The Forbidden Game

by Dan Washburn

  “I played just so-so in the coming tournaments, even though I felt more confident,” Zhou said. “I didn’t practice very often. It seems I didn’t care so much. I felt more comfortable out there, but the result was not the first and foremost. I just golfed without too much stress.”

  Zhou may have earned the biggest payday in Beijing – 72,000 yuan (about $12,000) after taxes and his mandatory donation to charity – but you wouldn’t have been able to tell it from looking around his and Liu Yan’s apartment. It was still sparsely decorated, the white walls bare save for a studio portrait of Hanhan dressed as a mouse, his zodiac sign, and a pre-wedding portrait of Zhou and Liu Yan, both dressed entirely in white formal wear, and lounging lovingly like characters in a movie adaptation of a Jane Austen novel, atop a plot of green grass. The display shelves in the dining room, where one might show off fine china or family heirlooms, instead housed a golf trophy, a purple plush toy animal and an odd assortment of liquor bottles and gift boxes Zhou had collected during his various stops around China. Nothing too fancy.

  So what had he done with his big prize money?

  “You should ask Liu Yan,” Zhou said, pointing in his wife’s direction.

  “I put it in the bank,” she said. “Saving most of it for the future.”

  The family finances were a subject of much good-humored dispute.

  “No particular person takes care of the money,” Liu Yan insisted. “Anyone who needs to spend money, can spend it.”

  “Really?” Zhou said skeptically. “Such beautiful words.”

  “Am I not telling the truth? Did I ever keep you from the money?” his wife replied.

  “Zhou bought a pair of shoes with two thousand yuan once,” she continued, presenting her evidence. “I’ve never bought something that expensive. But I know he is working outside, and must wear such things regularly. I’m a housewife. I don’t need expensive clothes. It is his first time to buy shoes so expensive. He thinks he needs some prizes for his hard work.”

  Things had improved for them over the years, Liu Yan said. “When I accompanied him to Kunming for a golf tournament, we didn’t check the weather in advance. It cooled down suddenly when the tournament was beginning. Zhou had to pay for a jacket, a very expensive jacket – fifteen hundred yuan. At that time, we even felt buying a jacket was a luxury.”

  Now, that jacket no longer seemed so expensive – at least, in Zhou’s opinion.

  “Liu Yan,” he said, “do you remember the wool coat we saw at the plaza? The Nautica one? I like it very much. It costs two thousand yuan.”

  “You already have an expensive coat,” she said. “How come you want a new one? Wool is very expensive. If you want one, I want one, too.”

  “That wool coat is so attractive. If I wore it, I’d look like Chow Yun-fat. I saw it last year, but I didn’t have the money. I want to buy it if I see it again. I have that money now.”

  They were beginning to have the concerns of a typical middle class household. Back in 2005, China’s National Bureau of Statistics had stated that members of the country’s urban middle class had an annual income between 60,000 and 500,000 yuan. It was the first time “middle class” had been expressed in numbers in China. Zhou felt confident he had risen from being a poor boy from Qixin to become a member of this group. “Yes,” he said, without hesitation. “I think I am a middle class.”

  Liu Yan had different criteria, however. “There are still a lot of things we can’t buy now,” she said. “Like, I want a car, but I don’t have that money. I also want to buy an expensive watch. I know Zhou can afford to buy me a Cartier watch, but we have to think twice before taking the money out. Hanhan has to go to school, and college, so we have to save money for his education.”

  “I can’t afford luxury brands right now,” Zhou admitted, agreeing with his wife. “But I can buy some middle-class clothes.” And Zhou could catalogue each item of middle-class clothing he’d bought along with its price. There was the 680-yuan sweater, for instance, or the 1,700-yuan suit he picked up in Chengdu. Things he’d never mention to his family back in Qixin – they wouldn’t understand – but that wouldn’t stop him from spending his money on them. “I would rather spend money on better clothes or meals than on cigarettes and alcohol,” Zhou said. “I think these things can change our quality of life.”

