The Forbidden Game

by Dan Washburn

  A cigarette heavy with ash dangling from his mouth, First Brother held open the beak of the chicken while his wife poured a clear liquid into its mouth from a white bowl.

  “Rice wine,” he explained. “That will make the chicken taste better.”

  *

  Over dinner, with the family crowded around the huolu, it was time to turn to the subject of Zhou.

  “Yes, I miss him,” Zhou’s father said. “All of these clothes I am wearing were bought by Zhou Xunshu and Liu Yan.” But it was true Zhou Xunshu was the son to visit home the least. “He rarely comes back.”

  “When he comes back, he still helps the family doing some work. Like plow the field,” said First Brother.

  “Not in the past several years,” First Brother’s wife mumbled as she placed some dishes on the table.

  “He can also still use the bamboo to make some baskets,” First Brother added, as compensation.

  And Zhou was well liked. “Every time he comes back, people will ask him to play cards or do farm work with them,” First Brother said. “Also, drinking and chatting. But he can’t drink too much and he does not gamble.”

  By the reckoning of his family, what made Fourth Brother the most successful person to come from the village, was that he had a “real profession.” That was something.

  “For us, going out to work, we may have a job, but not a real career,” said Little Tiger.

  First Brother agreed with his son. “And my Fourth Brother is not working for money, he is pursuing something he wants. If he was only working for money, he’d already have millions by now.”

  First Brother was among the family members who hadn’t made the journey to attend Zhou and Liu Yan’s wedding in November. Second Brother, too, was absent, as was their little-discussed sister, who had married a man from the northeast and moved there. And what of Zhou’s parents? First Brother said that they were “too old, and it was too far” for them to make the journey for the wedding, though they had wanted to. “It’s because of my leg,” Zhou’s father explained. “I suffer from hyperostosis and rheumatism.” He said he planned to visit the young couple in April or May. “When it gets warmer, my leg will feel better.”

  Of course, Zhou hoped the visit to Chongqing might persuade his parents to leave the hard life in Qixin. “Zhou Xunshu has called me before and asked us to go to Chongqing,” his father acknowledged. “But we can’t go. If we were young, we could go.

  “Living here now, the conditions, I can’t say they are good – just normal,” he went on. “Before, my sons tried to help me improve my living conditions, but I did not let them. I just tried to lighten their burden. That is what I am thinking. They asked me if I needed any money, and I just told them you just live your life, take care of yourself.”

  He was afraid that life in Chongqing would be too new, too strange. “But I am not thinking about this now. We will visit when the weather is warmer and Zhou Xunshu’s personal and financial situations are more stable. I’ll wait and see after I stay there for a while.”

  Zhou’s father wanted to make it clear he wasn’t a stranger to the city. He had been to Chongqing once before. In the late 1960s, he was in Chongqing for ten minutes. He spent the time changing cars on his way to “learn from Dazhai,” in Shiyang county, Shanxi province, 1,200 miles northeast of Qixin.

  For the generation that came of age after the Great Leap Forward, Shiyang county had become a holy land of sorts. It was home to the fabled Dazhai Production Team, which Chairman Mao held up to the nation as a model farming community, built on hard work, self-reliance and a passion for proletarian politics. Like Qixin, Dazhai was desperately poor and situated in a steep mountain valley prone to drought and soil erosion; China’s Loess Plateau, on which Dazhai sits, has many of the same traits as the “Dust Bowl” of the American Midwest. But by the mid-1960s, thanks largely to the backbreaking efforts of its residents, the eighty-family commune at Dazhai had transformed itself into a production phenomenon. The people of Dazhai, with their famously callused hands, literally moved mountains. They carved hillsides into terraces, built dams and reservoirs and erected aqueducts that carried water for miles. Their grain yields were astounding.

  “In agriculture, learn from Dazhai!” Mao proclaimed in 1964. The slogan became a common sight in rural China, plastered across walls and riverbanks. There were others, too: “Move hills, fill gullies and create plains!” “Destroy forests, open wastelands!” “Change the sky, alter the land!” The propaganda campaign sparked a pilgrimage. Village leaders from across the country trekked to Dazhai by the thousands to study its ways. Some estimates say Dazhai saw fifteen million guests between 1964 and the late ’70s.

