‌1

‌Foundations

Zhou Xunshu never believed in the stone man, though it looked down on him every day from across the valley. Thousands of years ago, according to village legend, there were two stone men, but one of them had been struck by lightning while bathing in a pond at the foot of the cliff. All that was left of him was a large rock, shaped vaguely like a human head. The stone visage of the survivor protruded from the top of a tall white cliff face, and in 1984, twelve-year-old Zhou was trying hard to ignore its presence while he grazed his family’s oxen in a clearing on the opposite side of the gorge.

Some villagers feared the stone man. They told with sincerity a more recent tale that centered on a tree that once sat on top of the stone man’s head, protecting him like a large umbrella. One day, a family was carrying their daughter to another family’s home to give her away for marriage. No one knows why, but on their walk back they decided to chop the tree down with an ax. Not long after, the entire family died.

Some villagers prayed to the stone man, believing he had the ability to protect them and improve their lives. Zhou didn’t see any use in praying. He was convinced nothing was powerful enough to make life better in his miserable village. Not even a man made of stone.

By the time Zhou was twelve, he had already been working in the fields for more than two years. He’d take to the grassland with his sickle and harvest fodder for his family’s livestock. He’d set out for a clearing with their oxen and wait there as they grazed. Many other village boys would do the same. There was a game the young cowhands would play as their cattle nibbled on the grass. The boys would dig a hole in the earth, about twenty inches in diameter, and using bamboo sticks and their harvesting sickles, take turns hitting a stone or a wad of paper. Whoever hit the “ball” into the hole in the fewest “strokes” would win an item of food from the other players. The boys didn’t have a name for this activity. It was just a folk game that had evolved over time, one of the many pastimes the village children invented to stave off boredom. They certainly didn’t call it “golf.” Nobody in the village of Qixin – and very few people in China – had ever heard of that game. The country hadn’t been home to a golf course in nearly four decades.

But that had changed earlier in 1984. Henry Fok, a billionaire tycoon from Hong Kong, had recently opened an eighteen-hole layout designed by the golf legend Arnold Palmer, near Zhongshan, a city in southern China’s Guangdong province most famous for being the birthplace of Sun Yat-sen, known by many as the “Father of Modern China.” Zhongshan Hot Spring Golf Club may have been the first golf course in Communist China, but China had been home to several courses during the first half of the twentieth century. Most were in the foreign-occupied, self-governing zones of Shanghai, where a group of British executives had opened the city’s first golf course in 1896. Its nine holes occupied part of the downtown expanse now known as People’s Square. The Shanghai Golf Club sat alongside the Shanghai Racecourse, a wildly popular horse track, the former clubhouse for which – still famous for its grand clock tower – today houses the Shanghai Art Museum.

By the 1930s, the city was home to a handful of courses that catered to its predominantly foreign elite. In 1935, a Fortune magazine piece profiled a day in the life of a typical Shanghai-based expatriate, or “Shanghailander”: “At noon you make your way to a club for a leisurely lunch and two cocktails… You return to your office. But at four-thirty you knock off again for a game of golf at the Shanghai Golf Club or the Hung-Jao Golf Club, both resembling the Westchester County variety except for the attendants in white nightgowns.” Golf’s persisting image as a frivolous amusement for the privileged classes is precisely why Mao Zedong denounced it as a “sport for millionaires” when the Communists seized control of China in 1949. Existing courses were plowed under or repurposed – for example, Hung-Jao Golf Club (or “Hongqiao,” as it’s spelled nowadays) is now the site of the Shanghai Zoo.

But now Mao was dead, and Deng Xiaoping’s free-market reforms were in full swing. The Chinese government remained suspicious of golf, that symbol of Western decadence, but it was also pragmatic. Golf could be a magnet for overseas business and tourism, and Zhongshan was just across the border from Macau, a popular destination for Japanese travelers. Government officials were also none too pleased that China was unable to field a team when golf was introduced as a sport in the 1982 Asian Games. “The Red Chinese are convinced that golf is one way they can get elite people to visit there and spend money,” Palmer said before his initial China site visit in 1981. Palmer saw opportunities, too: “There are 800 million people. Imagine if just a fraction of them played golf,” he noted. Alastair Johnston, then vice president of Arnold Palmer Enterprises, was equally bullish, saying China “could be Japan 100 times over.”

When, after a year-and-a-half of negotiations, Palmer’s team broke ground at Zhongshan Hot Spring in 1982, it became clear that any golf history or knowledge the country once enjoyed was a distant memory. “The Chinese know nothing about golf. Absolutely nothing,” said Palmer, who would later write about his China adventure in his memoirs.

When he arrived for his first site inspection after construction began, Palmer couldn’t believe his eyes. All he saw were thatched huts; a pop-up village housing more than a thousand laborers tasked with molding the challenging terrain – nestled between mountains and rice paddies – into the course Palmer had designed. They were doing this all by hand – they had no bulldozers, no tractors and no trucks. Nearly half a million yards of dirt were being moved by industrious men and women using little more than shovels and burlap sacks. “The rocks too big to fit in their sacks were carried on their heads,” Palmer wrote. “Boulders were ground to gravel by sledgehammers, with workers lined at the ready to remove the rocks when they were small enough to be carried away. It was an unbelievable sight.” He recounted an interaction he had with one of the workmen:

[I] gave this man a golf ball I had in my pocket. He stared at it for a few moments, then tried to take a bite out of the cover. “No,” I said. “You don’t eat it.” That’s when it dawned on me that the men engaged in the grueling labor of building our course had no idea what golf was. When I explained through an interpreter that this ball would be used to play the course our new friend was building, his eyes lit up and he took the ball from me as if I’d just presented him with the crown jewels of China.

