The Forbidden Game

by Dan Washburn

  Zhou’s nephew, Xiao Hu, or Little Tiger, emerged from the house. “Let’s go eat,” he said. “We can chat more later.”

  Zhou’s mother was hard at work in the kitchen. She looked strong, and her pleasant face was hard to read, an exercise in stoicism and seriousness. Her husband chatted away while she prepared the evening’s meal, picking the stems off of a clutch of wild mushrooms, barely saying a word. For warmth, she wore a charcoal gray men’s suit over her other clothing. Her silver hair was tucked inside a light gray stocking cap emblazoned with the word PING, an American brand of golf equipment.

  Little Tiger led the way to the huolu (literally “fire oven”), a coal-burning stove common in the mountainous regions of southwest China, that serves three purposes: space heater, hot plate and dinner table. Atop a single pedestal sat a square metal table top, with a hole in the middle filled with burning coals. The opening was the perfect size for heating a teakettle or a pot of soup. An exhaust pipe attached to one corner of the table sent the fumes – some of them, at least – out the window.

  Like the kitchen table in Western culture, the huolu is the heart of the village home. All meals, card games, dramas – and family drinking fests, when First Brother is around – play out around the huolu.

  On this day, the huolu’s only job was to hold the dishes that had been prepared for dinner, and it was failing. Today, though Zhou had declined to make the trip – he was too busy, he said – the village was hosting his American friend, its first foreigner, and there was far too much food, despite the fact that food was hard to come by. There is no refrigeration in Qixin village, and after that year’s brutal winter, there was almost no fresh produce, either. When it snows heavily, as it did in the winter of 2008, no vehicles can access Qixin, and the simplest items are a luxury. Villagers must lug heavy bags of rice up the mountain on foot. The cook of the family must get creative with the handful of non-perishable ingredients available. The colorful array of dishes laid out on the huolu belied the forced culinary restrictions of the season. “These are fried potato slices. That is tofu. That is fried wheat gluten. Those are rice noodles. Those are pig’s ears. That is larou. That is also larou. And that one, too.” Preserved pork, three ways.

  In a Chinese village, guests have to pace their consumption cannily, because each time a visitor finishes a bowl of food, someone immediately fills it up. “Eat more,” they say. “Eat more pig’s ears!”

  Nearly everyone seated around the table remembered when there was barely enough to eat. And Zhou’s parents remembered when people were starving. In today’s relative plenty, it’s important to prove you have enough. “Ni chi fan le ma?” – “Have you eaten?” – is still often used as a greeting. Guizhou was among the provinces hardest hit by China’s great famine, in which anywhere between twenty million and fifty million people died of starvation, the result of Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Some estimates say Guizhou experienced close to one million famine-related deaths – some 5 percent of its total population. Some remote towns and villages saw losses as high as 10 and 20 percent. Widespread reports suggest people resorted to eating tree bark and mud. Evidence suggests many turned to various forms of cannibalism, as well.

  Zhou’s father spoke of the hard times matter-of-factly, with little emotion. It was as though he was reciting from a timeline in the back of a book. His wife, as usual, didn’t say a word.

  “The tougher times were before 1949 and around 1960,” Zhou’s father said. “Life before 1949 was really hard.”

  “That time, every three households could only share one pig!” First Brother interjected.

  “China was under Kuomintang control at that time,” Zhou’s father continued. “This area was liberated in 1949, but the land-change policy didn’t come until 1952 and it took another several years after that to have any effect. In 1956 and 1957 we all joined the cooperatives, and from 1956 to 1958 they started the Great Leap Forward – people did not grow crops and focused on steelmaking. Then, in 1959 and 1960 – starting from September 1959 – the supply of the crops became very tight.”

  “The whole village shared a certain amount of food,” First Brother added.