  In the 1980s, a government campaign (some called it a smear campaign) discredited the Dazhai way, as Deng Xiaoping moved to privatize farm production. State media ran stories saying Dazhai had falsified harvest reports and was less than self-reliant, receiving outside labor from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Some of the reports claimed the PLA had brought in heavy machinery to move the earth. Later, environmentalists suggested some of Dazhai’s techniques actually exacerbated the region’s problems with soil erosion.

  Still, traveling across the country to Dazhai was a proud moment for Zhou’s father, who was one of very few villagers at the time to venture beyond the mountains of Guizhou. “From Shanxi, I went to Shijiazhuang and bought a train ticket for six yuan to go to Beijing,” he recalled. “We stayed in Beijing for three days and four nights. Then from Beijing to Wuhan, then back to Guizhou. We also went by Hunan and other places: Guiyang, Zunyi, Chongqing, Chengdu – I was in Chengdu for three days – Baotou, Zhengzhou. I cannot remember all of them now. Now, the route is much better than at that time. When we were in Beijing, we visited the Forbidden City. It was December 1969. I was gone for twenty-eight days.”

  Back then, Zhou’s father was the leading cadre of a production brigade that oversaw six production teams. In modern terms, he was the village leader. And when he returned from his travels, his teams began the arduous – and dangerous – task of carving up the mountainside just as the villagers of Dazhai had done.

  “It was very hard,” Zhou’s father said. “All we used were explosives, sledgehammers and spades. We carried all of the stone with our bare hands.”

  Zhou’s father stepped down as village leader in the early ’70s after some villagers suggested he was unfit for the job. He didn’t put up a fight. The salary was low – around fifty kilos of crops and 180 yuan (around 1,000 yuan by today’s standards, he said) per year – and there were too many mouths to feed at home. Zhou had just been born and Fifth Brother was on the way. Zhou’s father figured he’d be of more use working in the family fields anyway.

  This was not the expected trajectory for a man who once seemed set to become a city-level government official in Bijie. In his mid-twenties, Zhou’s father sold cloth at the city’s Supply and Marketing Cooperative. It wasn’t a glamorous role by any measure, but it was a steady job with a government agency, and he felt lucky to have it. Back in the village, however, things were far from stable. Zhou’s father’s father was prone to fighting. They were the only Zhous living in a village full of Zhes and that added to the bullying. It didn’t help that Zhou’s grandfather had a temper and often drank too much corn wine.

  Tired of making trips to the hospital and worried about his father’s well-being, Zhou’s father left his job at the cooperative abruptly and headed back to the village to look after his dad. By failing to go through his employer’s proper exit procedures, Zhou’s father forfeited his right to a government pension. Years later, after the Cultural Revolution, Zhou’s father returned to the Supply and Marketing Cooperative and asked to be rehabilitated, but he was denied – they said they had no record he ever worked there.

  “If I didn’t quit the job I probably would have become some big official, too,” Zhou’s father said. “The people I worked with in the Supply and Marketing Cooperative, who are not as capable as I w
as, all became some kind of leader later on.”

  This was one of the many chips weighing down the collective shoulder of Zhou’s family, and Zhou’s own ambitions in Qixin and beyond. “If he didn’t quit that job, we would be much better off now,” Zhou said later. “And we probably would’ve already left that place, the village. According to my dad’s level at the time, he would have been promoted to a position in the city. It was just a bad decision made at the spur of the moment.”

  His father’s stories from the old days had gone on too long. First Brother tried to shift the conversation around the huolu.

  “Eat more,” he insisted. “This is our local chicken.”

  “It didn’t even lay eggs yet!” added Zhou’s father, as a boast.

  Zhou’s family had answered so many questions about their history. And Zhou hadn’t explained to his family why such questions were being asked of them by their American guest.

