12
The Road Is Wider
Zhou Xunshu was not prepared for the 2010 competitive season. While there were several reasons for this, two stood out:
- He was extremely busy.
- For a long time, he had no idea if there was even going to be a professional golf season in China this year.
The busy part was largely a good thing – it meant Zhou was no longer unemployed. In November 2009 he had landed a job at a driving range. It paid him eight thousand yuan a month and was his first steady flow of income in more than five months.
But the job was in Chengdu, a city two hundred miles away from Liu Yan and Hanhan back in Chongqing, and the work itself was a chore. Zhou was teaching golf, which he enjoyed, but he was also involved in the daily management of the driving range, which he often found tedious. He did not like drama, and being stuck between layers of adolescence (his staff) and dysfunction (his superiors) added much of it to his life. Worst of all, he was working from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day and barely had any time to practice. And practicing was what he enjoyed most.
“It was difficult, but I have to work, right?” Zhou said. “Without a job, the family has no backbone. I needed to find a job to balance my life. I couldn’t just stay home all day long – even if the job means I need to be separated from my family.”
Zhou liked the driving range itself. It was newer and much bigger than where he previously worked. Its English name was Seasons International Country Club, and Zhou said his bosses were the richest men in all of Chengdu. One made his fortune from pharmaceuticals, the other from real estate development. He had been told that there would be a tournament-caliber golf course attached to the driving range and clubhouse. “But the government stopped construction,” Zhou said matter-of-factly.
Zhou didn’t concern himself with the details surrounding this turn of events. He didn’t have time to. He had thrown himself into his new job, with barely enough hours to see his family. He worked straight through the first month, and only started making semi-regular trips back home to Chongqing – a day here, a day there – in late December. The one-way trip was four hours by bus, or two hours if his schedule and budget aligned with that of the newly built bullet train. The train cost ninety-seven yuan each way.
Zhou was a hard worker by nature. He was what the Chinese might call a gongzuo kuang, a workaholic. But these days Zhou was also motivated by not a small amount of fear. He didn’t know when his next tournament might be; he didn’t know if there would even be one. The way the Omega China Tour had just vanished, coupled with the fragile state of the global economy, had Zhou wondering if professional golf in China was over. Would he have to stop counting on tournaments as an extra source of income? Would he have to give up on his dream?
Zhou had no answers. So he put everything he had into his new job, and that meant barely playing the game he loved. Over the course of his exhausting fourteen-hour shifts, Zhou was lucky if he had time to hit one hundred balls at the driving range, seven hundred shy of his normal routine. He almost never got an opportunity to play on a course. In fact, in the nine months since he had lost his job at Haoyun Golf Club in Chongqing, Zhou estimated he had played a full round of golf outside competition only three times. He could count on his fingers the number of proper driving range practice sessions he’d completed.
Then, in mid-March, the email came. “Did you hear the news?” a fellow golfer wrote. Zhou clicked the embedded link and watched the 2010 China Golf Association tournament schedule load in his web browser. It was surprisingly full, by Chinese golf standards, and it was starting soon. The first tournament, the Luxehills Open, was only a little over two weeks away. And it was taking place in Chengdu.
Zhou was excited. His dream was still alive. He also was panicked. He had sixteen days to prepare for a tournament at which his new bosses, colleagues and students would have a front-row seat.
“I wanted to golf well to win honor for my club,” said Zhou, who wore the Seasons International Country Club logo on his shirt for the tournament.
Truth was, even if Zhou had prepared properly for the tournament, he had little chance of ranking near the top. The Luxehills Open was a stop on the OneAsia Tour, which World Sport Group (the same organization behind the defunct Omega China Tour) had launched the previous year as a potential rival to the already established Asia Tour. OneAsia’s goal was to “provide an Asia-Pacific alternative to the PGA Tour and the European Tour,” and the total prize money for Luxehills was one million dollars – a purse intended to draw the top pros from the entire Pacific region. The field was dominated by Australian and Korean players competing regularly in international tournaments. Simply advancing beyond the first two rounds would be an incredible accomplishment for a coachless golfer like Zhou.
