by Dan Washburn
Offerings were sparse at first – whatever Wang could fit into his three-wheeled truck during a trip to Yongxing. Five metal shelves in the back of the shop housed most of the necessities: water, soft drinks, canned congee, eggs, instant noodles, soap, shampoo, toothbrushes, toothpaste, laundry detergent, soy sauce, and two brands of beer: Anchor and Pearl River. In front of the shelves, a small wooden desk and a glass display case where Wang kept cigarettes, nuts, seeds and a variety of prepackaged pastries. The only other piece of furniture in the mostly empty room was a large terracotta urn filled with a variety of drinks and ice trucked in from Wang’s house further down the road. Regular trips were necessary. It was late August on Hainan; nothing stayed frozen for long.
Wang’s little shop was in its second day in business. He shuffled a deck of playing cards from the chair behind his desk. “I am currently building two toilets in the back,” he said of his work in progress. “If you come back here after three years, there will be so many changes you won’t recognize this place. Even compared to two years ago, there have already been lots of changes here. Two years ago there were no buildings here. It was all mountainous wasteland and fruit trees – nothing like now.” In a few years’ time, he said, “it will be a different world.”
Wang paused from his discussion of the development of Hainan to attend to two weary workers in search of cold water. Once he’d served them, he continued. “In the future, the rich people will come to Hainan for holidays and they will live in villas and enjoy all-inclusive ‘eat-drink-and-be-merry’ packages, some even including beautiful women,” he noted. “The course will be very nice, too. It has a man-made lake and all the green grass and trees. It will be the same as in Shenzhen, but this one is even bigger than the one in Shenzhen, and better too.”
He said he’d heard about these grandiose plans from “the bosses” of the construction site. “They said developing this area will benefit us and help us get rich. There will be more people coming here, and we’ll be very busy. It’s not for the people who come here for holidays, because they’ll have their own services. It’s for the workers and the employees. They need to eat. The dormitories here will have thousands of workers living here and in the future we want to sell them things.”
He felt secure about his future, because he owned this land. The local officials had tried to wave off the protests by telling the villagers they were only renting their land to Mission Hills on a fifty-year contract. When the rental period ended, they or their children could renegotiate the terms for the land, which would be much more valuable. But Wang saw through it – and so did the other villagers. “In name, ‘rent’, but in reality, ‘buy.’ The government told us we are renting to them for fifty years, but after fifty years we will never get that land back,” he said. The developers, after all, had not signed a contract with the villagers. “They signed the contract with the government not with us farmers. So they say fifty years, who knows, after fifty years we might not even be alive. They won’t give the land back even if we are.”
He saw no point in all the protests. “As an ordinary citizen, how can you fight against the government officials?” His best bet, he thought, was to find some way to continue to profit from the project.
A car pulled into the dirt patch in front of Wang’s store. It looked new. The brand was BYD, or “Build Your Dreams,” a plucky Chinese company based in Shenzhen. A man in white shorts, a white golf shirt and flip-flops hopped out. It was Wang’s cousin, Wang Liguo, a district-level government official on the island. He said he was sure Mission Hills Haikou was going to be bigger and better than the one in Shenzhen.
“I have been to the Mission Hills in Shenzhen,” Wang Liguo stated proudly. He explained that he and around one hundred other village representatives from the area had traveled there on an all-expenses-paid trip so that they could understand the plans.
“Do you want to have a look inside?” Wang Liguo asked, motioning toward the Mission Hills property.
There seemed no way to get past the security.
“Who can stop me?” he scoffed. “Who can stop the government’s car?”
*
“I feel so gloomy these days,” Zhou Xunshu said. “I can’t find a job.” And then, with one swift twist of his wrist, he brought a fish head to the surface of the pot. Sichuan peppercorns covered its skin like barnacles. A small pool of bright red broth settled in the bottom of the ladle. Zhou dumped the whole thing into his rice bowl and began to pick it apart with his chopsticks. The surroundings matched Zhou’s mood. The neighborhood restaurant was tucked into a dark, sooty suburb near Beijing’s international airport. The kitchen workers sat shirtless at a corner table smoking cigarettes and playing cards, seemingly oblivious to the occasional cockroach scratching its way up a wall or a customer’s leg.
