The Forbidden Game

by Dan Washburn

  “The most important event in golf, Heroes gather in Huashan.”

  Five golfers were pictured. Zhou Xunshu was not one of them.

  *

  “A long day.”

  Frank Chen, the China Tour’s Chinese media director, seemed to exhale the words in a sigh. He was staring at the media center leaderboard – a Hisense flatscreen TV. He shook his head.

  “Lots of blue.” And blue was bad.

  Blue numbers meant bogeys, or worse. Bad scores. Black numbers signified par. Red was used for birdies. The rare eagle was highlighted in yellow. But on this day, the board was awash in blue. Only five golfers had finished the day under par.

  Late in his round, Zhou had managed to splash some red beside his name to turn what could have been a horrible day into just a bad one. He scored birdies on two of the final three holes to finish 6 over par with a 78. He was in a tie for sixty-first place, and was at risk of missing the cut. One golfer Zhou was tied with, Dong Caihong, had made history on the Qingdao Leg – she was the first female player to tee up for a China Tour event. Zhou could not be pleased.

  In the nearly three weeks between the season opener and the Qingdao tournament, Zhou had played on an actual golf course only once. He was too busy teaching, trying to save enough money for the coming month. He knew the tournament schedule – packed, by Chinese golf standards – would have him away from his home, his girlfriend and his paying job for several weeks. After Qingdao, he would fly to Beijing for a non-China Tour event sponsored by China Unicom, a state-owned telecommunications company. Then it was down to Guangzhou for the third leg of the tour at Dragon Lake Golf Club, Zhou’s former employer. Because of his familiarity with the course, Zhou was putting pressure on himself to perform well there. Friends and former colleagues would be in attendance.

  But it’s hard to perform well when you don’t have time to practice. Zhou’s training schedule was dictated by his teaching schedule. He squeezed practice in before and after his students. And he was doing both at the public driving range, which didn’t have a playable putting green. It wasn’t ideal. Not even close. This, however, was the lot of a pro golfer in China. He had bills to pay, plane tickets to buy, a girlfriend to support. There were no sponsors beating on his door offering to chip in. When he was away from home, on the road at tournaments, for a full month, there was no income. “Mei banfa,” Zhou said. “If you don’t play, you can’t win. I’d never get better.”

  Zhou had changed out of his golf shoes and into a rather garish pair of lace-up brown loafers. They were shiny, and a section of their thin soles was made of metal. They surely didn’t go with his outfit – the same fading maroon trousers and pilling baby blue golf shirt he had worn during his round.

  Standing there in the Qingdao Huashan clubhouse lobby, he pointed to the large gold clock from Omega, the China Tour’s title sponsor, which was mounted to a red plastic display stand. He urged a young golfer from Chongqing, making his China Tour debut, to pose for a photograph next to the clock. “It will be a good souvenir,” Zhou said, his gruff voice making it sound more like an order than a suggestion. Zhou lined up the shot – “two steps back, one step to the right” – and then snapped the picture. He looked at his work on the camera’s display screen and nodded, satisfied. “Bu cuo,” he said. “Pretty good.” Then it was Zhou’s turn. They were both still tourists.

  The ride back to the hotel was in a Chinese classic, the box-like minivan known throughout China as the mianbao che, or “bread car,” because of its loaf-like appearance. Despite their tiny 1.3-liter engines, the vans are workhorses, and wildly popular, thanks to their versatility and price tag – they start at around four thousand dollars. On any given day, you might see a mianbao che overflowing with schoolchildren, watermelons, furniture, livestock, or, in this case, Chinese professional golfers.

  The van belonged to the owner of a small grocery store near the Shower Hotel. Zhou had met him during his first day in Huashan; he had needed to find a ride to the course, and saw that the grocer also owned a car. A weeklong relationship was born. Zhou saved the man’s phone number in his mobile phone, and the mianbao che became his taxi for the duration of the tournament. The price: ten yuan each way. Expensive, but much better than walking every day. Zhou had learned quickly that, upon arriving at a China Tour event, securing a reliable ride to and from the golf course was second only to finding an affordable hotel. At the driving range and putting green, the golfers would gossip about who had negotiated the best deals.