After a solid first round that saw him birdie three of his first seven holes, Zhou found himself in a strong position to earn some respect. He shot a 2-under-par 70, good enough to be tied for thirty-third place in the 152-man field. There he was, his name up on the top quarter of the leaderboard, surrounded by foreign names and foreign flags. What surprised Zhou most was how comfortable he felt out on the course, even with the extra scrutiny that came with being a “local.” He was putting well and his mind was clear. It was as if his lack of preparation and his lack of expectations were turning into positives.
But he still had to play the second round. A quadruple bogey on hole No. 4, a double bogey on No. 6, and Zhou was already 6 over and out of contention. He finished with an 82, twelve strokes worse than the previous day, and was eliminated. He went back to his job at Seasons International in sole possession of 146th place.
“I think my golf club had high expectations for me in that tournament,” Zhou said. “And after the first day, when I shot a 70, they were very happy. After my performance in round two, I don’t think the club cared too much about it, but I felt very upset. It was my first tournament since I started working for them, and playing poorly made me feel like I had committed a crime.”
Zhou didn’t have long to feel guilty. In less than a week, he was off to Shenzhen to take part in the first leg of the China PGA Champions Tour, one of two new tournament series geared at China’s domestic golfers. The Champions Tour, with $200,000 purses per event – double what had normally been on offer on the Omega China Tour – was organized by DYM International Sports Development, a Hong Kong company owned by the father of China-born and Canada-raised Su Dong.
Su, who had turned pro in 2009 after three top-three finishes on the China Tour the previous year, was only twenty years old, but he represented the future of the game. There was a new generation of players nipping at the heels of homegrown and self-trained older golfers like Zhou. Mostly rich kids, these Chinese players were young enough to have grown up playing the game, and wealthy enough to afford quality coaching.
When Su and the other well-to-do, foreign-educated amateurs found themselves lined up next to their older and more rough-and-tumble counterparts – the Chinese working pros – the contrasts were striking. From their hair, to their clothing, to their meticulously coached and elegant swings.
In post-round interviews at a 2008 China Tour event, eighteen-year-old Hu Mu – who had been saddled with high expectations since someone labeled him “China’s Tiger Woods” when he was in his early teens – unwittingly made clear just how stacked the deck was against the self-trained golfers on the tour. Hu credited his fine performance to a call he had placed the night before to his coach, the world-famous swing doctor David Leadbetter. Later in that tournament he thanked Dr. Jim Loehr, a renowned performance psychologist, for the focus he maintained on the course. The reaction of players like Zhou? “What’s a performance psychologist?” Hu played one year at the University of Florida before turning pro.
The playing field may have been slightly more level in Shenzhen than at the OneAsia event, but Zhou’s rustiness remained. He did not feel good about his chances. But, quite to his surprise, he didn’t much care, either. That was good, because he opened with a sloppy round that included five bogeys on the back nine, resulting in a 4-over 76. His strong putting had carried over from Chengdu, but his drives were all over the place. His performance was exactly the opposite of what he had come to expect in years past. Still, even with his poor play, Zhou finished day one tied for thirty-seventh place. He suddenly realized he might not be the only Chinese golfer who hadn’t been practicing.
Zhou seemed to have found the Zen that Scottish coach Michael Dickie had said he was lacking back in 2008. His calmness garnered him solid, if not spectacular, rounds of 73, 70 and 72, and somehow this effort was good enough for an eighth place finish, seven strokes back from winner Zhang Lianwei, the legend himself.
“I don’t know how I finished in the top ten,” Zhou said. “I didn’t perform very well. I guess the other players just played worse than me.” But any celebrations were necessarily brief. After the tournament, he immediately threw himself back into his job at Seasons International. Though he had about six weeks until his next event, he didn’t start practicing in earnest until the final seven days.
