The Forbidden Game

by Dan Washburn

  When the local police arrived at Yongdong, protesters smashed and overturned some of their cars. Then the military police showed up and dispersed the crowd with tear gas. Several villagers were arrested, fined and sentenced to lengthy prison terms for inciting a crowd to disturb social order, and willful destruction of public property. Years after the incident, a slogan remained emblazoned on the side of a prominent building in the village: “Yongdong Must Be United Together!”

  News of the Yongdong protest spread quickly to Meiqiu, where villagers were angry about many of the same issues. Those who didn’t agree to sell their land, or those who were holding out in the hope of getting more money, were often among the first to find their land had been bulldozed. “You have to sell, because they force you,” one villager said. “Without your agreement, they bulldoze the lands then give you your money. Otherwise, the police will trouble you.”

  In fact, this had happened to one of Wang’s friends. His land was full of lychee trees that were still weeks away from being ready to harvest. Yet the bulldozers were called in. In less than an hour, his fruit trees were gone, as was his potential income for the summer. That left him with no option but to accept the government’s price. What good was his land to him now?

  “Why couldn’t they negotiate with him?” Wang asked. “Why couldn’t they wait two months and let him reap his fruit? What made it worse was that after they bulldozed his land, they didn’t touch it again for several months. It was such a pity.”

  Meiqiu was quite a bit smaller than Yongdong and couldn’t muster a demonstration of comparable size. There were a few dustups here and there, but a couple dozen farmers usually proved no match for men in bulldozers and the Mission Hills security force.

  Several of these small protests took place not far from a piece of land that Wang owned the rights to. It was an odd, triangle-shaped property originally intended to be part of the Mission Hills project, until the villagers successfully made a last-minute push to move the Red Line ever so slightly away from Meiqiu before the deal was finalized in late 2007. Wang wasn’t sure what to do with the land. It was right next to the cement road, and full of weeds and wild fruit trees too young to be reaped, with a construction site directly behind it. Wang didn’t know much about golf, but he was pretty sure that what he saw going on behind his property wasn’t golf. A concrete foundation was being laid. He had some construction experience, and he could tell that whatever was going up was going to be huge. Wang knew what he had to do: build a wall.

  Usually in China, golf course developers built walls to keep the riffraff out. This time it was the villager trying to keep the golf course at bay. They’ve already taken enough of my land, Wang thought as he laid brick on top of brick, just as he had so many thousands of times before. They’re not going to take any more. As Wang built his wall, he watched as another mini protest broke out in a contested clearing nearby. It was peaceful, like most of them had been. But, Wang thought, it was also hopeless, like all the others had been. Why yell at the bulldozer driver? Why yell at the security guards? They were probably just villagers, too.

  Wang felt for the protestors, and he agreed with them in many ways. But he also believed they were just prolonging the inevitable.

  ‌7

  ‌Scrape the Bones, Dry the Glass

  Almost every Chinese pro golfer will complain about the low prize money at tournaments, about how it’s difficult to simply break even trying to live from tournament to tournament. But Zhou Xunshu could occasionally step back and take a look at the big picture, and what he saw made him more depressed.

  “People say companies, especially Chinese companies, should invest in the game and become sponsors,” Zhou said. “But if they invest, they want to make money, right? Without any audience, who will invest? Sponsors are very practical. Who will give you money for no reason?”

  When the Omega China Tour had launched back in 2005, many players, including Zhou, were optimistic that it would finally bring some stability to their lives. That first year there’d been four events and the promise of an extra two tournaments added to the tour each year. And the promise had come true: in 2007 Zhou competed in all eight events, traveling from Nanjing to Qingdao to Guangzhou to Yanji to Shanghai to Kunming to Xiamen, and then to Beijing. The tournaments were first-rate operations, too. The tour organizers even ensured the Chinese media, mostly golf specialty magazines and websites, turned out to cover the tournaments, paying their travel and accommodation costs, and plying them with gift bags once they got there, so they would stay until the last day of play. Only one thing was missing: spectators.

  The tour organizers discovered their most successful events enticed fans with prizes – people were more likely to show up if they knew there was a chance they could win a home appliance or a laptop computer. Getting them to actually watch the golf was another issue. To get them to stay, they were coming up with a variety of new schemes. One year, spectators who got their ticket stamped after every three holes would go home with a free hat.

  It was almost comical that the China Tour organizers hadn’t approached a cigarette company about becoming a sponsor, since so many of the players smoked during rounds. Some would sneak a drag during holes, while others seemed to keep a cigarette lit the entire round, only handing it off to a caddie when it was time to take a swing. Zhou was not a smoker, although he’d sometimes light one up if he was “depressed” or needed to “clear his head.” If you saw Zhou holding a cigarette during a round, that usually meant things weren’t going well. Perhaps another sponsor would, in fact, be better.