  “Each production team had one cafeteria,” Zhou’s father went on. “The first two months, the food supply was pretty good, but later on it became worse – just two servings of rice. You could only get a little bit. The rest was things made from corn gruel and wild plants in the mountains, like grass and tree leaves and tree roots. By the second half of 1961 the shared cafeteria was canceled, and you could start to cook on your own. Life got a little bit better. But the 1970s were also pretty bad, a bare living.”

  ”Just barely enough to eat!” First Brother said.

  “Probably not one tenth of what we have today,” Zhou’s father continued. “The farmers’ life started to get better in the 1980s, after the land was distributed to each household. You see, we two people raised two pigs these past two years and sold one for over a thousand yuan!”

  “It is all because of Uncle Deng,” First Brother said. “He started the ‘opening-up’ policy and the common people’s life got better. And in recent years, it is even better, since Hu Jintao is in charge. The farmers do not need to hand in crops any more – just grow and eat their own crops. And for kids going to school, you do not need to pay tuition fees. This is the best policy for the common people.”

  Sometime between serving six and seven, the faint warble of recorded music could be heard coming from somewhere in the darkness beyond the house. “Ah, the electricity is back. Good,” First Brother said. “You see, it is a tradition for this family on the other side of the village to play music through a loudspeaker so everyone in the village can hear it and know the electricity is back.”

  This was not a very old tradition, since Qixin only got electricity in the mid-’90s. “Right now the countryside has the best conditions ever,” First Brother said. “Before, only when celebrating festivals or having friends visiting could we eat meat. Nowadays, we can eat meat any time, every day. Before, drinking beers – no way. Drinking rice wine – no way.”

  And that was certainly no longer the case.

  “Before we did not know each other, and now we do,” First Brother said, raising his glass of beer in a toast to me, his first foreign guest. “So we are friends. Ganbei!”

  This was the first of many toasts First Brother would make that evening. And the toasts continued at breakfast and at lunch. He insisted on drinking alcohol with every meal, saying he could “hardly walk” without sticking to such a regimen. “In Guizhou, good friends just drink together,” First Brother explained. “I do not like other forms of communication. For me, no matter whether at home or outside, if someone is not drinking with me, I cannot get along with him. I like drinking the most.”

  First Brother’s toasts got more flowery and dramatic the longer the drinking went on. The intensity of the alcohol increased, as well. He started with beer, a rather forgettable lager from Henan province, purchased at the market at the bottom of the mountain, 180 five-hundred-milliliter (half-quart) bottles at a time. He then graduated to a dubious local moonshine made from corn sold at the market for just three yuan per liquid pound. Finally, First Brother would bring out a bottle he received from his wife’s brother-in-law. It was filled with a pinkish-brown substance and hundreds of tiny flecks. It was called yaojiu, or “medicine alcohol,” and First Brother claimed it contained twenty-five different medicinal herbs that could cure problems with your “lung, liver, kidney, spleen and bones.”

  He never sipped. It was always ganbei, “dry the glass.”

  “From our grandparents’ generation until our next generation, it is impossible to have the chance to have a foreigner come to visit us,” he toasted.

  Ganbei!

  “In our hometown, this is probably a chance every thousand years that you come to our home. We are very happy. So drink more. This is our Guizhou people’s custom.
You are our friend coming from far away.”

  Ganbei!

  “Our place, although in the mountains of poor Guizhou province, has beautiful views in the spring. Cheers. Three cups, good friend. Three cups for my good friend from far away.”

  Ganbei!

  Ganbei!

  Ganbei!

  “Today, you came to visit our home and I am very excited. This is something not even money can buy.”

  Ganbei!

  “Gan three cups. You are my best friend. You are the best friend in my heart.”

  Ganbei!

  “In my heart, you are my best, best friend.”

  Ganbei!

  “You are my best friend, and it is not easy for you to come all the way here to be friends with us.”

  Ganbei!

  “Okay, my friend. Finish this corn wine and I promise I won’t give you any more.”

  Ganbei!

  Zhou’s father would drink a glass or two of beer with meals, but showed little interest in keeping up with his first-born son.

