The Forbidden Game

by Dan Washburn

  Zhou lined up his crucial tee shot, intent on showing the onlookers they had backed the wrong horse. But, as he put it, “something bad happened.” As he addressed the ball, he noticed a golf cart – likely containing some VIP members of the club – moving on the path fifty yards away. Zhou stepped back from the ball and waved the cart on. It came to a stop. Zhou stepped to the ball again, taking a deep breath, visualizing sending the ball down… the cart was on the move again. Zhou stepped back, visibly angry now, and waited for the cart to pass. It eventually settled beneath a willow tree. Zhou regrouped, and stood over the ball a third time.

  Focus. Focus. Focus. This is the most important shot of your life. Don’t think of anything other than…

  The cart started moving again. Zhou was enraged. Are they doing this on purpose? he wondered. Are they conspiring against me? The cart didn’t move a fourth time, but he was rattled. His face was warm with rage. And he nearly drove his ball into the water. With an almost impossible lie, his only option was to knock the ball sideways back toward the fairway. His birdie chance, like the VIP cart, was long gone.

  Zhou and Chen both ended up with pars on the sixteenth hole, as well as the seventeenth. Zhou found himself walking to the eighteenth tee two strokes down. The odds were not in his favor, but Zhou knew anything could happen on the very tricky hole, a 452-yard par-4 with trees to the left, water to the right, a very narrow fairway and more than a half dozen bunkers.

  When Chen sent his tee shot deep into the left rough, Zhou knew he had lucked into one last chance. From the tee box, no one could tell for sure where Chen’s ball had landed, but it didn’t look good. The trees were tall and the plant life thick to the left of the fairway. Some wondered whether Chen would be able to find his ball, let alone hit it out of there.

  Zhou tried not to be too distracted by Chen’s plight, because if he didn’t focus he could very easily end up in a similar situation. In Zhou’s mind he needed to at least birdie; this would force a playoff with Chen. Mistakes were not an option. Zhou closed his eyes and tried again to clear his head. He tried to force out the wind and the trees and the water, and the spectators rooting against him. He tried to forget about his wife and his son and his parents back in the village who were depending on him. He tried not to think about the trophy and the prize money and his dream of winning a tournament, which thus far had eluded him.

  He tried to break this moment down to its essentials. A man. A club. A little white ball. No different than it was when he was just a security guard sneaking out onto the course at Guangzhou International Golf Club. No different.

  Every golfer remembers that first time they hit a ball perfectly. It almost feels like you didn’t hit the ball at all. The body remains relaxed. The club does all the work. Zhou recognized this feeling immediately, and watched as his ball flew straight through the air and landed cleanly on the widest part of the fairway. Zhou knew he could reach the green from there. A birdie was within reach.

  Things had just got interesting.

  For the moment, that is. Chen not only found his ball in the forest, but it turned out he had a decent lie, as well. He was able to snake the ball through an opening in the trees. It skipped across the fairway, and looked destined for the right fairway rough, or even the water just beyond it. But the ball died just before it reached the long grass. Luck, it seemed, was again on Chen’s side. His next shot, his third, landed on the green, not far from the pin.

  A birdie for Zhou was now imperative. He needed to find the green on his second stroke, putt it in with his third – and hope that Chen two-putted, at least. Zhou had heard about situations like this. He’d read about them and watched them on videos and on TV. But, aside from the occasional daydream, he’d never been right in the thick of it. He’d never lined up a shot with a tournament hanging in the balance.

  But no one watching Zhou would have known this. He approached his second shot in an entirely businesslike manner, as though he was doing something he had done thousands of times before. The moment he made contact with the ball he started walking down the fairway. He knew his ball was headed for the green. It didn’t land as close to the hole as Zhou would have preferred – he still had a long way to go – but he had secured his chance for birdie.

  Chen could still put the tournament out of reach, however. Despite his close brushes with nature, he could save par. It was a long putt, but doable, and he proved as much by pushing the ball to within inches of the hole.