It was early September 2009, and Zhou was in Beijing for the China Unicom Pro-Am, an independent tournament with a large purse – 1.5 million yuan ($215,000) in total prize money – and a wacky format. During the final rounds of the event, when the Chinese professionals should be focused on competing for one of the biggest paydays of the year, they were being forced to play in groups that included inexperienced amateur golfers, usually local business people or clients of the title sponsor. These interlopers often proved to be more interested in socializing and glad-handing than playing a serious round of golf.
“I don’t know whose fucking idea this was,” Zhou fumed. “The pace is intolerable. They shoot in the hundreds. One round feels like it lasts a week. Sometimes players in the lead will lose their advantage because they are teamed with bad players. It is totally beyond understanding.”
Zhou sighed. “Chinese golf really sucks in our generation,” he said, “and I doubt we’ll see it improve in my lifetime.”
Although he may have wanted to, Zhou couldn’t skip the event. The lure of the prize money was far too great. This was especially the case in 2009, which was shaping up to be a lean year for professional golfers in China. The pro-am was the first domestic tournament since mid-June, ending a perplexing hiatus during what was supposed to be the heart of the playing season. The China Tour had mysteriously fizzled out. Only four of the planned eight to twelve tournaments had been scheduled, and the tour’s organizers had offered little explanation to Zhou or the others as to what was going on. At the Beijing pro-am, some players were still clinging to the hope of a fifth event in Guangzhou, and maybe another in Shanghai. But no one could say exactly when these would take place. It could be next week. It could be never.
The lack of tournaments was getting to Zhou. Emboldened by his performance in 2008 – those two top-ten finishes especially – he was determined he would earn his pro player card in 2009. He had to place third or better in a sanctioned China Golf Association event, or finish in the top twelve of 2009’s order of merit, which wouldn’t be easy.
Zhou also desperately needed a sponsor. He had a family to support, and this might be his final year on tour if he couldn’t find some help to cover the expenses. There was a businessman in Chongqing who owned a golf cart factory and had already offered Zhou a job as a salesman. If Zhou’s playing career didn’t pick up, he’d have to consider taking it. That prospect didn’t excite him.
So in February, Zhou took a risk. He arranged an unpaid break from his job at Haoyun Driving Range, said goodbye to Liu Yan and little Hanhan and left Chongqing for Shanghai’s David Leadbetter Golf Academy, more than a thousand miles away. There, he would train with Michael Dickie, the Scottish coach who had been so privately critical of Zhou’s attitude in 2008. Dickie had agreed to take Zhou on free of charge. This bit of good fortune had to mean this would be Zhou’s big year.
For a solid month, all Zhou did was train. Dickie analyzed every aspect of his game and, as he had suspected, discovered Zhou had all of the physical aspects down. Sure, a little fine-tuning here and there wouldn’t hurt, but Zhou’s biggest obstacle really was the mental game. Zhou said Dickie had taught him to calm down: “My mi
nd is more peaceful than before.” He also got in better shape. He lost nine pounds while he was in Shanghai, and his trousers were all now a bit loose. He was becoming more fit, in every way. “I’ve never felt like a professional golfer before,” Zhou reflected. He’d always been too distracted by his day job, too preoccupied with paying the bills. “But this month, I finally feel like a pro. All you do is think about how to golf well.”
But, despite Dickie’s generosity, this feeling didn’t come for free. Zhou had to make major sacrifices to live like a pro during his month in Shanghai. He had no income, and worried about his job security at the driving range. His bosses there didn’t hide their displeasure with his plan. He had to pay for his flight to Shanghai and a room at a two-bit boarding house on the outskirts of the city, and he was convinced the landlord was going through his things while he was gone.
On one of his days off from practicing, Zhou visited a fitness center in the city. The gym was small, but relatively high-end for China, and part of a luxury apartment complex popular with foreigners in Shanghai’s French Concession. A long row of cardio machines sat behind a tall wall of windows looking out onto Huaihai Road.