This was partially due to time – he had very little, after the demands of his work – but he had not recovered the feeling of motivation that had consumed him in the past. There was no urgency. No drive. No giant chip on his shoulder. No hint, no inkling he was about to enter the most important tournament of his career.
*
A smaller circuit, called the China Challenge Tour and operated by the state-owned China Sports Travel organization, was also making its debut this year. The prize money for the Challenge Tour was more in line with events in previous years: 800,000 yuan per tournament. The first event had a rather awkward English name: the Handa Cup Philanthropy in China. (The Chinese name translated directly to the much more manageable “Handa Fraternity Cup.”) The cup was a joint venture between the China Golf Association and the International Sports Promotion Society, a Tokyo-based organization founded in 2006 by Dr. Haruhisa Handa, a “golf philanthropist” dedicated to supporting charitable causes through sporting events. Ten percent of the prize money from the tournament was to be donated to charities aiding the disabled in China.
Zhou was fairly certain his mandatory donation to charity, if he was lucky to win anything at all, would be minimal. His confidence was already low, and the course, at the Jinghua Golf Club about twenty-five miles east of downtown Beijing on the banks of the Chaobai River, was known for its difficulty. The course’s Korean architect, Tiger Song, had put water into play on more than half of Jinghua’s holes. Zhou knew his typically aggressive style of play could prove disastrous on such a tricky course, so he decided to employ a more conservative approach, one that seemed to match his current mindset.
Early on, however, it didn’t seem as though any approach was going to work for Zhou. The four-day tournament started on a Sunday, which was unusual, but no Beijing courses were willing to close their doors to business during the prime days of the week, especially for an event featuring mostly domestic players. It was brutally hot – reaching ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit (thirty-five degrees Celsius), with 82 percent humidity – and Zhou slogged his way through the front nine. He was 2 over at the turn, buried in the middle of the pack, and showing no signs, either to himself or anyone else, that he was about to break loose.
Then something happened. It wasn’t dramatic. Probably nobody noticed. But Zhou collected himself, like a cat preparing to pounce. A birdie on hole No. 10, a birdie on No. 12, and he was back at even par. Zhou added two more birdies, offset by two more bogeys, and entered the clubhouse with a 72. He was in nineteenth place, four strokes behind the leaders. There was nothing spectacular about his round. He surely hadn’t raised any eyebrows. But Zhou, for whatever reason, was feeling good.
Monday was cooler, and it was windy. The course was almost free of spectators, but if you closed your eyes when the wind swirled through the tall trees lining the fairways it sounded like a large gallery of whispering fans was following the action. And if that had actually been the case, they would have been chasing Zhou Xunshu, who was far and away the best player on the course that day.
While the wind wreaked havoc on the field, Zhou occupied his own pocket of calm. The leaderboard was littered with bogeys and double bogeys and the occasional triple or quad. Most players were sliding decidedly downward. Sunday’s leaders – Chen Xiaoma and Yang Jinbiao, who both carded 4-under 68s in the first round, were a combined 10 over par for the day. Zhou, meanwhile, was climbing steadily upward. He was even par through the first nine holes, and tallied three birdies on a bogeyless back nine. His 69 put him in a tie for the best round of the day – no one else had shot better than a 73. When the final scores were counted, Zhou Xunshu’s name sat alone at the top of the leaderboard.
In years past, Zhou might have cracked under the pressure. This was the first time in his career he’d ever entered the last two rounds of a tournament in the final grouping, let alone with the outright lead. On Tuesday, he didn’t wait long to make it clear he was not shying away from his moment in the spotlight – he was seizing it. He birdied two of his first three holes and opened up a convincing lead. After eight straight pars, he added another birdie on the twelfth hole. Two more pars later, his lead over second place was a commanding five strokes. Zhou’s goal of finishing in the top three seemed a foregone conclusion. His dream of winning a tournament was well within his reach. Somehow, despite his lack of preparation, Zhou was playing the best golf of his life.
