13
Chasing the Next Dream
“I still think about the fourteenth and sixteenth holes.”
Zhou Xunshu was sitting in the dining room of his Chongqing apartment, five months after his gut-wrenching one-stroke loss at the Handa Fraternity Cup.
“I won’t forget it for the rest of my life,” Zhou said. “It’s not about the difference in prize money for first and second place. What really matters is the honor. If I won the tournament, I think my future as a coach would be more brilliant.
“It’s such a pity that I didn’t win.”
But, over the past several months, Zhou had come to learn that even coming in second had its privileges. First, his top-three finish meant that, in the eyes of the China Golf Association, he was no longer a second-class citizen. Now, he was not just a “professional coach,” he was a “professional golfer.” It was a distinction lost on 99.9 percent of the Chinese population, but it was an important one to Zhou. It meant he had reached the highest classification possible in his chosen profession.
He was a success. And he was no longer unemployed, as had been the case a year before.
“I never see him resting for one single day,” Liu Yan said. “He has such a big family to support.”
In fact, Zhou now had two jobs. He was still coaching at Seasons International in Chengdu, earning his eight thousand yuan per month from the club. But these days he was only making the long trip from Chongqing a couple times each month, cramming in as many clients as possible one weekend at a time. Back at home in Chongqing, he had picked up a job as a part-time sales executive for a local golf cart manufacturer. That brought in another three thousand yuan a month, plus a commission for each sale – that is, if he ever managed to make a sale.
“I can’t sell anything,” Zhou confessed. “They hired me because I am a golfer, and I know people at the management level from different courses. But I don’t really like making small talk with people. And I don’t like bargaining.”
Liu Yan agreed. “In my mind he is inadequate for sales work,” she said, before adding with a giggle, “He is good at physical labor – like carrying heavy things.”
“They call me every day wanting me to stay in the office,” Zhou said. “I am thinking about quitting.”
Not long ago, Zhou would’ve taken just about any job he could find. Now, it seemed, he could afford to pick and choose. After his second-place finish in Beijing, a longtime student – a wealthy aluminum dealer – had convinced the head of Chongqing’s first regulation golf course, Sun Kingdom, to sponsor Zhou. He was the best golfer in a city of thirty million, and people were finally starting to pay attention.
It was the kind of arrangement Zhou had dreamed about for years. Sun Kingdom, which had opened back in 2005, was paying him six thousand yuan plus all expenses, just to show up for a tournament. If he met certain performance goals, there were bonuses, too. Zhou was given free rein to use Sun Kingdom’s facilities for practice, as well. He could play a round whenever he wanted, free of charge. No questions asked. All he had to do in exchange was wear the Sun Kingdom logo while he played in public.
“Look around,” Zhou said, during a cart ride around the club grounds. “This golf course is so in accordance with nature. Basically, this course hardly occupies any arable land. On wasteland like this, the farmers couldn’t grow anything. So building a golf course is the best choice.”
Sun Kingdom had been built on the site of a very poor village, Zhou said, so poor that “some of the male villagers couldn’t even find girls to marry, because of their poverty.” The villagers in the area had been relocated to brand-new apartments, and many were now working for the golf course, he believed. Others had received compensation and opened “small-scale” businesses.
It all sounded very good to Zhou. “I welcome developers to go to my hometown and build a golf course.” Finally, with Sun Kingdom’s backing, Zhou could focus entirely on his game. He didn’t have to worry about whether he could afford the airfare or the hotel or his meals. He didn’t have to worry if he’d break even at the end of a tournament. It was all taken care of, and a huge weight had been lifted from his broad shoulders. But even with that support, Zhou didn’t come close to repeating his performance at the Handa Fraternity Cup for the rest of the season. He placed in the top twenty-five a few times, finishing as high as eleventh at one event. But the magic largely eluded him.
“I played just so-so in the coming tournaments, even though I felt more confident,” Zhou said. “I didn’t practice very often. It seems I didn’t care so much. I felt more comfortable out there, but the result was not the first and foremost. I just golfed without too much stress.”
Zhou may have earned the biggest payday in Beijing – 72,000 yuan (about $12,000) after taxes and his mandatory donation to charity – but you wouldn’t have been able to tell it from looking around his and Liu Yan’s apartment. It was still sparsely decorated, the white walls bare save for a studio portrait of Hanhan dressed as a mouse, his zodiac sign, and a pre-wedding portrait of Zhou and Liu Yan, both dressed entirely in white formal wear, and lounging lovingly like characters in a movie adaptation of a Jane Austen novel, atop a plot of green grass. The display shelves in the dining room, where one might show off fine china or family heirlooms, instead housed a golf trophy, a purple plush toy animal and an odd assortment of liquor bottles and gift boxes Zhou had collected during his various stops around China. Nothing too fancy.
So what had he done with his big prize money?
“You should ask Liu Yan,” Zhou said, pointing in his wife’s direction.
“I put it in the bank,” she said. “Saving most of it for the future.”
The family finances were a subject of much good-humored dispute.
“No particular person takes care of the money,” Liu Yan insisted. “Anyone who needs to spend money, can spend it.”
“Really?” Zhou said skeptically. “Such beautiful words.”