Word of the historic course in Zhongshan never made it to Zhou’s tiny village nine hundred miles to the northwest, nor word of any of the dozen or so golf courses built in China over the next decade. It’d be another twelve years before Zhou heard the word “golf” or saw a real golf ball. But when he did, it would change his life, far more than the stone man ever did.

*

Wang Libo didn’t think it was possible for his skin to get any darker. He had been laying bricks, one after the other, for five years under Hainan’s scorching sun. It was 2004. He was thirty-one years old and, like many Chinese, he dreamed of a better life.

The work was hard and monotonous, and it would often keep him away from home for months at a time. He’d chase jobs all over China’s island province, sometimes working with modern rectangular bricks, sometimes lugging the large lava rocks he grew up with. He built houses. He built roads. All for little more than a thousand yuan a month – about $125. But his growing family – he had a wife and three young children back in the village – needed every yuan. The fruit trees his family had relied on for generations were no longer enough. Times were changing, even in remote Hainan.

But Wang’s wife was beginning to complain that life was boring with him on the road. She needed his help around the house, and the children needed their father. So Wang vowed to make a change.

Life was simple in tiny Meiqiu village, about fifteen miles south of Haikou, the capital city. Even with his family’s small monthly income, Wang had managed to squirrel away a fair bit of cash. So, in the spring of 2005 he decided to invest in his family’s future. For twelve thousand yuan, he bought a san lun che, or three-wheeled car, which, based on his morning conversations with other drivers at the teahouse, would be his ticket to a better work–life balance. He’d be able to stay close to home, while helping the rural population meet a very basic need: Getting themselves, and their stuff, from one place to another. This part of Hainan, like most of the province, was extremely poor, and very few people could afford vehicles of their own. These three-wheelers had only been around for the past five years or so, and the only vehicles Wang remembered from his youth were dump trucks that transported loads of lava rocks toward the sea.

In years past, most people would simply stay close to home. The villages were largely self-sustaining. But the island economy was changing. People needed to go places. They needed to buy, to sell, to figure out new ways to put food on the table. People were adapting. Wang was, too.

The san lun che, a common sight on urban and rural streets throughout China, is basically a motorized, modernized rickshaw. They come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Wang’s was utilitarian blue, and large enough to carry people and cargo. The front looked kind of like a motorcycle, with a box-like metal carriage affixed just behind the driver’s seat. Around eight people could sit, somewhat uncomfortably, facing each other with their backs against the outside walls. Best of all for the passengers, and Wang’s precious skin, everything, including Wang’s cockpit, was enclosed and shielded from the sizzling sun. This armor, and the unusually loud growl of the engine, gave the vehicle a tank-like appearance, although if you were ever to ride in one you’d know they often feel as though one small pothole could make the whole thing fall apart.

Wang bought the truck on April 13, 2005, but according to the Chinese lunar calendar, that was not a good day to launch a business. So Wang waited a couple of weeks for a day that seemed appropriately auspicious for his initial ride. With nervous excitement, Wang rumbled off, ready to play the role of taxi or delivery truck, hoping his twelve-thousand-yuan gamble would pay off. His family was counting on him.

Wang drove from Yongxing, the closest town to his village, toward Xiuying, an area on the outskirts of Haikou, home to a variety of popular markets. It wasn’t long before people were waving him down and paying him the two-yuan fare. He fell into a rhythm. Back and forth. Back and forth. The same road, all day long.

But Wang enjoyed his new job. The route may not have changed, but the passengers did. From morning until night he could meet new people, make new friends and share ideas – that is, when the engine was quiet enough to talk over. He enjoyed the camaraderie with the other drivers, as well. They’d take breaks together at local restaurants and outdoor teahouses. They’d play the local lottery together – everyone, it seems, played the lottery in Hainan – studying confusing sheets of numbers with elaborate care.

Most days, the hours were long, 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Wang didn’t take weekends off. But the money was good. He could make around a hundred yuan (about $12.50) a day, and up to two or three hundred yuan on really busy days, more than tripling the monthly salary he earned working construction. And the best part of it all? At the end of the day he got to go home to his wife and children.

“It was so much better than laying bricks,” Wang said.

When Wang bought his san lun che, he was told its expected lifespan was around eight to ten years. And he didn’t see any reason why he wouldn’t continue working as a driver well into his forties. Maybe it’d be what he did for the rest of his life. This was still Hainan, after all. Change may happen, but it happens slowly. Or at least that’s the way it had always been before.

*

When Zhongshan Hot Spring Golf Club opened in 1984, Hainan was not yet a full-fledged province, and most mainland Chinese still observed the island with equal parts curiosity and fear. Despite its close proximity to the mainland – just eighteen miles from the southern tip of Guangdong province – for centuries Hainan was seen as a far-off and dangerous land, home to an unhealthy climate, impenetrable jungles and an unpredictable and treacherous sea. Some wrote it off as nothing more than a typhoon-plagued atoll inhabited by a motley collection of mysterious natives, ruthless pirates, banished criminals and exiled officials. Indeed, in the days before his expulsion to Hainan, disgraced Tang Dynasty chief minister Li Deyu complained he was being sent to the “gate of hell.” Several of these perceptions persisted well into the twentieth century. One Hainan local recalled how, when he arrived on the mainland for university in the 1980s, his fellow students were surprised he didn’t have a tail.