  Two rows of seats had been ripped out of the grocer’s mianbao che to make more room for passengers. In their place he had put tiny plastic stools, which slid along the greasy exposed metal of the van’s floor every time he made a turn.

  Before getting back to the Huashan Shower Hotel, the grocer stopped the van at his shop, so people could stock up on mosquito coils and food. He knew his market.

  Zhou, who had a 7 a.m. tee time the following day, chose to buy his breakfast in advance: three cans of Red Bull, two juice boxes of whole milk and three chocolate pastries. He seemed happy, bubbly even, the day’s bad round seemingly behind him.

  He ran out into the empty road, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath.

  “Fresh air,” he said with a comfortable smile. “Not like the city.”

  Zhou then turned his attention to an apartment block on the other side of the road. It had a bright orange tile roof and a surprisingly clean white exterior. Windows were spaced uniformly across the width of the structure. The building was new, three stories tall, boxy and boring. Zhou, still standing in the middle of the road, put his hands on his hips and took in the scene, nodding slowly, right to left.

  “The countryside here is not bad,” he proclaimed. “They even have buildings like this!”

  Huashan Shower Hotel wasn’t the worst hotel in China. Indeed, there are much, much worse. As a bare-bones, downmarket hotel, it was typical. At the Shower Hotel, 120 yuan – about fifteen dollars – a night got you a double room with ceramic tile floors, two hard single beds, a small color television and, a special surprise, a private bathroom with intermittent hot water – thus, the name. No toiletries were included, not even towels or toilet paper. But all necessities were available to buy downstairs at affordable prices, if not top quality. The bath towels for sale in the hotel lobby and the street-side shops were thin, and the size of washcloths. There was no kind of barrier between the shower and the rest of the bathroom, no door or curtain or ridge in the floor – and the shower nozzle was affixed to the wall facing the toilet and sink. Instead, the floor was purposefully higher on one side and angled slightly, so water would flow to a drain between the toilet and sink.

  The screens in the windows had large holes, providing a warm welcome to the mosquitoes. Outside, there was commotion. Several tall construction cranes were busy erecting a group of six-story apartment buildings, twice the size of the one Zhou had marveled at. A small dog barked as it raced around the large pieces of concrete piping that littered the vacant lot behind the hotel. Zhou went to bed early, keeping his tee time in mind. Shortly after midnight, a loud truck arrived at the construction site. Its horn beeped repeatedly, perhaps warning that for the next fifteen minutes it would be dumping large quantities of rocks, one on top of another. Two hours later, the dog was barking again. At 4:44 a.m., dawn light flooded the east-facing rooms, and a rooster began to crow. Around 6 o’clock, the public address system from a local school began blaring its musical morning calisthenics instructions: “Stretching exercise! Ready, and go! 1! 2! 3! 4! 5! 6! 7! 8!”

  Zhou’s tee time was in an hour.

  The nighttime noise did not seem to bother Zhou. He followed his 78 with a 76 on Friday, an even-par 72 on Saturday and a 75 on Sunday. He was 13 over for the tournament. Not exactly the kind of numbers that would have sponsors beating down his door, but at this tournament, on this course, which had the entire field befuddled, it was good enough. Qingdao, or Huashan, ended up being the best result of Zhou
’s young career. He finished twelfth, seven strokes behind the legendary Zhang Lianwei. After phoning Liu Yan back in Chongqing, Zhou celebrated what he called a “breakthrough moment” in his career at a tiny, empty restaurant in Huashan town. His companions were two people he barely knew, an American journalist and his translator, and a round of cold Tsingtaos.

