tour had also grown up poor, he was convinced none of them had grown up as poor as he had. None of their paths to golf was as wild and random as his was. He also suspected that approximately 90 percent of the China Tour’s golfers had finagled some kind of external financial support, whereas he was struggling to make ends meet.

  He had a chip on his shoulder. And it was sizable.

  Admittedly, Zhou had made little effort to find a sponsor. He was not a good salesman, especially if selling himself. He didn’t believe in boasting, and didn’t like listening to others do it, either. He wanted to be recognized for his actions, not his words. “I don’t know how to ask people to sponsor me,” Zhou said. “It feels just like begging people for money. I can’t do that.”

  ‌5

  ‌No Choice

  “At night there are mosquitoes.”

  From Zhou. A text message. And by his standards, a lengthy and informative one. He had sent it from the driving range, two hours before his 10 a.m. opening round tee time. So there were mosquitoes in the hotel in Qingdao – but still no word on where the hotel was. Or its phone number. Or its name. The message did represent progress, however. In the days leading up to his second stop on the 2007 China Tour, Zhou’s electronic missives had been even shorter. He had sent word that the hotel was “bad” and then “very bad,” but no more than that.

  In Qingdao the odd communications continued: 华山洗浴宾馆. Huashan Xiyu Binguan. Huashan Shower Hotel. It didn’t sound good, in English or Chinese. And first you had to get there.

  Zhou had discovered early on that finding transportation to golf courses in China is rarely easy and often expensive. Because they are so new, the courses, like China’s airports, are almost never close to a city center. Qingdao’s Liuting International Airport was twenty miles north of the city, and Qingdao Huashan Golf & Resort was twenty miles further to the northeast, where all you’d find otherwise was farmland and factories. No Chinese taxi drivers earned enough to play golf, and they rarely knew how to get to the far-flung courses. If a Chinese cabbie knew one thing about golf, it was that it’s a rich man’s game – and rich men in China have their own cars and drivers. They’d often refuse the long trip, because they knew there wouldn’t be a passenger available for the return fare.

  One China guidebook says visiting Qingdao is like “stepping into a replica of a nineteenth-century Bavarian village.” The city had been a German concession from the late 1800s until the early 1920s, and many Teutonic buildings still stand. But for anyone participating in the Qingdao leg of the China Tour, there was no need to visit Qingdao. Instead you had to go to Huashan.

  Huashan hadn’t aged well. The town had only officially been around since 1992, and the buildings along Zhifu Road, intended to serve as its “Main Street,” were all less than ten years old. Yet the whole scene looked worn and depressed. The tan tile exteriors of the buildings were coated in a permanent layer of dust – the road was not yet fully paved – and the steps leading up to their entrances were cracked and crumbling. The facades of the buildings were split in half by large plastic billboards announcing garishly what was inside: a bank; a clothing store; an insurance agency; a mobile phone dealer; a man who would fix your eyeglasses or your wristwatch, or both. Some shop signs were so big they made it difficult to see out of the windows on the second floor.

  In a way, downtown Huashan and its dusty main drag was nothing more than a modern version of a frontier town in America’s Old West. It seemed as though it had been cobbled together hurriedly, in anticipation of the rush of people to come. There was a hint of lawlessness. In an effort to ward off intruders, every ground floor shop window was veiled with jailhouse-like metal bars (though many were beginning to rust). The occasional street lamp lit Zhifu Road, but beyond its parallel rows of tiled buildings, it was pitch black. That darkness was deceiving, however, because out in the unlit distance was where all the life was: the countryside villages, where most of the area’s fifty thousand residents lived. Maybe some day that rush of people would come, but in 2007, Zhifu Road felt like a deserted, bankrupt strip mall.

  The Huashan Shower Hotel was on Songshan Road, the only Huashan side street that glowed, thanks to the buzzing purple, red and yellow signs announcing the Arc de Triomphe (Kai Xuan Men) Music Bar. Kai Xuan Men occupied the same new three-story pastel-green building as the Shower Hotel. It was a karaoke bar, or “KTV,” the widely accepted Chinese genteelism for “brothel.”

  The bar’s entrance faced the road, and the door was always open, revealing what could have been, to the casual observer, a sparsely decorated Chinese living room. Placed conspicuously near the doorway was a red sofa decorated with large white cartoon paw prints. Next to the sofa was a Christmas tree. It was almost June. Usually, one or two girls – they looked like they could have been in their late teens, but it was hard to tell – sat atop the sofa dressed in clothes one would wear to go shopping on the weekend. They lounged listlessly, staring at the opposite wall as if they were getting ready to watch a rerun of the evening news. Occasionally, a toddler would be seated with them. They’d all giggle when the rare foreigner walked by.