But it was also during this decade of reform and opening up that top-ranking officials began referring to Hainan as China’s “treasure island,” both for its rich natural resources and its sun-blessed, palm-tree-lined beaches. The island, although poor and backward, had potential, though at first no one could quite agree what for. Some felt the island should focus on agriculture, others emphasized industry, and there were those who favored the establishment of a free trade zone. Nothing much seemed to happen.

Thus, for Wang Libo, growing up in his tiny Hainan village meant a simple life, with very little interference from the Chinese authorities, let alone the wider world. His hometown, Meiqiu, appeared to be frozen in time. Like many villages on the island’s northeast coast, it was laid out in maze-like fashion with narrow stone paths weaving between small, single-story stone homes assembled from irregularly shaped lava rock and sporting tile roofs. Some of the structures were hundreds of years old. Everything was a shade of gray.

As a young child in the early 1980s, Wang attended classes in the village’s old stone schoolhouse. There was one teacher for both first and second grades, and there were only two classes: Chinese and math. When first grade was being taught, second grade would take a test, and vice versa. Their work was lit by traditional handheld oil lamps, and Wang recalls each pencil being a precious possession. If Wang lost one – just one – his parents would get very angry.

Outside school, free time was abundant, but Wang and his classmates had to be creative in how they spent it. There were no video games, no televisions and very few toys. He and his friends would play hide-and-seek, marbles and Chinese chess. There were ball games, too. One, played on a patch of dirt in front of the primary school, involved pushing a ball into holes dug in the ground.

But Wang’s favorite ways to kill time required cunning and dexterity. He especially liked to catch lizards and birds. The local lizards, about twice the size of a gecko, spent most of their time hidden from view, but when they’d emerge onto rocks hoping to soak up some sun, Wang was ready to pounce. He’d move slowly at first, and then distract the creature by placing a stick or a hand in front of its face. With his free hand he’d snatch the lizard by its belly. Then it was time for the pointed stick – this was no catch-and-release exercise – and an open fire. Meat was still largely a delicacy at the time, reserved for only the most important of holidays, and roasted lizard was a treat for the children of Meiqiu. Their diets at the time consisted primarily of cassava, jicama and other fruits and vegetables. While people had enough to eat, which wasn’t the case in prior decades, a lizard here and there provided a pleasant dose of protein. Wang would tuck the cooked lizard inside an edible leaf, sprinkle it with oil and salt, and dig in. “It tasted good,” Wang recalled. “So natural.”

Almost everyone in Meiqiu could climb trees, quickly. Even the tallest ones. They’d take off their shoes and race up a trunk as if it was a short flight of stairs. “If we can’t climb trees, who can harvest the fruits?” Wang asked. And it was deep inside the web of branches created by the village’s lychee trees that Wang and his friends took part in another popular pastime: raiding bird’s nests. If they found eggs inside, they’d cook them and eat them. If they found infant birds, they’d snatch those up, too, and attempt to raise them as pets. The hatchlings often died.

In 1985, when Wang was twelve, something happened that would change the way the island’s youth spent their free time forever: television arrived. The first set in Meiqiu was a black-and-white model with a seventeen-inch-wide screen. It resided in the family room of one of the village’s richest men, a public servant in charge of managing the area’s roads. Though he lived in a small, single-story lava-rock home like everyone else in Meiqiu, he was more than happy to share this technological wealth. Every night at around seven o’clock, the official and his wife would set out benches for a crowd. Wang recalled that more than twenty people, from young children to grandparents, showed up daily. It was the biggest thing to hit the village since, well… Wang couldn’t think of anything else from his childhood days that came close to it. The room was often so mobbed, he’d have to sit outside and peer in through the front door.

The TV received three channels – China Central Television (CCTV), Hainan TV and a local Haikou station – and the villagers would regularly stay and watch whatever was on until midnight. Wang’s favorites were Zaixiang Hushan Xing, a martial arts drama, and Dream of the Red Chamber, a series based on the classic Qing Dynasty novel. “TV dramas were such a precious thing for us,” Wang recalled. “Everybody would finish watching them before going to sleep.” Of course, there were days when the TV was unavailable, and he was forced to go back to his normal evening routine of doing homework or sitting under the village phoenix tree listening as the adults swapped folk stories. This pause in programming was not because the official and his wife got tired of hosting the community viewing parties. Quite the contrary. They loved the attention and status. Instead, the issue was infrastructure. Electricity was highly unreliable in Meiqiu, and the supply would cut off for days at a time. So it could be TV one day, oil lamps the next.

The village’s second TV arrived the following year. “It was color,” Wang said.

*

Martin Moore was never supposed to end up in China. That wasn’t the plan – if there was a plan at all. He knew nothing about the place. He could name Beijing, maybe Shanghai, but that was it. He’d never traveled west of the Mississippi River, and he was fine with that, so long as there were golf courses to build and cold beers to drink.