  *

  Zhou Xunshu’s childhood bedroom was being used as a storage shed. Initially, it had been the old tangwu – or south-facing, central room – of the original brick structure on the property, and Zhou had shared the room with all five of his siblings; he’d shared a bed with at least one, often two, of his brothers, as well. It had a dusty concrete floor and a rustic wood-and-bamboo ceiling strengthened by two simple floor-to-ceiling posts, bare logs worn smooth. Two of its walls were built with brick, the other two with mud partially covered by newspaper, the dates on which provide the only evidence it existed not in the nineteenth century, but in the twenty-first.

  The room was now home to corn, potatoes, fertilizer and coal, although there was little evidence of any of those items at this point of the year, late winter. Up against a brick wall were some mismatched end tables that looked like they once served as a crude kitchen. Two iron woks lay askew on the floor in front of a shadowy corner of the room piled high with wicker baskets and a hand-powered wooden grain thresher, still used today, that looked like it belonged in a museum.

  Zhou’s parents slept in a cave-like room that had once been the ox pen. Behind the current tangwu, it had been their bedroom for more than twenty years. “We always liked this room,” Zhou’s father explained. “And after the children moved out, we just started to live here. It’s quiet and cool.” The single tungsten light bulb dangling from the ceiling illuminated the room’s hand-laid, irregular stone walls. An unfinished twin-sized wooden bed frame was topped with an area rug instead of a mattress. The rest was clutter – old fruit boxes, and plastic bags full of clothing and other personal items. More clothing was strewn over a wooden branch suspended from the ceiling by two pieces of rope. Plastic tubs stored lard and cornmeal. Large sections of smoked pig carcass hung from the top of one wall like crown molding. A bowl of homemade white tofu rested at the foot of the bed.

  In fact, food was on display in every room of the house. Cured pig parts swayed from nearly every ceiling, and almost every room contained a large vat of ground corn, clusters of dried chili peppers and sacks of garlic bulbs. There was no artwork or photographs adorning the walls. Instead, there were constant reminders no one was starving these days.

  First Brother and his wife made their home in a newer cinderblock structure attached to the old house. There was a door in the back of one of the rooms that opened onto nothing – no steps, just a drop-off to the forest and fields below. The door’s primary purpose, it appeared, was trash receptacle. Family members regularly opened the door and tossed their waste into the darkness.

  “People just throw garbage to a certain place,” Little Tiger explained. “We throw ours in back of our house. No one comes to get it. The garbage will just rot.”

  What about plastic?

  “For plastic bottles, there will be people who collect them to sell.”

  What about plastic bags?

  “They will be buried in the dirt and rot.”

  This was the countryside. “It’s not like in the city where there are people to sweep that garbage away,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do.”

  *

  Qixin in the winter is absent of color. The ground is brown, the sky is gray, the trees are bare and the houses are covered in dust. The only splashes of color come from the villagers’ clothing, but even that is muted – it’s hard to keep anything clean here for long. When Zhou was a child, he used to bathe in a nearby river. That river had since run dry. Now, the villagers washed themselves in large basins at home. First Brother said most people bathed about once every ten days.

  But the village was bustling with activity. Walk through the village and you’d see schoolgirls braiding palm leaves for binding dried grass; women washing clothes by hand; a little boy walking on stilts someone fashioned from branches of a tree; a small old man, hunched over, inching up the trail with a load of dried corn stalks ten times his size strapped to his back. Chickens, dogs and geese roamed freely. And every ten minutes or so, a villager walked by with his or her back weighed down by a tall, funnel-shaped wicker basket filled with a heavy load of coal, fertilizer or corn lugged three miles from the bottom of the mountain. Children carried some of the baskets.

  This work was what Zhou blamed for his aching back.

  On the China Tour, Zhou occasionally popped a painkiller or two before rounds. Back in Chongqing, he saw a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner regularly for rigorous massage treatments. Some blamed the unorthodox swing Zhou employed during his formative golf years for his back problems. But Zhou blamed his village.