  Still, he wasn’t content with his financial situation. “Man should be more aggressive,” he explained. “I want to create a better life for my kid. I want to make more money to send Hanhan to study in America. Basically, I want to make more money.”

  How could he do that with all of his jobs?

  “Time is like a sponge,” Zhou said. “If you squeeze it, you can find more spare time.”

  Zhou was sounding more and more like a member of China’s new middle class, always striving for more.

  *

  For his part, Martin Moore never thought he’d find himself back at Yangzong Lake in southwest China’s Yunnan province. Of course, back in 1995, he never thought he’d end up there in the first place, either. Now he was joking about putting a floating office right in the middle of it, because there were times he thought he’d never be able to leave.

  His golf course construction management firm had twelve China projects going on simultaneously, and as Martin stood on the banks of the lake, he could see three of them. It was a strange feeling. More than fifteen years earlier, when he was completely new to China, he remembered looking across these mirror-like waters and seeing next to nothing, save for two blights on the landscape – the coal-fired power station to the north and the aluminum factory to the west. Both were scheduled to be shut down, he was assured back then, but both had since tripled in size.

  He stood on the red-brown earth of one of his current projects and stared east across the lake at his very first. Spring City Golf Club looked like a bright green layer cake cut into the hillside. Martin knew it intimately. Every green. Every fairway. Every dogleg right or left. The course was the reason he had first come to China, so reluctantly, and it was probably the main reason he was so busy in the country now. Since its completion, Spring City had been consistently rated as one of the top golf courses in Asia. Martin’s first China project was still the bar by which the country’s new courses were measured.

  Reminders of the Spring City job were everywhere. From one of the newer lakeside projects, he could throw a golf ball and hit the dilapidated resort he once called home. While clearing land on another, Martin had discovered some plastic netting that looked familiar – because he had put it there a decade and a half ago. One golf hole he was working on occupied a piece of land that had once served as Spring City’s turf nursery. He’d soon be growing grass there again, but for the fairway and green.

  “It definitely was weird kicking dirt around on that property,” Martin said. “Because I remember I actually spent a few days on the bulldozer myself grading it way back when.”

  But a lot, too, had changed since his time at Spring City. The previously indestructible golf course market in the United States was gone – golf course closures were consistently outnumbering course openings there. China had made the construction of new golf courses illegal, only to become the only country in the world in the thick of a golf course boom. The colleagues who, early on, had laughed at him for focusing on China – where no one seemed to recognize a golf ball, let alone know how to build a course – were constantly calling him up, knocking on his door.

  To those trying to break into the Chinese market, Martin would always say, “Good luck.” He’d been working there going on twenty years and had yet to feel he completely understood the vagaries of the place. Cracking China took time and it took patience. Lately, the inexperienced owner on one of his Yangzong Lake projects was making so many bullheaded decisions that Martin questioned whether the course would ever see the light of day. On another, Martin was once again dealing with villager disputes with the local government over land rights and compensation, which was creatin
g havoc with his schedule. He’d seen it all before, of course. They’d find a way around the problems or, if they didn’t, he would just move on to another one of his new job leads.

  For now, though, Martin was waiting to see how the villager disputes would settle. “Currently they are kind of upset,” Martin’s Chinese project coordinator said about the villagers living near the construction site. “I think this is the ugly side of China. The owner of the company paid the money for the land to the government, but the government didn’t give all the money to the villagers.”

  Many of the laborers now building the golf course used to grow corn on the land. In fact, corn still grew on what was supposed to be the course’s fifth green. According to the project coordinator, this was the last of many disputed sections of the course. What was the exact problem?

  “I have no idea,” the project coordinator said. “Some government thing. The big boss has been drinking with a lot of people just for that one piece of land.”

  Indeed, there was lots of determined drinking going on near the golf course projects around Yangzong Lake. While dining at a busy village restaurant near one of his lakeside sites, Martin and a few other members of the project team noticed a colleague – a Chinese man from Kunming – sitting at a large table nearby. He had about twenty men at his table, and an open bottle of baijiu sat atop the lazy Susan.