By his own admission, he was “single, crazy, stupid and wild.” Here he was in sunny Florida during the boom-boom mid-’80s, five years out of high school and spending all his time thinking about greens and fairways, bunkers and rough. He had landed a job with PGA Tour pro and golf architect Mark McCumber, helping to build courses throughout the South, and it seemed they couldn’t build them fast enough. The job suited Martin well. He loved the outdoors, hated working in an office, and golf was pretty much the only thing he knew – even as a kid, his summer jobs had always been at courses in his hometown, Fort Myers. He had worked his way up with McCumber, and now he was driving tractors and bulldozers, becoming trusted enough to put the finishing touches on some holes. He had worked in course maintenance before, but he “fell in love with” the construction side of things. It was partly the machismo required – all the big machines, the moving of earth – but he was also drawn to the artistic side of the job. The open acreage of a course was the ultimate blank canvas, and the before-and-after, the molding of the landscape to match the architect’s drawings, lit a fire inside Martin. True, he also liked living out of a suitcase, traveling from project to project. The pay was good, too, especially for someone in his early twenties, and so was the partying. As good as any trader up on Wall Street, Martin and his colleagues worked hard and played harder. The cliché nearly killed him.

He was on the waiting list to be enrolled at Lake City Community College in northern Florida, near the Georgia border. The school was known as “the Harvard of the golf industry” for its ability to churn out top-notch golf course superintendents. Martin, in fact, had been on the waiting list for more than three years, a detail he had nearly forgotten by the time the school called him in early 1986 to tell him he’d been accepted into their Golf Course Operations and Landscape Technology program, and that he could start studying in the autumn. His father, aware his son could be heading down a dangerous path, pressured him to go. But by that point, Martin wasn’t sure what good it would do him. He already had several years of real-world experience in an industry he knew he loved, and he was enjoying himself, perhaps too much. “I was in another world, and didn’t have any intention of going to school,” Martin said. “But my father was getting all over my shit.”

Martin was working a job in Green Cove Springs, Florida, south of Jacksonville, when he heard from Lake City. He blew off the school. He blew off his father. He focused on the job. “In the construction industry, we work all day busting our butts,” Martin said. “And after work, someone would buy a case of beer.” It was at one of those after-work happy hours that Martin had more beers than he should have. And then he went to a bar and had a few more. This wouldn’t have been too big an issue – it wasn’t the first time Martin had too much to drink – but Martin was driving that night. He drove a brown 1982 Dodge Ram van with a carpeted interior. His father had bought it for him two months earlier, partly to congratulate him for getting into Lake City, and partly to convince him to go.

Martin was living at a golf course in Middleburg, about fifteen miles away from Green Cove Springs along a narrow two-lane country road. It was pitch black, but that’s no excuse. Truth is, Martin was unfit to drive in any conditions. The story he’d tell the police later that night was a little different, but if we’re being honest Martin simply drove off the side of the road. He caught himself drifting right, and then overcorrected with a hard left turn and dropped hard, nose first, into a ditch on the side of the road. Martin had a fifty-pound metal Craftsman toolbox in the back, and at the point of impact it buzzed past his right ear and went straight out the windshield. “It’s pretty amazing that I didn’t get killed,” said Martin. “I think that was the wake-up call. I was lucky to be alive.”

Lucky indeed. Martin was not wearing his seatbelt, and the van was considered totaled, but he was able to open the driver’s side door and walk away from the accident. Other than a bloody forehead from where his head smacked the steering wheel, he was okay. He went to work the following morning – although he had to find a ride, of course.

He felt he had to prove something to his father, who, before the accident, had always been willing to pay Martin’s way through school – but no longer. So Martin enrolled at Lake City, taking classes Monday through Thursday and then working thirty-five to forty hours from Friday through Sunday building courses for Mark McCumber to pay his tuition bill. “It was tough,” Martin said, “but I got straight As in college. Everybody copied my shit. I’d already lived my stupid, crazy life. I was more responsible and disciplined.”

Martin continued working for McCumber, now as a project manager, after graduating from Lake City in 1988. And he was happy. He liked the work, and the industry was booming. In 1989, 267 new golf courses opened in the United States, by far the highest number since the National Golf Federation started keeping track in 1985, and the graph would continue to trend sharply upwards for the next decade. “There was no indication I would ever see anywhere other than America at that stage,” Martin said. But in 1989 a conversation with an old friend got Martin an interview with one of the biggest names in the industry: Nicklaus Design, founded by Jack Nicklaus. Martin felt he already had his “dream job” with McCumber, but thought he should at least hear what Nicklaus had to say. He was a sports legend, and had been a prolific course designer since he began mapping out holes in the late 1960s. “I had no intention of working there,” Martin said. “But why not take a free flight and go down there and talk?” “Down there” was North Palm Beach, Florida, home of the recently completed Golden Bear Plaza, a multi-million-dollar office complex that bore Nicklaus’ nickname and housed his business empire. Of course, Martin was impressed.

He was also somewhat taken aback by their offer. They wanted him to manage one of their golf course construction projects – in Thailand.

“It was pretty good money,” Martin said. “And I was single, twenty-seven years old, so it sure made me think. I flew back the next day and went back to my other job, but the offer had my mind going a mile a minute.”

A week after his interview, he called the Nicklaus offices and accepted the job.

*

It was early 1990, and about as far from a direct flight as you can get. Martin was clutching his first ever passport as he boarded the Delta plane in Fort Myers, Florida. Next stop, Atlanta. Then Portland. Then Seoul. And then finally, Bangkok. With each new city, Martin saw more and more Asian faces on his flights, and the reality of his big move began to set in.