  In his hotel room one evening, while talking to a fellow golfer he worked with back at Guangzhou International, Zhou had recalled emotionally the hardships of his youth. He stood up and acted out the words coming from his mouth, a sad game of charades where every answer was the word ku – “bitter.” He talked about malnutrition not allowing his bones to form properly. And he talked about his mid-teens, when he was the one carrying heavy loads of coal, fertilizer and corn on his back up and down the mountain.

  “But that is why your legs are so strong and powerful,” the other golfer said. Indeed, Zhou’s calves were hulking, and he had the thick thighs of an NFL running back. But it was his back that Zhou wanted to talk about. If it wasn’t the burdensome loads he carried upon it that did the damage, surely it was the unwieldy cement poles he had helped to haul and install when Qixin first got electricity.

  Zhou’s years in the village haunted him. But he seemed to enjoy letting people know how much of a struggle his early years had been, perhaps so they’d realize just how far he’d come. His aching back would often lead to a more general tale of rural Guizhou in the 1970s, of people not having enough to eat (“If a family ate rice twice a week you thought they were rich”), or of nearly tumbling to his death down a cliffside while cutting grass with a sickle (because he was overworked and tired). In Qixin they had only one month of rest per year – the remainder was hard labor.

  Zhou also wasn’t shy about saying who he blamed for this life, and it wasn’t his parents. “If Mao would have lived ten more years, China would have gone backward ten more years,” he always said, emphatically.

  *

  Little Tiger’s brother, Xiao Long, or Little Dragon, walked past the old tobacco smokehouse, past the terraced fields that would first produce potatoes and then corn, past a tall evergreen tree the family used for pine oil. His father had planted it two decades ago. “Down the hill, there is a big walnut tree,” Little Dragon said. “It’s so big it takes seven or eight people holding hands to circle its trunk.” He was going to a landing overlooking the valley, which was still partially obscured by fog. The terrain was dry and brittle: tall yellow grass, white rocks, naked trees. As a child, Zhou would take the family oxen to graze on this spot. This was where he once played the golf-like game with a wad of paper and a long-handled sickle.

  On this day, four village boys were taking part in
a much more primitive pastime. One would hold a lighter to the land until something caught fire. They’d wait a few moments for orange flames to appear. And when the blaze got to about knee high, they attacked, pounding the fire with tree branches until all that was left was a patch of black grass and smoke in the air. This activity kept them occupied for quite some time.

  The boys, who ranged in age from seven to eleven, looked like a gang of Chinese Huckleberry Finns, “fluttering with rags,” long blades of grass held between their teeth. They all recognized the name of the village’s famous son – Zhou Xunshu – but none of them had heard of golf. Nor had they heard of soccer, basketball, Yao Ming or the Olympics. The only sport they really knew was the calisthenics they performed at school each morning.

  So, what do you want to do when you are older?

  The boy who appeared to be the leader of the little group thought for a moment, and then, straight-faced, recited the Mao-era slogan, “Wei renmin fuwu” – “Serve the people.”

  The other boys were uninterested and started playing leapfrog in the meadow.

  What did they want to do in the future?

  They didn’t stop their game to answer, “Learn jumping from the frog!” They all laughed.

  At home, First Brother was preparing a chicken for slaughter. This was a special gesture, to honor the visiting American guest. Normally, the family would only kill a chicken for Spring Festival. Meat was even more of a luxury when Zhou was growing up. If the family did not slaughter a pig for the new year, there would be no meat until the next year. Mostly, Zhou’s family lived on vegetables, cornmeal and rice – which was also a scarce commodity in the village. Families traded two pounds of corn for one pound of rice. And while Zhou’s family raised chickens that laid eggs, they rarely ate either, because they needed to barter the eggs for salt. No family would kill a chicken for meat, because no chickens meant no salt. Only when chickens could no longer lay eggs, would they be killed and eaten.