“I’m more relaxed in my mind,” Zhou said. “It’s not like before, when I would stress over every stroke, because if I didn’t play well my family would starve. Before, I was too aggressive, too anxious to win a tournament. Without prize money, I couldn’t support my family. So I viewed every stroke as my last chance to succeed.”
The break between domestic tournaments, coupled with his own period of extended unemployment, had been “torture,” he said. If he had learned anything from the ordeal, it was the value of patience. Exactly what Michael Dickie had tried to counsel little more than a year earlier in Shanghai.
“Yes, Michael told me to be patient, to slow down my pace,” Zhou admitted. “He told me to raise my head, to lengthen my stride, and to speak more deliberately. He said all of these things could help calm me down during competition.”
It took Zhou a while, but he finally decided to put Dickie’s advice into practice. “Before this year, every stroke I took was overly ambitious,” Zhou said. “I played with too much urgency. I took too many risks. Now, I want to think and make sure every stroke is steady and secure. If I want to win, I have to put safety first, right? Before, I never understood this cause and effect. Now I do. Now I am beginning to understand what Michael really meant about being patient.”
Hole No. 15 at Jinghua was a pretty straightforward 458-yard par-4. It was surrounded by water – the fairway and green occupy a small peninsula that juts out into a lake – but the playable area was wide enough that, for a skilled golfer, the water rarely came into play. The bunkers, on the other hand, were a different story. Four of them framed the green like a pendant necklace, and they had claimed the hopes of more than a few players during the tournament. Statistically, the fifteenth hole was the fifth most difficult on the course, causing fifty-five bogeys, or worse.
But Zhou had managed to birdie the hole in rounds one and two. He had seemingly figured it out. Given his large lead, he felt a conservative approach made the most sense again. So, he held back a bit on his tee shot, going more for accuracy than distance. The safe move, he told himself. The smart move.
It very well might have been, too, if only he had hit the ball cleanly. Zhou was perhaps too concerned with being careful, and his driver only made contact with the top half of the ball. It skipped forward ungracefully, finally settling around 150 yards away from him in the left rough.
The hole marked the end of conservative, Zen-like Zhou. He was beginning to tire, and he desperately wanted the round to be over. He went for the green with his second stroke, and instead found a bunker. On his first attempt in the sand, the ball didn’t budge. On his second, it sailed over the green and into the rough. He managed to get up and down from there, but the damage had been done. The double bogey turned his five-stroke lead into a three-stroke lead. One of the earlier leaders, Chen Xiaoma, birdied the following hole. This shrank Zhou’s once insurmountable advantage to two. That’s where he remained heading into the final round.
In his post-round interview, Zhou told reporters his plan for the final round was to not think too much. But thinking was all he could do. Zhou had never been this close to winning a tournament before. He’d never been this close to achieving his dream. Every time he tried to empty his mind, a thousand new thoughts forced their way in. They played like a slideshow of images in his head, of what he wanted to do on each hole, each stroke. Images of him winning, raising his arms on the eighteenth green, raising the trophy in front of a wall of flashing cameras. And then negative images fought their way into view – hooking a drive, missing a putt, sailing the ball into the water. He shook his head, trying to reshuffle the pile. But he had lost his sense of control. He was having anxiety dreams before he even fell asleep.
Zhou went out to dinner, like he normally would have, thinking the diversion would help clear his head. He had a couple beers, like he always did, thinking it would help him sleep. Neither seemed to work. He managed about five hours’ fitful sleep that night. He couldn’t stop thinking about winning, but did he actually think he could win?
“I knew I wanted to win,” Zhou would say later. “But I guess I wasn’t sure if I could do it. I thought about it too much, about how to win. I was really distracted.”
In the final round, Zhou’s main competition was Chen Xiaoma and Su Dong. Zhou had often played against Chen on the Omega China Tour, and they came from similar backgrounds – from the family’s fields to a job on a driving range in their twenties. They were the old generation, matched up against the new. But Su never really made a run in the final round, and it was clear early on that the Handa Fraternity Cup was going to be a slugfest between the two journeymen, when Zhou bogeyed the second hole and Chen birdied. Just like that, the two were dead even.