Zhou was probably the strongest person there, but he appeared tentative, unsure. He watched the other people in the gym closely. Several times he hopped on a machine immediately after someone else had finished a set. His movements were hasty and often awkward, but believable enough that his approach could be chalked up to cultural differences in technique – somewhat like his homegrown style of golf. But when Zhou decided to give the treadmill a try, the jig was up: it was clear he had no idea what he was doing.
He straddled the moving belt as if it was a mighty river surging beneath him, and he clutched the grips so tightly his hands turned white. He built up the courage to dive in, but did so in spurts. He’d run a few steps, then straddle, run a few steps, then straddle, as though the belt was burning his feet. “I kept thinking the machine was going to push me backwards and make me fall off it,” Zhou later said.
His confusion seemed odd – at least one of the Chinese golf magazines had run photos of him using an elliptical machine as part of a profile. “That was just posed,” Zhou explained. “The magazine made me do it. The machine wasn’t even turned on.”
It turned out that, although he’d seen gyms on television and in movies, he’d never been to one before.
He wasn’t a stranger to physical training, however. As a teenager, he said, he would lift weights occasionally – large rocks, really, carved into the shape of a square, with a hole cut into one side to fashion a handle. They were called Chinese stone locks, and they’d been around for thousands of years, a sort of an ancient kettle bell. Zhou had seen the stone locks used as strengthening tools in the kung fu dramas he watched as a child, and he had wanted to be big and strong like the stars of those shows. “I did it when my village friends were with me,” he said. “We’d always compete to see who could lift the most.” Zhou could lift sixty-five pounds (thirty kilograms) five or six times in a row back then. “Today, I wouldn’t be able to do that,” he said.
Still, Zhou was feeling good about his game. He had finished second at a local event at Shanghai Links Golf & Country Club, and he liked his chances at the two-day Shanghai qualifying tournament that would take place in mid-March before the Volvo China Open in April. Simply joining the field for such a prestigious event, the longest running international tournament in China, would be a major achievement. He needed a top-three finish in Shanghai to earn a spot in the China Open.
Zhou felt confident going into the final round of qualifying not because of his weeks of training with a coach, or his newfound levels of fitness, but because of a dream. The night before, Zhou had dreamed that swift waters had overtaken his hometown. He was certain this was a good sign. According to Chinese superstition, a flood of water in a dream means a flood of wealth in real life.
At the tournament, Zhou bogeyed two of the final three holes and finished in fourth place, just one stroke out of third. The Volvo China Open would have to wait for another year. “The flood didn’t swallow me in the dream,” Zhou said later. “Maybe if it did I would have had better luck.”
He didn’t have time to dwell on what could have been. He was on a flight headed for Xiamen just four hours after finishing his round. The following morning he was scheduled to tee off at 7:30 a.m. in the opening round of the Dell Championship at Orient Golf Country Club, the official season opener of the 2009 Omega China Tour. And there was a full schedule of events to come.
*
Perhaps Zhou needed a flood to wash away all of Guizhou province, because as the China Tour began, things were not going according to plan. At Xiamen, Zhou placed fifty-eighth, his worst result since 2006. A month later in Nanjing, he opened with an 80 and had to hustle to finish in the top forty. Finally, in June, things started to improve for him. He finished under par and cracked the top twenty at the tournament in Chengdu. And the following weekend, in Anji, he closed with rounds of 69 and 70 to finish tied for twenty-fifth at 3-under.
He was starting to play more consistently. But then the tournaments stopped. And Zhou lost his job back in Chongqing.
Over the past year, Chongqing had been caught up in a political crackdown. The crackdown had nothing to do with illegal golf courses – it was a government attempt to wipe out organized crime. The campaign, called dahei, or “striking black”, was the brainchild of Bo Xilai, son of one of the Communist Party’s “eight elders,” Bo Yibo, and most recently the country’s minister of commerce. At the Party conference in 2007, Bo Xilai had been assigned to serve as chief of Chongqing as part of a reshuffling of the Party’s politburo.