  “Today, my plan was even-par,” Zhou said. “If I got even-par, I’d definitely be in the top ten. Then my name would be on the leaderboard. Today, I made so many mistakes on my tee shots, but I still saved a lot of pars, so I felt I improved a lot.” It was one of the first events in which Zhou actually turned a profit. After taxes and travel fees, Zhou’s total earnings for the tournament were around eight thousand yuan – one thousand dollars.

  Zhou fiddled with the cap to his bottle of beer. He still had the hands of a farm worker – that would be true no matter how well he played golf. They were covered in scars, as though he’d used a porcupine as a punching bag. “It’s from cutting the wild grass in the village,” he explained. “We used sharp sickles. I started when I was ten.” Zhou started to count his scars. He lost track after thirty.

  He pointed to the biggest one, on his left hand, which drew a curved line between the middle and base knuckles on his index finger. “You could see the bone,” he said. But they’d never use stitches in the village, he said, just “put the flesh back on” and wrap it up.

  “There’s also this one,” Zhou said, pointing to a divot above his left eyebrow.

  In the spring, before there was grass to cut, Zhou and his childhood friends would attach sickles to long pieces of bamboo, and then use the contraptions to cut leaf buds off of the tallest trees. One of Zhou’s friends took a wild swing, missed a tree completely, and connected with Zhou’s forehead instead. He almost lost an eye.

  Zhou seldom went back to the village these days. Just talking about doing so could change his mood, and he’d often try to change the subject. “Life in the mountains was pretty rough,” he’d usually say when asked about his youth. It was, he said, a page in his life. “Conditions were bad, and there was nothing we could do about it.”

  Now he simply wanted to get his elderly parents out of the village.

  “My father has arthritis in his leg,” Zhou said. But there was more to it than that. “He also believes in Jesus. My parents are home alone and they needed to find something to attach to, and there are some people in our village who are believing in that,” he continued. “So my father started to believe, too. He gets on his knees every day and prays. He’s got a cross and reads the Bible every night.”

  Zhou was not pleased with this development. He said he realized older people in China may search for some kind of meaning “because they suffered from the old traditions in the old society,” but he was worried. It seemed his father was starting to rely more on prayer to heal his leg than on medicine.

  “Last time I went back for Spring Festival I tried to teach him that science is what he should really believe in,” Zhou said, referring to the Chinese New Year, the biggest holiday of the year. “I said, ‘Look at the planes in the sky, do you think Jesus made that happen?’ I gave him some medicine that made his leg feel better, and I thought he understood what I had told him. But after I left, he could walk again because of the medicine, and so he went out and met those people in the village, and he started to believe again. I think it will be fine once I get them to Chongqing.”

  Zhou said his parents, who were in their seventies, didn’t have much longer to live.

  “They’ve never taken a plane before,” he said. “I want to get them to Guiyang so they can take a plane to Chongqing.”

  *

  In the village of Meiqiu, on Hainan island, nearly any event of any significance takes place under the phoenix tree, which sits in the clearing where three of the primary paths out of the village converge. Concrete Chinese chess tables are arranged near the knotty trunk of the old tree, the branches of which cover much of the open area like a giant parasol. For Wang Libo, and many of his fellow Meiqiu villagers of a certain age, walking past the big phoenix tree is like being on an episode of This is Your Life.

  When he was just a teenager, Wang had led the construction of the cinder volleyball court that takes up much of the courtyard. This new, bigger court (he still knows the exact dimensions – twelve meters wide by twenty meters long) replaced a smaller, shabby, dirt playing area. Wang’s team laid the bricks to mark the boundaries of the court. Then they installed the posts and the net, which were all paid for by the village committee.

  Volleyball was a big deal. Each village had a team, and every summer Wang and his Meiqiu cohorts would play home and away matches with other squads from the area. They’d line the court with powdered limestone, and large crowds would cycle for miles to watch the action. “We gambled on every match,” Wang said. “I remember one day we lost seven hundred yuan. That was a lot of money!”