He landed at one in the morning, yet the Bangkok airport was packed. He was told someone would pick him up at the airport, but he didn’t see his name written on any of the signs being held up by the crowd in the arrivals area. He was tired, confused and intimidated. He couldn’t understand what people were saying to him. They couldn’t understand what he said in return. “I didn’t know what was going on,” Martin said. “I was freaking out.” Two anxious hours later, his driver arrived.

He was taken to a hotel in the heart of Bangkok and told to await further instructions. By then, it was close to four in the morning, but he couldn’t sleep. He lay on his plank-hard mattress, trying to relax, wondering what he’d got himself into.

At 7:30 a.m., there was a knock on Martin’s door. When Martin answered, a young man smiled and said, “Khun Suraphan would like to see you in his office now.”

He didn’t stay long at the office, which was very close to the hotel, in an old building behind the Golden Buddha Temple. Soon he was escorted to an old but well-maintained Jaguar, and driven north, beyond the city limits. And the driver kept driving and driving. Martin’s palms began to sweat. Where were they going?

“I know someone told me the job was north of Bangkok, but I never thought I’d be so far out in the sticks,” Martin said. “I didn’t have any idea. I thought Thailand was Bangkok, and Bangkok was Thailand.

“I was wrong.”

*

Martin was crying again. This had become a regular occurrence during his first month in Thailand. He’d sit alone in his room at night and, with nothing else to occupy his attention, he’d just cry. He was convinced he’d made the biggest mistake of his life. He had left a great job in Florida, doing what he loved, working for people who cared for him, living in places that felt familiar. And he abandoned it all – for what? Living by himself in an office on a construction site four hours north of the only Thai city he’d ever heard of (and that was only because of that song by Murray Head). There was a tiny village nearby, but it was unlike any place Martin had ever seen before, and when he went into town, the locals stared at him like he was an alien. And, in many ways, he was.

Martin had never felt so isolated. No one in the village spoke English. Neither did anyone at the job site. The translator he was promised was nowhere to be found. Martin worked long days, but never felt he was making progress. Outside Japan, Nicklaus hadn’t designed much for Asia, and Mission Hills Khao Yai – the project Martin had been put on – was among the first batch of bids they had won in Thailand. Many of Martin’s workers had never built a golf course. Some had never even heard of the game. He would try to give directions through a combination of charades and doodles. It felt impossible.

Often, the only friend Martin thought he could turn to was the telephone. In those early weeks, he’d make frantic, expensive calls back to the Nicklaus Design reps in Florida. “I can’t do this,” Martin would say like a junkie during his first week of rehab. “I gotta come home. I can’t handle this.”

At night, after all the workers made their way home, the hours got longer for Martin. He was having trouble sleeping due to a combination of culture shock and jet lag. So he’d sit there, alone with his thoughts – and the shadow that lurked outside his window. It was a security guard making his rounds, and every fifteen minutes or so the silhouette of the guard and his machine gun would appear on Martin’s bedroom curtain. The sight filled him with unease. He wasn’t sure what frightened him more: the thought of a man holding a machine gun outside his window, or whatever it was the man with the machine gun was supposed to be protecting him from.

On his irregular visits to the construction site, Mission Hills Khao Yai’s owner could sense something was amiss with his project manager. Martin had heard a lot about Suraphan Ngamjitsuksri in the past weeks. An ethnically Chinese man in his late fifties, he was said to be the biggest steel importer in Thailand. He also had his hands in the country’s lucrative road construction business, but Martin suspected there was more to the story. He couldn’t shake it: Suraphan was like a character out of a mob movie. He was tall among Thai men, an inch or two shy of six feet, and he was bone thin, with sunken cheeks and a poof of wispy dyed black hair on the top of his head. It made him look like a walking skeleton, and many of the workers seemed to be scared to death of him. Despite the large gold Buddha medallions that dangled from his neck, he was an intense man, whose moods changed quickly. He chain-smoked. He yelled a lot, in multiple languages. Martin was happy he appeared to have done something to get on Suraphan’s good side. “I think he liked me because I worked seven days a week,” Martin said.

Suraphan made it his business to find the cure for what was ailing Martin. “I think you need to go to Bangkok,” Suraphan told Martin on his third Saturday in Thailand. “My driver will take you. I’ve got everything arranged.”

Martin wasn’t sure what that meant, but he was eager for a change of scenery, and when Suraphan’s Jaguar – he had a collection of more than a dozen cars – showed up at around 11 p.m., Martin was ready. The driver did not waste any time, hitting 120 miles per hour as soon as they reached the virtually empty highway, driving like a man who had no fear he’d ever be pulled over. The car had a clunky car phone embedded in the front seat armrest – a luxury rarely seen in north Florida, let alone Thailand – and the chauffeur received several calls during the drive. Martin could hear Suraphan barking orders on the other end of the line. What was normally a four-hour trip was cut nearly in half. Martin had no idea what was in store for him, and was already playing out numerous hair-raising scenarios in his head.

Once in Bangkok, the driver made a quick turn down a narrow, one-lane alleyway off Sukhumvit Road and came to an abrupt stop. A large neon sign on the building flashed, “Darling Turkish Bath.”

“I was already freaking out,” Martin said. “I was thinking, ‘What is this place? Are they going to kill me inside?’”