Bo seemed intent to use the position to prove himself to the Party leadership. Thousands of people were arrested, including gangsters, businessmen and the former deputy head of Chongqing’s Public Security Bureau. “Many former Chongqing leaders had no way to deal with the gangsters,” Zhou said. “But Bo Xilai is the son of a powerful ex-official. He can do this. No one can get him into trouble.”
Zhou said several of the “bosses” at his driving range were involved, in one way or another, in the types of “black” society activities Bo Xilai had targeted. One was arrested. Others ran away. This exodus at the top, according to Zhou, left all the decision-making power at the driving range to one man – Zhang Yong. “And he’s very mean,” Zhou said.
When Zhou’s contract came up for renewal in July, Zhang refused. There was no “thank you for your four years of service,” no farewell party, not even a free box of golf balls. Zhou learned through backchannels that he’d been replaced by a foreign coach, a Canadian who’d been working in Shanghai, in an experiment Zhang hoped would drum up more business. “He doesn’t even speak Mandarin,” Zhou said of the new coach. “He coaches through a translator. But the translator doesn’t know golf terminology. How can that be better than being coached by me?”
Zhou was stupefied. He was insulted. And he was short three months’ pay Zhang still owed him. But once the initial sting wore off, Zhou realized what he really was: lost. He’d never really stopped to consider just how integral golf had become to his life – for the past fifteen years or so, it had always been there. Now he lacked both a place to coach and, with the China Tour faltering, an outlet to compete. He thought about his wife, his son, his house. He was jobless and clueless, a dangerous combination.
“What skills do I really have?” Zhou said. “It’s not like I can just hit the street and line up to find a job, right? I’m a golfer.”
Zhou made some calls inquiring about coaching positions, but he’d never been a very good salesman, especially when selling himself. He had some leads in Guangdong, but he was reluctant to move back there. Guangdong was part of his past, and Zhou was all about moving forward.
Some suggested he move to Beijing. But Zhou said people in the capital were too aloof for his tastes. And he wouldn’t be able to put up with the city’s traffic and air poll
ution. Shanghai? Too expensive. Zhou was worried he wouldn’t be able to afford a good quality of life for his family there. Indeed, Zhou had reasons against moving to a variety of Chinese cities.
“It’s not that easy,” he said. “I am not single now. I have Hanhan and Liu Yan.” He paused to take a sip of beer. “But I would go to Hainan,” he added. “People there are very down-to-earth and leisurely.”
He knew he couldn’t afford to be picky much longer. He realized it every time he took a look at his dwindling bank account, which he jokingly compared to the Chinese stock market, “becoming less and less.” He still had some savings. He could still cover his daily bills. But something had to change.
“I lost my job on July 21,” said Zhou, still picking at his fish in the suburban Beijing restaurant. “Now it is early September. I have spent ten thousand yuan this month. I don’t know how I have spent that much.”
Zhou was paying more than 1,000 yuan a month for an ayi, or nanny, to help look after Hanhan. Earlier in the summer he had spent 10,000 yuan trying to help Liu Yan open an ill-fated clothing store. And then there were the more extravagant purchases that only a year or two earlier would have been unthinkable for Zhou. Purchases that, if word of them ever traveled back to Qixin, would give his parents a heart attack. After a job interview in Guangzhou, Zhou crossed the border into Hong Kong and bought a 3,000-yuan necklace for Liu Yan. During a tournament in South Korea, he brought her back 3,000 yuan worth of Lancôme cosmetics. At this dinner in Beijing, he was decked out in a brand-new outfit. Shoes by Adidas: 550 yuan. T-shirt by Nautica: 330 yuan. Jeans by Lee: 700 yuan. “I just want them to see what a good life I am living even without a job,” he said.
But it wasn’t a good life. Not at all. Later Zhou would admit to being in a state of depression. When he was in Chongqing he slept often, and spent many of his waking hours lying on the sofa, doing nothing. “I didn’t know what to do at home,” Zhou said. “I couldn’t calm down to do anything.” He stopped hearing from his students. He stopped reaching out to his friends.