  “He works for us,” said the owner’s representative. “His job is to entertain the farmers, and take care of government issues.”

  The drinkfest was one of the aspects of working in China that Martin could do without. But such annoyances were unavoidable, and until the industry picked up somewhere else in the world, he was resigned to the fact they were simply part of his reality.

  He may have been working in China longer than almost anyone else in the industry, but the place still had a way of surprising him. Sometimes in a good way, sometimes bad, but the country was rarely, if ever, boring. “I still look forward to the times when I get a new lead in some place I haven’t been to in China,” Martin said. “I like going to a new city. And meeting new people.”

  Martin doesn’t want his sons to get into his line of work. “It’s a tough life,” he said. He was spending more time on the road than at home in Scottsdale, Arizona. When he was traveling, his schedule was often brutal – red-eye flights broken up by twelve-hour workdays on a construction site. When he wasn’t working on a job, he was chasing down new leads.

  He was usually up and working by 5 a.m. He liked to say he was a living example of the old US Army motto: “We do more before 9 a.m. than most people do all day.” He was averaging less than five hours’ sleep a night, by his reckoning, and those handfuls of precious hours were often interrupted by emails and text messages. He maintained three mobile phones – one each for the United States, China and Thailand – and kept all three at the ready on his nightstand.

  “I’m addicted,” Martin said. “It’s almost like I’ve got one eye open. So if someone sends me an email, it’s never one hour old before I read it. If I open my eyes every hour and that thing’s got a red light flashing, I’m checking email. And it’s not unusual that if it’s something that I feel is important, I’ll sit there and answer. Throw it down, go back to sleep – or, you know, semi-sleep. This blows some people’s minds.”

  So far, his addictions had paid off. But he knew many aspects of the Chinese market would never be within his control. The China boom, while nowhere close to going bust, was not reverberating quite as loudly as it had in the past. The crackdowns were beginning to have more bite. The numbers were coming back down to earth. Even Mission Hills seemed to be slowing down. “I’ve never seen them say, ‘We’re not doing anything,’ before,” Martin said. It was as good an indication as any that nothing was a sure thing.

  Martin was worried he’d put all his eggs in the same Made-in-China basket. He was looking for more leads in Vietnam and South Korea, so he wouldn’t be left with nothing if and when the Chinese market dried up, just like the US market before it.

  Martin picked a stone out of the dirt and tossed it in the direction of the lake he couldn’t seem to escape.

  “It’s all weird, man,” he said with a sigh. “It makes no sense to me, this moratorium, this golf boom. I sit here every day and wonder about my business. Is it all going to fall apart in a year? Or is it going to go strong for five years? Who knows?”

  *

  Now a toddler, little Hanhan was attending preschool. Zhou and Liu Yan were paying five hundred yuan a month, which included eight hours of schooling and lunch five days a week, for their only son to have this early start in his education. With Zhou gone for most of the day, Liu Yan’s days had become a bit boring. Lately, a middle-aged woman also from Hunan province, who lived upstairs, would often come down and visit with her. They’d speak in their provincial dialect, watch soap operas and gossip about the neighbors. It wasn’t exactly the life she’d dreamed of as a teenager getting ready to leave her village for a job as a caddie at Dragon Lake Golf Club.

  That wasn’t to say the life she imagined for herself back then was an elaborate one. Ten years before, Liu Yan’s dreams had been quite basic, actually. She’d wanted a job, someone to love her, and happiness for her family. Now her dreams were more specific. Looking forward to 2020, she hoped her husband would win many golf tournaments, that her son would grow up happily, and that her parents and Zhou’s parents were all at peace.

  “I want to live in a villa with lots of pets, children and friends,” Liu Yan said. “I want to live in Hunan. Zhou wants to live in Guizhou.”

  As a young boy in Guizhou province, Zhou, too, had his dreams. Most of all, his desire to get out of Qixin. He did that, and then his dreams got bigger. “Ten years ago, I was a security chief in Guangdong,” he said. “I was paid about one thousand yuan a month. I lived in a room with eight people. I didn’t have any good clothes. I knew I wanted to marry a girl and have my own family. But my dreams weren’t detailed. I just wanted a better life with more money. With hard work, we can only live out our dreams step by step. All I wanted was a stable family with a monthly salary of ten thousand yuan.”