  Zhou said he knew golf was still a young game in China, but he couldn’t help but compare the situation to other countries, where the game was more established, and where being a professional golfer wasn’t such an oddity. “When Padraig Harrington won the British Open, the whole country paraded in the streets and took days off to celebrate,” Zhou remembered. “I read a report online, and all Irish people went crazy because of the win. They treated him as a hero. Can you see this happening in China?”

  He brought up the success of Korean golfers, men and women, overseas. “In Korea, golf is a game for everybody,” he said. “Everyone plays golf and the country supports the sport. In China, when people talk about golf it is always about corrupt government officials using public money to play. No one talks about how we can get more people interested in playing the game or how we can make golf more affordable. But this is the situation in China, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  He pointed out that the overall prize money per tournament, 800,000 yuan, didn’t change between 2006 to 2007, but the number of players who were expected to split the prize money had increased from fifty to sixty. “And the prize money for first, second, third and fourth remained the same,” Zhou said. “This is what we call scraping the fat from chicken’s feet. How can a chicken foot have any fat? How can you scrape fat from bones?”

  He was angry. “In foreign tournaments those who make the cut won’t lose money,” he said. “Here, sixty people make the cut and the last one’s prize money is 3,500 yuan.” About five hundred dollars. “After 20 percent tax, that might be enough to pay for the round-trip flight.”

  Zhou concluded, “The CGA does not care how many tournaments there are for us every year. They just care how much money they’ve made.”

  *

  Zhou hadn’t practiced all winter. The decorating of their new apartment in Chongqing was still not done, and Liu Yan was still living with her parents. Zhou was at least living in their new place, but the hot water wasn’t working yet, and the water pressure was low, so he’d been taking his showers back at the driving range.

  Worse, the China Tour was starting earlier than ever in 2008, in an effort to front-load the schedule before the start of the Beijing Olympic Games, an event so big it was expected to bring much of the country to a grinding halt. The first tournament was just a few weeks away, at Dragon Lake Golf Club in Guangzhou, the very spot where Zhou an
d Liu Yan had met. Zhou had begun to hit some balls in earnest at his driving range, but he was unable to practice any putting there. “The putting green here is unplayable,” Zhou said. “It’s a mess. No one maintains it. My putting is not very good.”

  He still considered Dragon Lake to be his home course, and he wished the season opener was somewhere else. He wanted time to get his form back before he played in front of people who knew him. He also wanted time to get his finances in order.

  Zhou’s house was almost empty. He had a bed, a washing machine, kitchen appliances, but nothing more. “I don’t have money for anything else,” Zhou said. “I spent it all. I don’t even have money for the tournaments yet.”

  He wasn’t getting much sleep either. Zhou’s entire building reverberated with the sounds of drills and saws. All his neighbors were going through the same process – buying a new place in the city and trying to make it a home. The air was thick with plaster dust. The insides of the elevators were covered in plywood, on which were scribbled names and phone numbers, hundreds of contractors and handymen peddling their trades.

  Perhaps it was all the time alone, but Zhou was in a contemplative mood. He said although he hadn’t been able to exercise his body, he’d been thinking a lot about his game. He’d been playing on the tour for two seasons now, and knew what his shortcomings were. Most of them were in his head. “Sometimes I am impatient for success,” Zhou said. “For example, last year in Kunming, that ball in the tree.” Being so close to the lead affected the way he’d approached that hole. He was trying to play conservatively, to play it safe, and that was not his style. “I should have just played without thinking anything. Sometimes golf is just like this. Your mind says one thing. Your body says another.”

  Zhou knew he needed to work on managing his temper, to be able to focus on his next shot instead of his last shot. “The littlest thing can affect my mood. Like trying to land a taxi cab, or having to wait for an elevator.”

  He thought he must have inherited this trait from his father, who was “always strict” and “has a very bad temper.” Over the years, he’d avoided talking to his father, who he said treated him like a child and too often preached “antiquated ideas,” like doctrines from the days of Mao. “How can people living in the new era still follow those old-fashioned ideas?” Zhou asked, his blood clearly beginning to boil. “For example, right now he will tell you it is not necessary to make lots of money. ‘Just make enough to get by,’ he’ll say. Do you think this mindset will work in this world?”

  And if it wasn’t quotations from one book, it was another.

  “He believes in Jesus, but why won’t he take medicine or go to the hospital when he is sick?” Zhou continued. “They believe Jesus will bless them and they will recover without taking any medicine or going to hospital. And this is total bullshit! What the hell does he know? He just believes what other people say.”

  Zhou rarely went back to Qixin these days. He insisted the reason for his infrequent visits home had been due mostly to the arduous journey it involved. Guangzhou to Guiyang by train was already a twenty-four-hour trip, and then, from Guiyang to Bijie, the closest city to the village, could be as much as another half day. In the 1990s, before National Highway 321 was complete, buses snaked along the treacherous mountain roads and inched across old bridges suspended precariously above deep river gorges. One bridge in particular always made Zhou’s heart stop. “It crossed the Wu River, and was held up by iron chains,” he said. “There were armed policemen standing on each side of the bridge. Only one car could go at a time.” He’d actually prayed for fog sometimes, because he didn’t want to be able to see what was outside his window.