Far from it. Suraphan owned Darling, and he had clearly sent the message that Martin was to be given VIP treatment. He was greeted with deferential bows and then ushered quickly into a large dark room with one wall made almost entirely of glass. There were women on the other side of the fishbowl, thirty of them, each one more beautiful than the last – an aquarium swarming with supermodels. The women were dressed alluringly; numbers were printed on slips of paper and pinned near their left shoulders. “I didn’t know what to think,” Martin said. “I was still in culture shock, but I was a single male in my twenties. This was starting to look appealing.”

“Choose one!” the manager, a pleasant-looking, middle-aged woman, ordered.

Martin was dumbfounded. He didn’t say a word. The host pointed to a couple of the women and provided an overview of the services offered. She also drew Martin’s attention to the women who spoke English.

“So, who do you like?” she pressed.

“I guess No. 63 looks nice,” Martin mumbled.

“63!” the host yelled, and the woman came out from behind the glass.

“Pick another one!” cried the host.

Another one? Martin thought.

“I think this one is fine,” Martin said politely.

“No! Khun Suraphan said you must have two.”

“Um, I don’t know.”

The manager, growing frustrated with Martin’s indecisiveness, chose a second attendant for him. Martin and the two masseuses were escorted to a room.

Inside the room, the women started drawing a bath for Martin. Then there was a knock at the door. It was the manager.

“Khun Suraphan said you must have a third one!”

A third masseuse entered the room, and Martin tried hard to relax.

*

Back at the work site, things started to get better for Martin. A translator eventually arrived, and Martin began to occupy his empty nights by studying the Thai language. He’d force himself to learn ten words each evening before he went to bed, and he’d carry his vocabulary list around with him the following day and practice speaking with anyone who’d listen. Usually it ended up being the local girls who worked in the office. After six months, Martin could have basic conversations in Thai, and started to make friends. Suraphan still insisted he take monthly breaks in Bangkok, but Martin was beginning to grow accustomed to life in the countryside. He was never much of a big city kind of guy anyway.

Still, the job wasn’t without its frustrations. Several white-knuckle moments made Martin wonder why he’d ever left Florida. Many of them involved Suraphan, who was proving to be a hair-trigger personality in more ways than one.

Sometimes when Martin was in Bangkok, Suraphan would invite him over to his office. Initially, it didn’t appear to be the kind of office one would expect of a man who owned a Jaguar, a Mercedes and a Porsche. Tucked in that old building behind the Golden Buddha Temple, where Suraphan often prayed, the room was dingy and dark, with water-stained walls. It had once been the office of Suraphan’s father, and had the feel of an antique shop. The furniture – including Suraphan’s unusually large desk – was in the classic Thai style, dark wood with intricately carved detail. Gold, jade and ivory statues, many of them Buddhas, adorned nearly every flat surface in the room, and the walls were covered with portraits of the Thai kings. Suraphan, like many of his countrymen, seemed especially fond of King Rama V.

In the morning, Martin would watch as women brought in suitcases full of money, the takings from the previous day’s customers at Darling Turkish Bath. This was before Thailand introduced the one-thousand-baht note – up until the mid-1990s, five hundred baht (roughly twenty US dollars) was as big as bills got – so Suraphan’s piles of cash grew to be cartoonishly tall. Suraphan would open up some sliding doors on the wall of cabinets behind his desk and place his bounty of baht alongside even more cash, in every currency Martin could imagine. It wasn’t all banknotes, either. He thought he saw several bars of solid gold.

Every couple of weeks, Suraphan would fill up a few suitcases with cash and head out to the work site at Mission Hills Khao Yai. He’d ask Martin to be present when he doled out payments to subcontractors. In theory, Martin was there to confirm that the agreed work had been done to his satisfaction. But it was clear only one opinion mattered during these proceedings, and that was the opinion of the man with the loaded gun.

Subcontractors would queue up outside Suraphan’s office at the course, waiting to be paid in wads of cash. He’d make them wait for hours, and when they did make it to his desk, Suraphan would never pay them what they thought they were owed. For 100,000 baht’s worth of work, he’d pay 80,000 and say, “That’s enough.” Few subcontractors complained. With all the cash lying around, Suraphan had two armed guards at the door and a nine-millimeter pistol on his desk; it could be intimidating. “It’s not a negotiation,” Martin said. “If he says you didn’t do something, you’re not getting fucking paid.”

One instance in particular stuck with Martin. It was late, close to 10 p.m., and the subcontractor responsible for building the cart paths on the course had been waiting to be paid since sundown. When the man finally got his turn, he presented Suraphan with a bill for five holes’ worth of cart path, calculated by the square meter.

“Square meter?” Suraphan scoffed. “I pay you by linear meter.”

The man looked heartbroken. This meant he’d get paid a third of what he was owed. He tried to argue, all the while eyeing the gun on the table. He didn’t get very far.

“It’s linear meter, right?” Suraphan yelled to his staff, who were not inclined to disagree with him.

“You’re right,” they said. “Linear meter.”

The subcontractor began to cry.

“You’re getting paid per linear meter,” Suraphan said brusquely. “Here’s your money. Now get the hell out of here.”

“That guy lost his ass, probably totally went broke,” Martin recalled. “I never saw that cart path contractor again.”

Six months into the job, Martin learned that Suraphan’s gun wasn’t just for show. Several families of wild dogs lived near the golf course, and they’d dig holes in fairways and greens. Martin saw them as merely a nuisance, but Suraphan absolutely hated the dogs, and he told his staff to do whatever it took to get rid of the pests. They were costing him money.