  The bar and the hotel shared the building with Xiang Yun Ge Restaurant, a banquet-style Chinese restaurant boasting plenty of private rooms and enough space to host a large wedding reception. On the first day of the tournament, the dining hall was filled to capacity for a private party, or so the hostess claimed. It didn’t seem she was lying, given the number of cars scattered about the street. The restaurant – not the pro golf tournament down the road – was the hottest ticket in town that day. According to the hostess, their customers were mostly
government officials or executives with local state-owned enterprises. But this was still the countryside, and the men filing in and out had an agrarian glow about them – crew cuts, weathered brown skin and dirt on their shoes.

  The lobby was cold, in both temperature and ambience. The floor was faux marble. The walls were cement and painted white. One side of the lobby was decked out with oversized living room furniture upholstered in imitation leather that had begun to blister long ago. Above the sofa hung a large painting of a waterfall. The other half of the lobby boasted the day’s fresh ingredients – arranged in more than forty white plastic and Styrofoam containers on the floor. Huashan is close to the Yellow Sea, and the selection of creatures and animal parts on offer looked like lab prep for a university biology course. Chicken gizzards, pig kidneys, silkworm pupae, plump bamboo worms, entire freshly plucked chicken carcasses, quails, squid two feet long, shrimp, cuttlefish, stingrays, octopuses with bulging, translucent eyes, chickens’ feet, conches, snails, coagulated pig’s blood, and various fish, mollusks, tendons, hearts and other entrails. Each item was sitting in its own fluids or juices or blood or slime, all waiting to be cooked up and served as lunch.

  *

  In most Chinese cities or towns, regardless of size, there is usually someone willing to take you where you want to go, for a price – whether it’s in a Volkswagen, a motorized rickshaw, or on the back of a motorcycle. But despite all the cars outside the Xiang Yun Ge, not one was for hire. No taxis. Nothing. The only option, it seemed, was to walk. The course was about twenty-five minutes away by foot. How were the golfers staying at the Shower Hotel getting to the course each morning?

  Walking north along a newly laid road – almost all of the roads in Huashan were new – you were quickly surrounded by farmland, but signs of the inevitable change soon to come to the area were visible in the distance. The farms were being phased out. Next to each brand-new, multi-story building stood a cluster of construction cranes, ready to erect more new buildings. In 2001, the Shandong provincial government had declared Huashan one of six “high-tech industry development zones” in the province. Multinational companies from Singapore, South Korea and Japan had moved in and opened factories. Toiling in the fields was a thing of the past. The local people now worked on electronic gadgetry: computers and MP3 players.

  Nonetheless, Shandong, together with Hebei and Henan provinces, still accounts for nearly 10 percent of the world’s wheat production and 50 percent of the domestic harvest. What arable land that remains is farmed intensely. Fields don’t lie fallow for long. As soon as the winter wheat crop is harvested in May and June, corn is planted. Peanuts, green beans and other vegetables fill in the gaps, planted in long, straight lines, the young leaves protected by plastic sheets over the soil. The carefully aligned crops felt incongruous with the haphazard manner in which the rest of Huashan was being developed.

  Another new road signaled the way to the golf course. In contrast to the orderly efficiency of the crop rows, this route was a chaotic blank canvas, two very wide lanes separated by a wide median and flanked by a sidewalk. No one had got around to painting lane markers. It didn’t matter. There were no cars in sight, except for a rickety blue Dongfeng dump truck that was cruising down the wrong side of the road. Tall, modern-looking lamps lined the street, as did several sapling trees, one planted every twenty feet or so along the sidewalk. But the soil around the trees was overgrown with weeds and tall grass. The median was the same way. The road appeared to have been laid recently, but it already felt abandoned.

  In the distance, a woman was pacing barefoot along a yellow blanket of wheat. She had spread out thousands of tiny, amber-colored kernels on the flat concrete. The woman had a stocky but solid build, like a retired gymnast. Middle-aged, she sported a short, asexual haircut and was wearing black polyester trousers and a polyester blouse with a drab tan and mauve floral print. Her pink plastic sandals had been placed beside her patch of the road, the boundary of which she had marked with a dozen evenly placed large stones. Slowly, she walked the length of her section of wheat, back and forth, hands behind her back, shuffling through the kernels, her feet rubbing them against the road below.

  “I’m rotating the kernels so they all get sun,” the woman explained in a thick local dialect. She smiled, flashing a chipped front tooth.

  Not too far away, on the other side of the median, another woman was doing the same thing.