  Just on the other side of the phoenix tree stands one of the most important relics from village history. It looks like a pile of vine-covered lava stones – not exactly an uncommon sight on this part of the island – but it’s actually one of Meiqiu’s original entry gates. Closer inspection reveals a trapezoidal section of stone wall with a rectangular opening in the middle. No one knows for certain how old the bit of wall is – lava rocks appear to be ancient even when they’re “new” – but “hundreds” of years is what most people say. Typically no one pays it much mind, until somebody from the village gets married or dies.

  There are three such old entryways in Meiqiu, each denoting a specific section of the village. Every family belongs to one entryway, and that is where they congregate on the occasion of a wedding or a funeral. All weeds and vines are removed from the stones, and the married couple – or on bad days, the coffin – is walked beneath the lintel. “The old men in the village say this village gate is the only way to welcome new people in, and to send daughters and the dead out,” Wang explained. “When these important things happen, people must walk through the old village gate. It means God will bless you in the coming days. If you walk around the opening, it is not auspicious.”

  Wang and his wife walked through the old gate behind the phoenix tree when they got married in 1997. The whole village was there to wish them well. They set off firecrackers. They killed pigs and goats and chickens in their honor. It was a day of celebration for everyone.

  But ten years later, in August 2007, Wang found himself and about one hundred other villagers gathered under the phoenix tree for a decidedly different occasion. And no one seemed to be in a celebratory mood. The blood-red flowers of the phoenix tree had come and gone with the season, but the curved seedpods remained. In the gloom of the early evening sky, they hung from the tree like hundreds of dark sickles.

  It was cooler than normal for the middle of the Hainan summer, but the crowd was hot with anxiety. For several weeks, rumors had been swirling around the local teahouses that a company was interested in renting land in the area. But no one seemed to have the details: What land, for what price? And who was the mysterious company interested in large swaths of rocky terrain previously thought only good for growing fruit trees? Meiqiu’s residents wanted answers, and they were finally about to get some.

  The village governor stood atop a cement bench next to a lychee tree and told the crowd that the rumors they had heard were indeed true. There was a developer interested in village land – in fact this company, named Junhao and based in Hong Kong, was intent on buying up property from many villages in the area, not just Meiqiu.

  The government had determined that each plot of Meiqiu land in question would fall into three categories, with three different prices: “garden,” where most of the land was covered by fruit trees, at 29,000 yuan per mu, a Chinese unit of measurement equal to roughly one-sixth of an acre; “fruit tree land,” where a portion is covered with fruit trees, at 26,200 yuan per mu; and huangdi, or “wasteland,” earth covered in wild plant life, rocks and
grass, at 12,500 yuan per mu.

  The meeting went on for more than an hour. The governor did most of the talking, but the crowd did plenty grumbling, muttering among themselves as he talked through what he knew of the proposals. Some villagers flatly refused to sell their acreage. Some expressed disappointment with the prices. Others worried what the future would hold without large portions of their family land.

  Wang didn’t say much. He just listened. Conflicted, he agreed with some of what everyone had to say. He admitted that the numbers being bandied about were tempting for a poor villager like him. It was more than he ever thought someone would want to pay for his “wasteland” near Meiqiu. But when he learned that land laden with fruit trees was also to be included in the deal, his mood changed. The fruit reaped from one mu of fruit trees could fetch around ten thousand yuan at market in one year. “Do they think we’re stupid?” he asked. “We can make back the compensation money in two or three years selling fruit.”

  The villagers also didn’t agree with the “Red Line,” the literal red line that encircled the entirety of land planned for development on the proposal map. They felt it came too close to their village. They didn’t want to feel surrounded. Wang noticed that some of the land he owned fell right inside the Red Line.

  He thought about his children, and their children. These lands had been passed down from generation to generation. Meiqiu people took pride in private land ownership. They felt it set them apart from other parts of rural China, where land is typically owned by a collective. Wang felt a duty to hold on to his family’s land legacy. His initial inclination was to refuse to sell. But as the governor continued, it became clear to Wang and everyone else in the crowd that the decision to sell or not to sell had already been made for them. This deal was going through, whether the villagers liked it or not.