Then, during one of his weekend visits to the job site, Martin took Suraphan on a drive around the course so he could update him on progress. Sure enough, there was a wild dog in the middle of one of the finished greens.

“Martin, I told you to fucking kill those dogs!” Suraphan said.

Martin chuckled, thinking Suraphan was just joking.

“Stop! Stop the truck!” Suraphan yelled.

Martin obliged, and in one motion Suraphan hopped out, reached into the waistband at the back of his blue jeans, pulled out his nine-millimeter and shot the dog dead. He got back in the truck, turned to Martin and said, “I don’t want to see any more dogs out here.”

Martin liked dogs. He had them as pets. And when, a couple of holes later, he spotted another dog, he started shaking his head. He knew what was coming – or at least he thought he did.

“Stop!” Suraphan screamed.

Martin stopped the truck and waited for Suraphan to hop out and shoot the dog. But this time Suraphan handed the pistol to Martin.

“You take care of this one,” Suraphan said.

Martin’s face went flush, and all the hairs on his body stood at attention. He didn’t have much experience with guns, and he had no desire to shoot anything. But he felt he couldn’t say no. Nobody could say no to Suraphan.

Martin took the gun and reluctantly left the driver’s seat. He could feel the sweat building up on his forehead. He slowly raised his right hand, hoping that, if he delayed long enough, the dog would run away.

“Shoot!” Suraphan screamed. “Shoot him!”

The shots burst out of the gun in such quick succession, Martin wasn’t sure how many there were. Five? Six? One thing was obvious: none of the shots came anywhere close to the dog, which had scampered off to safety with the first bang.

Martin was part emasculated, part relieved. Suraphan was laughing hysterically, uncontrollably, like it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen.

“It was all a joke to him,” Martin said.

Suraphan killed three dogs that day. And it only took him four shots to do it. Martin hoped he’d never see the nine-millimeter again.

He wouldn’t be so lucky. Half a year later, Martin and Suraphan were in a luxury van – yet another member of Suraphan’s fleet – returning to Khao Yai after a weekend trip to another Mission Hills project in Kanchanaburi in southwest Thailand, not far from the border with Burma. They were only four miles from the course in Khao Yai, but construction had traffic at a standstill. The road only had two lanes, but that didn’t stop some vehicles from trying to create their own, forcing themselves between and around stopped cars, making traffic move even slower. Martin had his attention focused on a ten-wheel dump truck on his side of the van trying to squeeze by them on the shoulder. Suraphan saw it, too.

“What is that asshole doing?” Suraphan roared.

The truck kept inching closer, and Suraphan kept shouting. The van couldn’t move, and the truck driver obviously didn’t know who he was messing with. He crept closer and closer, until he clipped the sideview mirror on the van and ripped it off. Suraphan was enraged.

“That fucker!” Suraphan screamed.

He reached under his seat, pulled out the pistol and leaned across Martin to slide open the van door. Then, with his arm extended in front of Martin’s frozen face, Suraphan aimed at the truck’s tires and squeezed the trigger four times. Problem solved, Suraphan closed the door and put the gun back under his seat. Martin was in shock, his face speckled with gunshot residue, his ears deafened.

“The truck driver didn’t do anything in response,” said Martin, whose hearing didn’t come back for over three hours. “He probably assumed it was a super VIP.”

And the driver would have been right. Suraphan was well connected, at the highest levels of the Thai government. Martin saw this influence firsthand. He knew the course at Khao Yai butted up against national park land – he’d seen herds of wild elephants on local roads – but he wasn’t aware that the course actually straddled the park. In fact, to get from hole No. 1 to No. 2, and then from hole No. 6 to No. 7, you had to traverse a small mountain that was protected land. Suraphan insisted a path traverse the mountain and connect the holes, and he instructed his workers to begin chiseling and dynamiting away. This effort was soon shut down by park police, and for about six months Suraphan’s team wasn’t allowed near the mountain. Suraphan was pissed off – and that was before he learned about the hefty fines he was expected to pay. But a leadership change was looming in Thailand, and the candidate Suraphan backed ended up winning.

“Within one month after that, they dynamited the fuck out of that mountain – got a road through there and everything,” Martin said. “And Suraphan only got fined five-hundred baht, or twenty bucks.”

Thailand would prove to be a perfect training ground for working in China.

*

When Wang Libo was a young boy, his grandfather would tell him stories about his years in Malaysia. He captivated Wang with descriptions of tall cement buildings with flat walls and square windows. “My grandfather told me modern buildings like that were everywhere over there,” Wang recalled. “And when he came back to Hainan all he saw were small stone houses with dirt floors and tiled roofs. He said people outside were living better than in Hainan. Hainan was very backwards back then.” Forty years had passed and Hainan villagers were still living in those one-story houses made of lava rock, just like they had for centuries. Wang, not yet a teenager at the time, dreamed of the day this would change. He thought the stone homes were dark and depressing. He wanted to live in a house where you could brush against a wall and not draw blood.

In 2000, at the age of twenty-seven, Wang realized his dream. He and his wife of three years moved out of his parents’ lava stone house, the house he had grown up in, and built a new home on a different plot of family land. The house was not large, but it had smooth walls and square windows. It was made of red brick and cement and was situated near the cement road. Cement was a status symbol in Meiqiu. People talked of saving up to build a “cement home” near the “cement road” and Wang was one of the first in Meiqiu to live in a house built using cement.