  On the handful of rare visits since he’d left Qixin for police school, Zhou always brought his father some clothing or food, but beyond that, their interactions were minimal. “I really am afraid to talk to him because every time I did, he would start to talk about those things,” Zhou said, referring once again to Mao quotations and the Bible. “And once he does that, I just turn around and leave. No other way. It is impossible to communicate with him, and if I try he would get mad. So the only way to solve this problem is to move him in with me and get him out of that environment.”

  His mother was “honest and simple,” like all people from the countryside, he said. But he didn’t talk with her often, either. “What is there to talk about? When I go back, we just talk about the current situations, and I ask her about her health. Just like that. There is nothing to talk about.”

  Yet he planned to bring his parents to Chongqing after Liu Yan returned with their baby. Zhou didn’t think his parents wanted to move, but that made no difference. “Even if they don’t want to come, I will still bring them by force. I don’t want them to be doing the hard labor at home any more. I want to bring them here, and during the daytime they can just wander around.”

  *

  It was winter. Zhou’s father wore a thigh-length black jacket that covered at least four other layers of clothing. His unhemmed suit pants were long and rolled hastily at the bottom, and he wore black loafers without any socks. On his head was a tall, black Soviet-style ushanka hat, perhaps most associated in China with the historical (some might say mythical) figure Lei Feng, a People’s Liberation Army soldier canonized by the government as a model socialist shortly after his untimely death in the early 1960s. Zhou’s father wore this bulky headpiece with the earflaps buttoned up, displaying just a hint of his salt-and-pepper hair. His face was dotted with liver spots – it was clear he’d spent many long days in the elements – but his skin was taut and smooth, the only wrinkles forming around the corners of his eyes. When he smiled, which he did often, he revealed a full set of badly stained teeth.

  Zhou may have been the most successful person to come out of Qixin village, but for some, including his father, he was still the member of his family who was supposed to become a police officer and had failed. “Police officer” was a concept Zhou’s family, especially his parents, could understand. It’s a concept they knew their neighbors would understand. Golf was different. It was strange. It was foreign. It was completely new. How can you impress your friends with your son’s job when you don’t understand what he does?

  “I just leave him alone and let him mature,” Zhou’s father said by way of explanation. “We are from the countryside, and we spent about four thousand to five thousand yuan for him to study and live at the armed police school in Zunyi. He did not stay in that school for very long – less than half a year – and then he got the job at the golf course.”

  The first time Zhou brought golf balls back to the village, it had caused a sensation. “Not only my father, even I felt it was very weird, very strange,” First Brother said. “I never saw these things before. There were so many tiny craters on the ball – I was wondering how to play this game. Other people all thought it was very strange, too.”

  Now, Zhou was ranked in the top twenty of golfers in China. Things must have changed by now. “I didn’t know what golf was,” Zhou’s father said. “Today, I do not really understand what it is. I was just happy he found a job.”

  Wasn’t the family proud of Zhou’s accomplishments?

  “We all know he is playing golf,” First Brother said.

  But were they proud of him?

  “We are in different places. If he can go to every country in this world, if he can go and travel to every one of them, I will be like this,” First Brother said, pounding his fist on his heart. “Very proud.”

  First Brother, born in 1963, was Zhou’s only sibling still living in Qixin. He had not seen Zhou – who the family called Fourth Brother – in more than a year. But like Zhou the professional golfer, First Brother spent much of his time on the road, as a migrant worker. He had once worked in the zinc factories in the mountains for thirty yuan a day, but when a friend told him he could earn twice that outside Guizhou, he jumped at the chance. Since 1999 he had been traveling the country working in tunnel construction as
a slurry sprayer, one of the unfortunate souls who sprays concrete onto the rough walls of a freshly drilled tunnel. The tunnels were dark, humid, noisy, poorly ventilated and frequently dangerous. Often, pieces of rock would fall; sometimes tunnels would collapse. Projects could range from 100 to 350 yards long, and a job could last anywhere from one to eight months. First Brother had missed Zhou’s wedding because of a tunnel job in Hubei province.

  “The people living in this village are lucky to earn two thousand yuan per year,” First Brother said. “My family – me, my wife and my two sons – at best we’d make thirty thousand yuan per year. And if it is a bad year, we could make nothing at all. If we were not migrant workers, it’s probably hard to even earn five hundred yuan per person per year.” He took a long drag on his cigarette. At the brick factory down in the valley, things were better. “Their average income per person per year is fifty thousand yuan. They are all bosses.”

  For his part, Zhou’s father had simple aspirations for his sons. “Every time they call and tell us they do not have any problems, we are very happy,” he said. “Because now there are many disasters out there, and the world is very complicated. We are very worried they might steal things and go to jail. We are worried they might do illegal things. In our family, before they left the village, we taught them not to do bad things, otherwise it would humiliate us, the elders.”