Two holes later, Zhou bogeyed again, and Chen took the lead for the first time since early in the second round. Another birdie by Chen on the fifth hole, and it was Zhou who was now staring at a two-stroke deficit. The bad images that bullied their way into Zhou’s head the night before appeared to be winning.
But Zhou battled back. He’d been fighting his whole life, and he wasn’t going to give up now. By the start of the back nine, Zhou had regained a share of the lead, and he and Chen remained knotted up until the fourteenth hole.
“Even when he had a two-stroke lead, I didn’t let it bother me,” Zhou said. “I just worried about myself. I never took Chen as a scary competitor. I never thought he could beat me. We both weren’t putting well. I missed several birdie chances. We were neck and neck.”
Meanwhile, poor Liu Yan was back home in Chongqing following the action in perhaps the most frustrating way possible. There was no TV coverage of the domestic golf tournaments. No radio, either. So fans trying to follow the action remotely – and, to be honest, these were mostly the wives and girlfriends of players – were left with two options: either try to distract yourself for five hours, maybe go shopping or do some housework, and wait for a phone call from the player, or spend the afternoon staring anxiously at a computer screen, pressing “refresh” repeatedly, waiting for the numbers to come, muttering, Why haven’t those idiots posted new numbers yet?
Liu Yan had chosen the second option.
Obsessing over the online tournament scoreboard was by far the most maddening of the two options, but it was also hard to resist, because it was the most immediate, even if the rate at which the numbers were updated was wildly inconsistent. Often, scores would be updated three holes at a time. There were sudden bursts of excitement or disappointment, followed by long periods of jittery inactivity.
The interpretation of a golf leaderboard in China is quite simple: black numbers are good; red are even better; and blue are bad – very bad. But the computer screen offers no context. There were no explanations, no backstories, just batches of scores magically appearing on her screen. No nuance, just numbers. It’s the most one-dimensional way to follow such a complex and multi-layered game. Ahead then, behind now, ahead again. It was all she had. So, as her husband forged ahead toward the most important five holes of his golfing career, she sat in front of her computer, and hit “refresh” again and again.
Hole No. 14 was a 416-yard, dogleg-right par-4. The fairway curved around a lake, with the most direct route to the green sailing the ball over the water. And Zhou decided to take the most direct route. His tee shot was perfect, leaving him eighty-four yards from the green. Then he saw his opportunity: Chen’s drive ended up in the rough. Zhou knew he had a chance to get a stroke back. He took out his lob wedge, hoping to place himself in line for a birdie putt. But Zhou hit it shorter than he wanted, and the ball found the edge of the green. Instead of skipping forward, it spun backwards, and settled into the fairway.
Meanwhile, Chen escaped from the rough unscathed. His second shot found the fringe, and he putted to save par. Zhou putted poorly, and his third bogey of the round had him back down by one stroke.
Zhou bogeyed again on the fifteenth hole, after his drive landed in the rough. Another par for Chen, and Chen’s lead was back to two strokes.
“I began to be impatient,” Zhou said. “I was too aggressive. I wanted to finish the round as soon as possible.”
Chen stopped being Zhou’s only concern. By now, Su Dong was just a couple shots behind Zhou, too close for comfort. And two players in the group ahead were also closing in on his score. Another mistake and, forget winning a tournament, Zhou could find himself outside of the top three.
But Zhou didn’t panic. He knew there were opportunities for him to make up ground on the final three holes. Hole No. 16, a 544-yard par-5, was the easiest of all the holes during the tournament. In fact, it was the only hole on which the entire field was under par on average. Zhou himself had birdied it twice. So when Chen sent his tee shot into the rough, Zhou saw another opportunity. With a solid drive, a birdie was well within Zhou’s reach.
The crowd was not large for this final round – it was a Wednesday, and China’s domestic tour, after all. Less than thirty people were following the lead group, and Zhou sensed each one of them was rooting against him. No matter, Zhou thought to himself, I’ve been the underdog my whole life.