  By the time the wheat makes it out to the street in Huashan, it is nearing the end of its journey from the farm. It has already been threshed, the wheat literally separated from the chaff. Nowadays this is done mostly with machines, small threshers and occasionally large combines. Grain acreage has decreased in recent years, partly due to better opportunities with other crops, but also because of urban encroachment, so the government has encouraged the adoption of improved technologies, often with subsidies, to keep production levels high. But for some steps in the process, bare feet and concrete are all that’s needed.

  In the past, most farms had a naked piece of land, called a shai chang, set aside for drying the kernels before the grain was stored for the summer in a warehouse, or in large clay crocks in the home. It’s said that for every acre of wheat a family has, they’ll need around 240 square meters set aside for drying. But now that farmland was growing increasingly precious – and only 12 percent of China’s land is arable to begin with – most farmers agree this isn’t a very practical use of their tillage.

  So, as much as they can, farmers try to use development, particularly the introduction of paved roads to their rural communities, to their advantage. Wheat kernels dry several times faster on cement than they do on a traditional shai chang. Naturally, using the roads in this way can be dangerous, sometimes deadly. Accidents often happen when cars swerve to avoid the swath of grain. Around the time of the winter wheat harvest, a car collided with a cyclist as its driver tried to maneuver around a road-top shai chang near Qihe, a city in the province’s northwest – the cyclist died in the wreck. The aftermath provided some insight into how much value the locals place on kernels of wheat (the driver could easily have just driven over the grain) and how much value local authorities place on human life (for causing the fatal crash, the farmer paid only a $1,400 fine).

  Further along the road to Qingdao Huashan Golf & Resort, two workers were napping in the cab of a small rusty combine. Further still, sixty-year-old Wang Zhongkui was tilling his sorghum field with a spade near the sidewalk. He had been a farmer his entire life. He lived on the opposite side of the road, in a village just beyond a row of single-story brick grain warehouses, with doors adorned with a square-shaped red and gold sign featuring fu, the Chinese character for good fortune. Wang had a round, friendly face and his crew cut showed only a few specks of gray. Beyond Wang, in the distance, the golf club was now visible – you could just make out the roofs of luxury villas peeking out over a wall. “I have seen it,” Wang said of the course, resting his chin on his sturdy hands, which he had stacked atop the nub of his spade’s wooden handle. “But I have never been inside.”

  He thought about his response for a moment, and then corrected himself. “Before it was a golf course, I often visited that land. When the golf course was built, nobody was allowed inside.”

  He smiled. “I have less land now.” Then he got serious. “Villagers here used to have two mu of land each, but now they have only a third.” Wang forcefully raised two fingers, and then three, for emphasis.

  “It is because of the golf course. The golf course used to belong to us.”

  He said that the villagers had seen no financial benefits from the course. “No one is happy about this. But there haven’t been any conflicts. Most now go to work in the factories,” Wang said. “My family eats most of the crops we grow here.” He pointed to his land, split up into rectangular patches of peanuts, corn and sorghum. “We sell whatever is left over.”

  Then Wang closed the topic with one of the most vexing and frequently he
ard phrases in the Chinese language. “Mei banfa,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do.”

  Often you hear “mei banfa” used in its defeatist form – when someone is trying to shirk responsibility. The person is unwilling to put in the necessary effort to perform a task that, in most situations, falls within his or her job description. Saying that they have no choice takes it out of their hands.

  But Wang was telling the truth. There really was nothing he could do.

  *

  The final stretch of the journey ran along Route 204, a multi-lane highway that stretches 130 miles from Qingdao to Yantai, a busy seaport on the Bohai Strait in northern Shandong. The road, which opened in 1990, cut the travel time between the two tourist cities in half. And since 1996, when drivers on Route 204 look to the east as they pass through the town of Huashan, they’ll see the province’s first golf course. Or at least they’ll see the wall that protects Qingdao Huashan Golf & Resort from riffraff like Wang Zhongkui.

  Beyond the resort’s wall the large luxury homes were mostly vacant. “TAO OF BUSINESS IN HEAVENLY VILLA” a billboard on the wall proclaimed in English. The advertisement featured a heavily Photoshopped golf fairway and three people: a bejeweled woman in a lavender evening gown holding a gold masquerade mask; a cocksure man in a double-breasted suit using an inverted 9-iron as a cane; and, closest to the green, a woman in a black dress, seated and playing the cello. The ad’s Chinese text was no less obtuse: “Leading the dance of business philosophy, one villa can conquer the world.”

  A few other billboards were more straightforward, with contact information for the King’s Palace development, which promises buyers a “Unique Villa,” a “Unique Lifestyle” and four luxurious master bedrooms. And above the chimneys and tiled rooftops was a bright red sign announcing that weekend’s China Tour event.