  “No, Zhou Xunshu did not tell us why you were visiting the village. I never thought about it,” First Brother said, raising his glass of beer in a toast. “Ganbei!”

  “It was my fifth uncle who called and said someone is coming to visit, but he did not say who,” Little Tiger said. “He called my uncle in Bijie and my uncle in Bijie called the village.”

  “We are friends now. I do not care if my youngest brother called or not,” First Brother said. “As long as you are my friend I will treat you the same way. We welcome friends, no matter whether from China or abroad.”

  *

  Later that year, on the Shanghai leg of the China Tour, Zhou was acting the way any proud father would, displaying photos of his newborn son on his mobile phone to anyone within eyeshot. Zhou’s pride was genuine, but the photos also gave him an excuse to talk about something other than the awful round of golf he had just played.

  “The doctor said he is taller than the average baby his age,” Zhou said, beaming. “If he can grow to be 1.9 meters tall [six foot three], I’ll let him play basketball.”

  But if the child wanted to play golf like his father, Zhou said he’d send his son somewhere else, some place other than China. “I won’t let him be like the current domestic players,” Zhou said. “If I have the financial ability, I will have him study golf in America.” He figured he’d need to save around five million yuan to be able to afford that.

  These were lofty goals for a man who just shot an 80 and was in a seven-way tie for seventy-fourth place in the Shanghai championship. It was mid-May, and Zhou’s mind seemed to be off in Hunan province, where he had recently left his wife and baby boy. Or perhaps, like so many others, he was distracted by the devastating news of an 8.0-magnitude earthquake that had struck Sichuan province just three days before the tournament’s opening round. Or it could have just been the wind. Whatever the cause, it was not the kind of effort Zhou had come to expect.

  Despite starting the season feeling ill-prepared and unfit, 2008 was shaping up to be Zhou’s best year on tour. He had placed sixth, the top performance of his career, at Dragon Lake, and followed this with an eighth-place effort in Xiamen. Two weeks later, he placed twenty-second in Kunming. He was three events into the year and ranked ninth on the China Tour’s money list. It seemed this could be the year Zhou finally earned his pro player credentials.

  These days, there was a new Chinese star Zhou could look to for inspiration. The hero of the previous year had been Liang Wenchong. He was the son of a peasant farmer, just like Zhou, had won the Asian Tour’s Order of Merit, and had been the first Chinese golfer to crack the top one hundred in the world golf rankings. The only reason Liang, six years younger than Zhou, started playing golf was because he happened to grow up near modern China’s first course, Zhongshan Hot Spring Golf Club. Liang was fifteen when the golf club, then not a decade old, decided it wanted to start a golf team. Club officials visited local schools, Liang’s included, and asked curious students, most of whom had never heard of the game before, to line up and swing a golf club. Those who showed promise were offered a spot. Liang was one of the lucky ones, and he accepted. Playing golf, he thought, must be better than helping his father in the peanut fields. Many of Liang’s teammates, unable to handle the club’s strict training regimen, quit. But Liang persevered, turning pro just six years after his first swing. Players like Liang, and Zhang Lianwei before him, gave Zhou hope. A humble boy could make it, not just in China, but beyond its borders, as well.

  Zhou, too, was beginning to catch people’s attention. The media, both local and international, were taking an interest in his story, and on the Guangzhou leg he had signed his first sponsorship. There was no money involved, but Titleist and FootJoy agreed to outfit him with shoes, gloves, hats, balls and clubs free of charge. It was a big shift in his fortunes. Then, a golf course in Chongqing had made noises that they might be interested in sponsoring him on the tour, paying his travel expenses for as many as ten events per year.

  “All the groundwork for life and work are finally starting to pay off,” Zhou said. “Before I was married, I wanted to find a wife. This was one goal. After getting married, I wanted to buy a house. After buying a house, I wanted to build a perfect family. So we had to have a baby. We planned it, and had a baby this year. Once I had a child, suddenly the pressure was much greater. I’m no longer doing it just for my own happiness. I’m doing it for my family.” He told the reporters asking for interviews that his mental game had got stronger after he got married, which meant he had to be more responsible, more mature. He said becoming a father had made him more confident.