Wang said that while he admired the resiliency of the old stone homes – lava rock walls can last generations – he didn’t miss living in his old house at all. Life was easier in cement houses. And since villages were still closed to most vehicles, being close to the cement road meant he could get where he needed to go much faster. “Old stone homes are a reminder of old tough lives,” Wang said. “When everyone lived in old stone houses, we had to trade coupons for rice. There was no meat to eat. Now you can buy anything you want.”

Before passable roads were built in the late 1970s, everything was carried on the shoulders of people traveling on foot. In fact, many villagers still commonly use the unit of measurement dan, literally the amount of weight a grown man can carry over his shoulder. Old men in Meiqiu recalled hauling sacks of coal to Haikou, a three-hour trek, hoping they could trade it for just one yuan. And then they began their journey back to the village, fearful that bandits would steal the only coin they had. Until the late 1980s, water was fetched from wells thirty meters deep. In the winter months, the wells would often run dry. What did the villagers do? “We didn’t use much water in the winter,” one longtime Meiqiu resident said wryly.

Meiqiu was the only home Wang had ever known. And, he figured, it would be the only home he’d ever know. Very few people leave the village, and those who do usually go just a short way down the road to Yongxing. Wang’s great-grandfather had told him that his ancestors probably arrived on the island several hundred, maybe even a thousand, years ago, from Fujian province in southeastern China. Everyone in the village, and several surrounding villages, shared this origin story. That explained why they were all ethnically Han Chinese and not part of the Li or Miao minorities native to Hainan. It also explained why everyone carried the same family name, Wang. Wang Libo assumed that if you looked far enough back in the family tree you’d find that everyone in Meiqiu was related in one way or another. And he’d later learn, as anyone with a large extended family will tell you, that this can be both a blessing and a curse.

Most villagers assumed their ancestors felt the area had auspicious feng shui. Meiqiu and the neighboring communities sit slightly east of what’s now a 27,000-acre national geological park. The park surrounds an extinct volcano crater and has earned the reputation of the “green lung of Haikou.” Locals say their air is cleaner than the surrounding parts of the island, that their primitive forests are more lush, that their location is less susceptible to wind and rain. The villages are also perched on a ridge, higher than many other parts of the island, which is thought to be more advantageous for burying and honoring the dead.

Wang’s family had been farmers for as long as he or his relatives could remember. The area’s rocky terrain was not suitable for most crops, including rice, but fruit trees thrived in the black, nutrient-rich volcanic soil. Wampee, guava, jackfruit, banana and longan are grown in family farms and harvested from the wild. But it’s the local lychees that are famous, and everyone brags about how big they are. Lychee season begins in May; jackfruit and wampee start to ripen in June. And while the fruit seasons are finite, the money they produce needs to last the entire year.

There have been plenty of interruptions to life on this island paradise, some of them rather severe. Things got so bad for Wang’s grandparents, they fled to Malaysia and lived there for several years before his father was born. “At that time, Hainan was in chaos,” Wang said, recalling the story he was told. “I’m not sure, maybe it was the Japanese War.” Hainan has seen its share of chaos. It has been ruled by many masters: dynastic generals, pirates, foreign imperialists, missionaries and feudal warlords, to name just a few. And then, of course, there were the Japanese, the Nationalists and the Communists, who arrived in succession during a turbulent, often terrible three decades, starting in the late 1930s.

Before the Japanese invasion of Hainan, which began in February 1939 and didn’t end until the close of the Second World War in 1945, Wang’s family lived in a village called Cangdao, just over two miles from Meiqiu. Cangdao was the largest village in the area and its residents had a reputation, compared to other villagers at least, for having large amounts of money and land. Wang said many men in Cangdao, intent on defending their possessions, formed citizen militias and bandit gangs after the Japanese invaded. Perhaps it was Cangdao’s size that caught Japanese attention. Perhaps it was its fight. Today, many believe it was a combination of the two, coupled with its hubris: Cangdao was one of the few villages in the area not to construct a protective exterior wall. It was an easy target, and Japanese soldiers burned it to the ground. The surviving Cangdao villagers limped off to seek refuge in neighboring villages. Most ended up in Meiqiu. “Some older villagers told me there were one thousand villagers in Cangdao before the Japanese came,” Wang said. “When we moved to Meiqiu, Cangdao had no more than one hundred people.”

According to stories told in the village, Meiqiu was a comparatively safe place to be during the Japanese occupation of Hainan. It was small enough to be ignored, and a wall of lava rocks, as tall as ten feet high in some places, encircled the village. The walls also came in handy later, when Chinese Nationalist forces controlled the island. “They would rob you,” one elderly Meiqiu resident said. “And if you didn’t give them what they wanted, they would threaten you with guns. But they weren’t like the Japanese, who took all your things, burned down your village and raped your women. They were Chinese. They just took your rice and your chickens. They didn’t kill farmers.”

The Meiqiu wall was knocked down decades ago, but Wang always felt fortified by the place. This was home. His father had lived in Meiqiu his entire life; Wang had been born and raised here. Over the past century his family had survived the same horrors as everyone else in the village. He never felt like an outsider, and thought he never would. But that was before anyone in Meiqiu had heard of the “Red Line” or Project 791.