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.”
The outdoor kitchen was simple: a gas-powered wok, three large pots cooking on open flames and a long rectangular barbecue pit filled with burning coals. That, and a small cutting space, were all Wang and his family needed to produce a rather diverse offering of dishes. The most expensive was stir-fried pork with green vegetables – only fifteen yuan ($2.25) and well within the budgets of the golf course workers. Those who were saving money to send back to their families on the mainland opted for cheaper items – grilled chives on a stick (one yuan); grilled beef on a stick (1.5 yuan); grilled chicken wings on a stick (3.5 yuan); grilled squid on a stick (seven yuan); or boiled dumplings, fried rice noodles or stir-fried sea snails (each five yuan).
Bottles of Anchor, Yanjing and Tsingtao beer sold for four to five yuan. There was also a considerable selection of harder alcohols – rice wine and huangjiu, or “yellow wine,” mostly – ranging from four to sixteen yuan, and you could get a pack of Lotus cigarettes for 2.2 yuan. For those craving something a little bit healthier, Wang kept a pile of young coconuts next to the TV, the water from which he’d serve up for two yuan.
The games Wang had installed proved to be a good investment. The mah-jongg table, tucked off in a side room of the shop, was twenty yuan for a morning or afternoon of play. Mission Hills security guards came early each day to take their places at the table. The pool tables, which ran three yuan an hour, attracted a different sort; young men with spiky hair and blue jeans who arrived on motorbikes. There were plenty of ways to while away the hours at Wang’s restaurant, and many customers did. Sitting at one of Wang’s tables in the dark, you could look across the road and see lights from the Mission Hills dump trucks and cement trucks working into the night.
These were long days for Wang and his family, too. But as the orders raced in, as the hours drew later and later, they were always smiling and laughing. They seemed happy. Could that be? “No, we are not happy at all,” Wang’s wife said with a chuckle. “But just because we are tired doesn’t mean we can’t laugh. We are too busy for any rest, but we can still laugh. We tell jokes to each other.”
It was 2 a.m. on a Wednesday and Wang looked exhausted. He was sprawled out across two pink plastic chairs, his arms resting across his stomach, his legs up in the air. It was monsoon season, and the rain sounded like a hundred hammers banging on the steel roof. “This job is tough,” he said. “The money is better than before, but all at the expense of our health and time.”
Wang’s wife nodded her head. “He started to lose weight the moment we opened the restaurant. He was a little bit fat when driving his truck. Now, he can’t have regular meals.”
Regardless, Wang’s brother-in-law knew this was better than the life he’d had before. “One thing we are happy about is that we get to work together. If I was working as a bricklayer, I’d be alone and unhappy.”
Later that morning, Wang was out on the patio, preparing for the day’s trip to the wet market. He took a look at the pile of beer bottles to see how much it had grown and thought to himself, Not bad. Then he turned his attention to the commotion in the clearing on the other side of the cement road. Mission Hills workers were using an excavator and a tall hydraulic crane to plant a long line of fully-grown palm trees. Wang had never seen anything quite like it.
“There were already trees there before they bulldozed the land,” he said, shaking his head. “They were old and tall. Some were probably hundreds of years old. Now they are planting new ones that look old?”
He shook his head again and got back to work. He had another long day ahead of him.
*
There was still one section of Wang’s land yet to be developed. It was a small but lush gully between his brother’s property and his own. Wang wanted to fill it in and build on it. For what, he hadn’t figured out yet. “I will build it first, and then decide,” he said. “I can rent it to others who want to do business.”
He sounded like one of the big bosses over on the construction site. But becoming “Boss Wang” wasn’t part of his plans. “I am just a self-made man,” he said.
Still, he was concerned whether everything he had worked so hard to build might be taken away at any moment. What if Mission Hills decided they wanted to expand? If he had learned anything over the past few years, it was that nothing could be guaranteed, that what you thought was rightfully yours could be taken away with very little warning.