  But Zhou still wasn’t satisfied. “Of course things are better than before, but my ideal life is not like this,” he said. “Now that I have a house, I also want a car and some savings.” He also wanted to win a tournament or, at the very least, finish in the top three. He wanted more sponsors. He wanted to give up teaching and just focus on playing. But he knew he’d have to shoot much better than an 80 if he wanted to accomplish any of that.

  The evening after his poor opening round performance at Shanghai, Zhou lay on his hotel bed watching news reports from the earthquake recovery efforts in Sichuan. He shook his head and sighed. “Every night I watch these reports and cry,” Zhou said. “Too sad! But I don’t want to donate to any of those official relief organizations. I’d rather give money, even two thousand yuan, if I could directly give the money to the people.”

  He decided he needed to go out.

  “I never thought I would be in such terrible form today,” he confessed at a restaurant across the street from his hotel. He wanted to get something to eat, and drink some beers, so he could relax. He was drinking with more vigor than usual.

  He explained that his son’s name, Hanhan, was chosen because, according to his birthdate, he was lacking in two of the five elements from wu xing, the traditional Chinese philosophy used to explain the cosmos: metal (associated with ambition and determination) and wood (associated with flexibility and growth). He had consulted with a university professor, the father of one of his golf students, to help come up with the appropriate name.

  “My wife said my son has a big temper like me,” Zhou said. “He cries really loud.”

  The dishes on the table were empty. So too were the beers. But Zhou didn’t seem interested in calling it a night. On his way out, he spotted a table full of fellow golfers and decided to pull up a chair. Based on the number of bottles sitting before them, they too had had a rough day on the course. More beers were ordered. Some huangjiu, a local alcohol, too. And cigarettes were passed out like so many toothpicks.

  Zhou began to get tipsy, and talkative. “I miss my son,” he announced to everyone. “I’ve only spent several days with him so far. The first two days I went back, I couldn’t even sleep. I kept getting up to check on him. Too excited!”

  More beers were ordered, and the men drank to Zhou’s son. Ganbei! But soon the festivities came to a close – it was the first day of the tournament, after all. Zhou, however, now more than tipsy, did not follo
w the others back to the hotel.

  “Let’s get a massage!” he barked. “My neck is sore.” It was late, and he was drunk, but Zhou called his wife as he lightly stumbled to the massage parlor.

  “I am very annoyed… I played golf for so long, and I’ve never had no birdies at all in a round. Never happened… I just felt very annoyed out there,” he told Liu Yan.

  “There was a film crew following me these past two days. And this morning a golf magazine shot photos of me. I don’t know if these things affected me – I was just very annoyed. The photo shoot took an hour. I drank a lot tonight…”

  He stopped for a moment, then started up again.

  “I called you because I wanted to talk to you. I don’t need you to tell me what to do. I want you to trust me, and believe in me. I can play well… I am in very good form, and I still played like this… I am so annoyed. Fuck… I have been competing for such a long time and today I was annoyed more than ever… I am so annoyed. I do not care what you think…”

  Another pause, and then he decided to end the call.

  “You treat our son better than you treat me… Just take good care of my son. I shouldn’t have called you tonight.”

  Zhou had been to this massage parlor once before, earlier in the week. Then, the masseuse inspected his rough hands. She seemed concerned.

  “What are those bumps?” she asked.

  “Calluses,” he said. “I’m a construction worker.”

  The girl said, “Ah, no wonder.” She added that it also explained why Zhou was so tanned. She told Zhou that the earthquake in Sichuan could be good for people in his line of work – they’re going to need people to help rebuild.

  Zhou explained why he hadn’t just told the girl the truth. “If I tell them I am a golfer, they will judge me,” he said. “They are going to say, ‘Oh, you play golf, that is a rich people’s sport.’ It makes me angry hearing that. What rich people’s sport? For rich people that is just entertainment. For us it is a job.”