  The stage was set for Zhou. Make the putt and force a playoff. Miss the putt and lose a tournament he had seemed destined to win not twenty-four hours ago. Zhou’s ball sat fifteen yards away from the hole. It was a long shot, in every sense of the phrase. But, then again, so was Zhou. Peasant farmer, security guard, golf pro. Wasn’t tournament champion the next logical step for this illogical life?

  No. Not on this day, at least. Zhou’s putt, and his dream, came up just short – four inches from the cup. It was Chen Xiaoma who raised his fist in triumph. Chen Xiaoma who was in the photos, a thick necklace of flowers around his neck, posing with hordes of smiling caddies, hoisting the championship trophy, receiving a giant commemorative check.

  There were no photos of Zhou Xunshu that day. After signing his scorecard, he raced off to find a quiet place to call Liu Yan, who had just seen the final disappointing numbers appear on her computer screen.

  Zhou was overflowing with conflicting emotions. His goal all along was to finish in the top three of a tournament. Now he had finished second and won 100,000 yuan in the process, more than five times what he had ever won before. But he had been so close to winning. So painfully close. One stroke, just one stroke. His mind was flooded with what-ifs, could haves and should haves from the past four days. So many moments that seemed insignificant at the time – a different bounce here, another inch there – that might have altered the outcome.

  “I wasn’t sure how to feel,” Zhou said. “I was full of happiness and regret. I was excited. I was upset. I was excited that I finished second. But I was upset at the mistakes that I made. I should have been the champion.”

  *

  Already, Wang Libo’s predictions had proved correct. His shop, and the road that led to it, were almost unrecognizable. It took just over a year, not the three he had imagined, for this to happen. By the autumn of 2010, new construction had started sprouting up all along the cement road from the Mission Hills employee dormitories, past Meiqiu village and into Yongxing town. The buildings were growing at an alarming rate. Stay for a week and you might see bare ground become two stories of brick before you leave. Most of the finished products strongly resembled the house Wang had built along the road two years before. They were cavernous, boxy and covered in tile. In rural Hainan, this is what a McMansion looked like.

  Wang’s once modest shop had also grown considerably, or more to the point, Wang’s empire had expanded around it. The shop itself was still the same size, just packed with more shelves and merchandise, but a new building now stood to its left, more than doubling the business’s footprint. A corrugated steel awning extended twenty feet beyond all of it, covering two pool tables, a TV, a makeshift outdoor kitchen and dozens of pink and purple plastic chairs. In April 2010, not long after Mission Hills’ surprise grand opening, Wang and his wife had opened an outdoor restaurant, which now accounted for the bulk of their income and employed seven family members. None of them had any experience serving food.

  Wang’s wife said business was “just so-so.” There were more potential customers – some of the dormitories behind the shop were now fully occupied – but there was also more competition. No longer was Wang’s place the only game in town. Three grocery stores had opened inside the Mission Hills compound, offering a level of convenience Wang could not compete with. Outside the Mission Hills gates, more budding businessmen had followed Wang’s lead. Next door, Wang’s brother had opened a small mah-jongg parlor that, not surprisingly, also did a steady trade in drinks and cigarettes. Beyond
that, Wang’s cousin Wang Liguo, the local government official, was building a large structure along the road, which he planned to turn into a hotel. Another door over, another cousin had opened a karaoke bar that looked very similar to Wang’s new home, but for the large illuminated sign advertising Tsingtao beer.

  Wang didn’t view the new businesses as rivals – “family never competes with family,” he said – and seemed content trying to do the best he could with his tiny piece of the pie. Wang was never much for bookkeeping, so he only had a vague knowledge of his expenses and sales, but he felt he was doing “a little better than before.” The easiest way for him to gauge growth was to inspect the pile of empty five-hundred-milliliter beer bottles growing along a cinderblock wall at the far end of his yard. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of them, green glass bottles with white foil around their necks, stacked neatly on their sides, one atop the other. It was beautiful, in its own way, and maybe somewhere else in the world it would have been considered a fine example of found-object art. But Wang was only interested in watching it grow. If in the morning he saw a noticeable difference in the size of the stack, he knew the previous night had been a good one.