“If they want to rent our land by force, we have no way out,” Wang’s wife admitted. “That land over there” – she pointed to acreage that Wang Puhua and other Meiqiu villagers were contesting, on the other side of the cement road – “was bulldozed without compensation or measuring. Instead, they built a road to the course on that land. They said that it was owned by the public, and that they could take it at any time.”
There used to be more butterflies in Meiqiu. Not long ago you could see them nearly anywhere in the village. They seemed especially fond of a clearing near a small temple not far from where Wang Libo built his restaurant. Until recently, trees surrounded the temple and its garden, and the butterflies would flutter around and drink the nectar from the thousands of wild flowers that dotted the yard.
“The butterflies are becoming fewer and fewer,” Wang’s wife said. “In the past, we had more trees. When they bulldozed the trees, many of the butterflies went away.”
The temple, like so much of Meiqiu, was now neighbor with the massive Mission Hills golf complex. Where there were once trees on one side of the garden, there was now a short wall and a wide-open view of overturned earth, new roads and freshly planted palm trees. The tall white employee dormitories loomed on the horizon. Not far from the temple, there was an old stone tablet, etched with the names of villagers who had passed away – the character for “Wang” is everywhere. An archway of lava rock sheltered the tablet, but it had once been protected by so much more: trees, shrubs and isolation. Now it was right out in the open, just a few feet from a new thoroughfare leading to one of the biggest developments in modern China, a small monument to the old way of life and a stark reminder that, in this new China, everything and everyone must be prepared to adapt and change, whether they want to or not.
In the years since Mission Hills had broken ground in Hainan, Wang had been inside the compound many times. When he worked as a san lun che driver, he’d often taxi workers in and out of the site. Security guards came to know him and allowed him to pass freely. Occasionally Wang would forget he was now driving on private land. To him, it still felt like home.
Now that Mission Hills was open to the public, there was no way a villager on a san lun che would make it past the gate. Thankfully, Wang’s cousin, Wang Liguo, the local government official, had an official pass to get through security, and he was more than happy to flaunt it. He had stuck it to his dashboard, for everyone to see. Beneath a large Mission Hills logo, it read, “Yangshan District Land Consolidation and Ecological Restoration Project.”
Life had been good to Wang Liguo since Mission Hills had arrived. He wore a diamond ring on his pinkie finger. He’d opened a restaurant in Yongxing, and he was building a hotel along the cement road. He’d given his BYD car to a younger brother and bought a new Honda Civic for himself. That was the car with his official pass, the one he drove when he gave his cousin Wang Libo a tour of the grounds around the Mission Hills clubhouse.
They took the road right around the corner from Wang’s restaurant, and they didn’t have to drive far to realize they were no longer in Meiqiu. As soon as they passed through the gates, it was obvious they had left the randomness of nature behind them. There were trees and shrubs and even lava rock walls intended to keep the local flavor, but everything had its own place; everything appeared planned and polished. Off to the left was a collection of cookie-cutter mansions, the garages for which probably cost more than Wang Libo’s entire new home. It was amazing what a difference a two-minute drive made.
“Many stars will come here. I don’t know their names,” Wang Liguo said, referring to the upcoming celebrity tournament, the Mission Hills Star Trophy.
His cousin knew the names, as did many of the people on the other side of the gates, in Meiqiu. “Jet Li, the kung fu star, will come,” Wang Libo said. “And Eric Tsang, the Hong Kong comedian, will come, too. Many people in the village know this.”
To discover the rest of the names, all they had to do was read the banners attached to the light posts lining the road. Wang Libo didn’t recognize many of the faces, a sign that he perhaps wasn’t the target audience. In typical Mission Hills fashion, the first public event at their new resort was destined to be the biggest celebrity golf event ever held in China. Dozens of famous faces greeted visitors as they approached the clubhouse. There were professional golfers, such as Greg Norman, Nick Faldo, Colin Montgomerie, Lorena Ochoa, Annika Sörenstam, Se Ri Pak and Zhang Lianwei. And there were celebrities, like Catherine Zeta-Jones, Michael Phelps, Hugh Grant, Matthew McConaughey, Christian Slater, Li Ning and Sammo Hung. Another banner appeared regularly along the road. It was red and let people know they were arriving at “The World’s Golf Club.”