  So what does a man do when he has already realized all of his dreams before the age of forty?

  “It wasn’t easy for me,” Zhou said, “and now I will pursue more dreams. I want to make more money and attend more tournaments. All I want is to create more conveniences for my son. If I can win a tournament, my life goals will be almost complete.”

  And that “almost” was at the heart of things. Where the old Zhou’s dreams were lacking in detail, some of the new ones were pretty specific. “I want to buy a new house,” he said, “with a convenient location and good property management. And I hope I can own a car worth 300,000 or 400,000 yuan.” The car bug seemed to be catching in this newly minted middle-class family. While walking past Chongqing’s Olympic Stadium, little Hanhan pointed at a sign featuring the famous five-interlocking-rings Olympic logo. “Audi,” he said.

  Zhou’s ambitions for his son were open-ended and expansive. “If he can golf, I hope he can golf. If he can study and go to college, I want him to do that,” Zhou said. It seemed there wouldn’t be a police academy in Hanhan’s future, unless that’s what Hanhan wanted.

  For Liu Yan, Zhou simply wanted happiness. “I don’t know,” he said. “How can I plan her life? If she wants to work outside, or just be a housewife, it’s all up to her.” Asked if there was anything he really wanted to be able to buy for his wife ten years from now, he was sure in his answer. “Yes, I would love to,” he said, “but it still depends on if I have that money. If I had the money now, I would buy her anything she wants.”

  Dinner that evening was at KFC, followed by a stroll through the French superstore Carrefour. Zhou drove his family there in a black Hyundai loaned to him indefinitely by the management at his driving range in Chengdu. “This car costs around 300,000 yuan,” Zhou announced dryly during the drive over.

  He was
wearing a navy Nautica sweater vest over a royal blue golf shirt and a pair of khaki trousers. Liu Yan wore a yellow hoodie and skinny jeans. Walking down the store’s aisles, the couple were affectionate and full of laughter. Hanhan, wearing a Uniqlo fleece jacket, stood at the front of the shopping cart as though he were king of the world.

  Back in the Hyundai on the drive home, Hanhan sat on his mother’s lap in the passenger seat. Zhou quickly turned up the volume on the car stereo.

  “Oh, listen,” he said excitedly. “It’s Hanhan’s favorite song!”

  First, there was the sound of the Chinese flute. Then, a man sang:

  Hair so long

  Eyes so brown

  Have I seen you somewhere before?

  The tundra roses are blossoming on the mountains

  And I’d love to pluck one of them just for you

  Smiles so innocent

  Conversations so coy

  Seared into my heart, I won’t forget

  Butterflies waft over our heads

  I just want to say I’ve fallen for you.

  “Sing it, Hanhan!” Zhou urged his son.

  Dear girl, I love you

  Please let me into your world so I can be with you

  Dear girl, I love you

  I would do anything for you one lifetime after another

  The little boy sang, and Zhou and his happy family laughed. They were on their way.

  ‌

  ‌Epilogue

  These days, when golf in China makes international headlines, the topics are less often crackdowns and mega-complexes, and more the action taking place on the golf courses themselves.

  In 2012, twenty-two-year-old female golfer Feng Shanshan earned a two-stroke victory in the LPGA Championship at Locust Hill Country Club in Pittsford, New York, becoming the first professional golfer from China, male or female, to win a major championship. Yet she was still struggling for recognition in her home country, especially when compared to someone like Chinese tennis star Li Na. “In China, I can still have a hamburger and Coke in my hand and eat on the street and nobody would recognize me,” Feng said. And, like male pros Zhang Lianwei and Liang Wenchong before her, Feng was still finding it a challenge to attract sponsors from mainland China’s companies. (By early 2014, Feng had three LPGA Tour victories to her name and was the sixth-ranked female golfer in the world.)