  Wang was proud to employ several family members – two of his wife’s sisters, a brother-in-law and two nephews – and he was happy that, unlike before, when he was off in his three-wheeled truck and she was tending to the fruit trees, he and his wife were involved in this venture together. And, though the hours were long, he relished that he got to spend at least a handful of them with his children nearby.

  When they weren’t in school, third-grader Wang Jiaxing and his older sister Wang Jiazhen, a fifth grader, were regular fixtures around their parents’ businesses. They did inventory at the shop, prep work for the restaurant, and staffed the counter, giving change for orders of cigarettes and beer. The rest of the time they were either honing their billiards skills or glued to the outdoor TV (their favorite cartoons were GG Bond, about a naughty pig with superpowers, and Pleasant Goat and the Big Big Wolf, about a group of likable goats and the bumbling wolf who wants to eat them). Wang Jiaxing was quite the budding pool shark, even though the sticks were as tall as he was. He had the trash talking down, too. “Don’t waste your strength,” he’d tell his competition. “You are not going to beat me.”

  It was becoming obvious just how close Wang’s businesses were to the world’s largest collection of golf courses. The green netting and bamboo scaffolding had been removed from some of the buildings directly behind Wang’s shop, revealing the giant, seven-story white dormitories with more than a hundred windows on a side, a row of uniform flower baskets hanging under every one.

  Opposite Wang’s lot, the land on the other side of the cement road was also taking shape. This was the site of Meiqiu’s biggest land protest less than a year earlier. It had once been labeled huangdi, an expanse of lava rock wasteland topped with dense fruit trees and tall grasses. Now it was something altogether different. Two spotless white cement roads weaved their way through a field of freshly turned red earth. From his patio, Wang could watch a continuous parade of bulldozers, backhoes, excavators, cement trucks and the occasional golf cart full of red-uniformed female caddies roll by. Beyond the roads and a row of mature trees, he could just make out a swath of freshly cut bright green grass that strongly resembled a golf fairway.

  Closer to Wang’s place but still on the other side of the main cement road, wild shrubs and grasses remained, for the time being, and the scene was more familiar. At a certain time of day you might see a brown cow grazing, accompanied by a rail-thin seventy-eight-year-old man wearing shorts and a tank top – Wang’s father. Later in the afternoon, he’d be back, riding a bicycle with a five-gallon paint can strapped to either side of the rear wheel. Every day he came to Wang’s restaurant to collect the slop from the previous evening and bike it home to feed to his pigs.

  “My father has been through a lot, and he hopes these new businesses can be successful,” Wang said. “He knows that after losing our land, my wife and I need to have a job to do. Without the restaurant and grocery store, we have nothing to live on.”

  Wang himself was thankful his livelihood was no longer dependent on his san lun che, which hadn’t aged gracefully over the past five years. The three-wheeled truck’s battered, primitive appearance belied its relatively young age. It looked like it belonged in a museum of automotive history, perhaps in a wing dedicated to failed experiments of the Cold War, with its rudimentary and rusty exposed engine, and its driver’s seat falling apart despite dozens of strips of tape trying to hold it together. The truck was also obnoxiously loud. When Wang turned the ignition key, all conversation within a fifty-foot radius was forced to stop.

  Making a living from driving this little blue monster was getting increasingly difficult, especially as more and more of the villagers could afford their own modes of transportation. Indeed, the roads were getting more crowded, as Wang saw on an almost daily basis when he took his three-wheeler into Yongxing, or the big Xiuying wet market in the suburbs of Haikou, to pick up fresh produce, meat and seafood for his restaurant. Though it meant little sleep for him (the restaurant often didn’t close down until two or three in the morning), Wang insisted on making the early-morning run to the market himself.

  “First, I have the time to buy my own products,” he explained. “Second, I can guarantee the quality of the products if I buy them myself. And third, I know how much I need to buy. If I pay somebody to buy for me, they may purchase too much and waste money.”