“Mission Hills has given me tickets to see the Star Trophy,” Wang Liguo noted proudly. “I have been to Shenzhen to learn to play golf. I went there twice and I played golf. I have also been to Beijing and Shanghai to play golf. Project 791 has asked me several times to return to Mission Hills in Shenzhen, but I refused. Because soon I’ll be able to play near my house.”
The Blackstone Course, on which the celebrities would soon be playing, was stunning. With its irregular lines and eroded sand traps, it managed to appear rugged and natural, even though there was very little natural about it. Incorporated into the design were old, overgrown lava rock walls and archways left over from the land’s previous occupants, along with some mature lychee, ficus and acacia trees that managed to elude the clear-cutter. The result was a landscape that seemed as though it had occupied the earth for decades, maybe centuries – not months. A drive along the cart path made of crushed lava rock gave the impression of a Jurassic-era safari – that is, until the massive hotel and clubhouse came into view. Fashioned in a “Mediterranean Revival” style, white with red and black tile roofs, they were unlike anything else in Haikou.
Wang Libo didn’t say much as he walked through the lobby of the Mission Hills luxury hotel. It was a lot for him to take in. The decor was immaculate, everything shiny and new. There was plush furniture, marble floors and art hanging on the walls. He’d never seen anything quite like it before. He followed his cousin out to the big balcony, which looked out onto a swimming pool the size of a football field. The pool was surrounded by dozens of red-and-white umbrellas and lounge chairs, and for each one there were two palm trees. Behind it all were two towering man-made volcanoes. Kitschy nods to the region’s actual volcanoes, the two mounds looked like giant primary-school science projects, poised to spew vinegar-and-baking-soda “lava” at any moment. Mission Hills was trying hard to impress. And largely, it succeeded.
Wang Libo stood at the railing and stared at the scene in silence. “There used to be a mountain here,” he said. “I think this looks better.”
On the drive back to the village, Wang Liguo explained why he thought the Mission Hills development was good for the area. “If the lands are not rented out, the farmers have very little chance to make money,” he said. “Even if they grow lots of fruit trees in their fields, they’ll never make enough money for a new house. Building materials are much more expensive than before, but the fruit still costs the same as years before. The 791 project gives us land compensation with which we can start our own businesses; also they can provide us with jobs. People may lose land in the short term, and their quality of life may not immediately improve. But their children will have better opportunities.”
Back in the village, Wang Libo took a seat underneath the phoenix tree where he and the rest of the village had first heard about “land compensation,” Project 791 and Mission Hills – before anyone had ever questioned whether he was a true Meiqiu villager or not. The setting was undeniably different from the five-star resort he had just returned from. The old volleyball court was full of weeds, its net sagging sadly in the middle. The stone top to the Chinese chess table was broken in half and lying on the ground. It all put Wang Libo into a reflective mood.
“Quality of life is getting better and better,” he said. “More and more people are building new houses. But the thing is, more and more traditions that were once available under this phoenix tree are disappearing. We always played volleyball or chess or talked about the news right here. Today, all of our attention is focused on how to make money. Interaction between villagers is not that close anymore. I doubt this will get any better in the future. Look around. Nobody takes care of this infrastructure.”
Wang thought about what the village might look like in ten years’ time. “More buildings probably,” he mused. “I had thought that the volleyball matches would continue no matter what development came here. I never thought things like chess or even just nighttime chatting between villagers would disappear so quickly. And I think in the near future all of the old stone houses will be replaced.
“Times are changing. You see it in other villages, too. Some have more new houses than we do. If we don’t build more cement houses, my sons will have difficulty finding girls to marry them. People now are very materialistic, right?”
But Wang couldn’t reflect for long. It was time to get back to work. He had two businesses to run.