  There was also a fourth reason. These regular trips to the market traced the same route Wang took when he was driving the san lun che for money, and this allowed him to keep in touch with his fellow drivers. He might stop off in Yongxing for a few cups of tea, or have lunch at a greasy spoon popular among drivers, called Ba Gongli, literally “eight kilometers” – roughly the restaurant’s distance from the Xiuying wet market. For old time’s sake, and a little extra pocket money, Wang would pick up passengers on his way to and from the market, but he was glad he no longer had to rely on these fares to support his family.

  “The road has become wider, and there are more private cars than ever before,” Wang said. “People have more money now. Chinese people have two dreams, right? A new house and a private car. Most cars here are BYD brand, but you can also see Toyotas, Fords, Hondas, Mazdas, Volkswagens and even BMWs and Mercedes Benzes. Not too long ago it was all three-wheeled trucks like mine, or public buses.”

  Lately, Wang had noticed owners of private cars becoming increasingly frustrated that they had to share the road with the little three-wheeled trucks. They’d beep their horns and curse at him. Sometimes Wang felt as though some cars were trying to drive him off the road. The area was changing.

  Back at the restaurant, once Wang returned with his purchases, the day began for the rest of the family. There were chickens to be butchered, vegetables to be cleaned and chopped, cloves of garlic to be peeled, dumplings to be stuffed and folded – a seemingly endless list of tasks to take care of before the first Mission Hills shift ended at 5:30 p.m. and the dinner crowd began to arrive. A few times a week, Wang would bring back a large sack of sea snails and spill the contents onto the cement patio. The tip of each spiral-shaped shell had to be broken off with a hammer. There were hundreds of them, and Wang’s wife attacked the bag one shell at a time.

  “We are farmers,” she said. “We’re used to being busy. Life before was tend the trees, look after the kids, chop the twigs to feed the goats. Now, it’s still busy, just different work.”

  Did she miss anything about the old life?

  “Let the past be the past,” she said. “Why should I miss it?”

  While his extended family prepared the food, Wang would often try to grab a midday nap in a room just off the kitchen. After he awoke, his wife would try to do the same. But the naps never lasted long enough. There was always work to be done. The clock was always ticking down to the evening rush, which was
preceded by a flurry of activity: Wang’s wife sorting and cleaning the vegetables, his brother-in-law frying eggs and chopping garlic, both sisters-in-law placing the barbecue items on their wooden skewers, his nephews arranging the chairs and tables. Wang’s job was to fix any new rips in the felt of the pool tables with some clear plastic tape.

  Once the sun landed just above the tree line and the shadows grew longer, their customers – Mission Hills caddies, hotel workers, cooks, cleaners and security guards – arrived mostly on foot, from the dormitories on the other side of the gates. They were young, and they came from all over China. For many of them, this was their first time living beyond their hometown or province. They had come to Hainan to pursue their own versions of the Chinese Dream.

  “We want to make them feel at home,” Wang said, noting they added boiled dumplings, not common in Hainan, to their menu to cater to clientele from northern China. “They are mostly from other provinces. If we offer our best service to them, they will come to our shop more often. We want to treat them well, which can also help us expand in the future.”

  One demographic that wasn’t queuing up for a seat at one of Wang’s tables was his fellow villagers, especially those who were still, all these months later, waiting to receive a land payment. They were stewing in their resentment of Wang and the other Cangdao ancestors who had made their deals and then built new houses and opened new businesses in prime locations along the cement road. “We have our own rice,” scoffed Wang Puhua, who remained one of the more vocal Meiqiu villagers. “We can cook by ourselves. Why would we go to his restaurant?”

  Visitors to Wang’s restaurant were never given a menu, and though the items on offer rarely changed from day to day, a menu never existed. This was common in rural Hainan. Asked how customers knew what to order, Wang’s wife looked puzzled. “You just write down things you want. And you don’t write down things you don’t want.”