“Am I not telling the truth? Did I ever keep you from the money?” his wife replied.
“Zhou bought a pair of shoes with two thousand yuan once,” she continued, presenting her evidence. “I’ve never bought something that expensive. But I know he is working outside, and must wear such things regularly. I’m a housewife. I don’t need expensive clothes. It is his first time to buy shoes so expensive. He thinks he needs some prizes for his hard work.”
Things had improved for them over the years, Liu Yan said. “When I accompanied him to Kunming for a golf tournament, we didn’t check the weather in advance. It cooled down suddenly when the tournament was beginning. Zhou had to pay for a jacket, a very expensive jacket – fifteen hundred yuan. At that time, we even felt buying a jacket was a luxury.”
Now, that jacket no longer seemed so expensive – at least, in Zhou’s opinion.
“Liu Yan,” he said, “do you remember the wool coat we saw at the plaza? The Nautica one? I like it very much. It costs two thousand yuan.”
“You already have an expensive coat,” she said. “How come you want a new one? Wool is very expensive. If you want one, I want one, too.”
“That wool coat is so attractive. If I wore it, I’d look like Chow Yun-fat. I saw it last year, but I didn’t have the money. I want to buy it if I see it again. I have that money now.”
They were beginning to have the concerns of a typical middle class household. Back in 2005, China’s National Bureau of Statistics had stated that members of the country’s urban middle class had an annual income between 60,000 and 500,000 yuan. It was the first time “middle class” had been expressed in numbers in China. Zhou felt confident he had risen from being a poor boy from Qixin to become a member of this group. “Yes,” he said, without hesitation. “I think I am a middle class.”
Liu Yan had different criteria, however. “There are still a lot of things we can’t buy now,” she said. “Like, I want a car, but I don’t have that money. I also want to buy an expensive watch. I know Zhou can afford to buy me a Cartier watch, but we have to think twice before taking the money out. Hanhan has to go to school, and college, so we have to save money for his education.”
“I can’t afford luxury brands right now,” Zhou admitted, agreeing with his wife. “But I can buy some middle-class clothes.” And Zhou could catalogue each item of middle-class clothing he’d bought along with its price. There was the 680-yuan sweater, for instance, or the 1,700-yuan suit he picked up in Chengdu. Things he’d never mention to his family back in Qixin – they wouldn’t understand – but that wouldn’t stop him from spending his money on them. “I would rather spend money on better clothes or meals than on cigarettes and alcohol,” Zhou said. “I think these things can change our quality of life.”
Still, he wasn’t content with his financial situation. “Man should be more aggressive,” he explained. “I want to create a better life for my kid. I want to make more money to send Hanhan to study in America. Basically, I want to make more money.”
How could he do that with all of his jobs?
“Time is like a sponge,” Zhou said. “If you squeeze it, you can find more spare time.”
Zhou was sounding more and more like a member of China’s new middle class, always striving for more.
*
For his part, Martin Moore never thought he’d find himself back at Yangzong Lake in southwest China’s Yunnan province. Of course, back in 1995, he never thought he’d end up there in the first place, either. Now he was joking about putting a floating office right in the middle of it, because there were times he thought he’d never be able to leave.
His golf course construction management firm had twelve China projects going on simultaneously, and as Martin stood on the banks of the lake, he could see three of them. It was a strange feeling. More than fifteen years earlier, when he was completely new to China, he remembered looking across these mirror-like waters and seeing next to nothing, save for two blights on the landscape – the coal-fired power station to the north and the aluminum factory to the west. Both were scheduled to be shut down, he was assured back then, but both had since tripled in size.
He stood on the red-brown earth of one of his current projects and stared east across the lake at his very first. Spring City Golf Club looked like a bright green layer cake cut into the hillside. Martin knew it intimately. Every green. Every fairway. Every dogleg right or left. The course was the reason he had first come to China, so reluctantly, and it was probably the main reason he was so busy in the country now. Since its completion, Spring City had been consistently rated as one of the top golf courses in Asia. Martin’s first China project was still the bar by which the country’s new courses were measured.
Reminders of the Spring City job were everywhere. From one of the newer lakeside projects, he could throw a golf ball and hit the dilapidated resort he once called home. While clearing land on another, Martin had discovered some plastic netting that looked familiar – because he had put it there a decade and a half ago. One golf hole he was working on occupied a piece of land that had once served as Spring City’s turf nursery. He’d soon be growing grass there again, but for the fairway and green.
“It definitely was weird kicking dirt around on that property,” Martin said. “Because I remember I actually spent a few days on the bulldozer myself grading it way back when.”
But a lot, too, had changed since his time at Spring City. The previously indestructible golf course market in the United States was gone – golf course closures were consistently outnumbering course openings there. China had made the construction of new golf courses illegal, only to become the only country in the world in the thick of a golf course boom. The colleagues who, early on, had laughed at him for focusing on China – where no one seemed to recognize a golf ball, let alone know how to build a course – were constantly calling him up, knocking on his door.
To those trying to break into the Chinese market, Martin would always say, “Good luck.” He’d been working there going on twenty years and had yet to feel he completely understood the vagaries of the place. Cracking China took time and it took patience. Lately, the inexperienced owner on one of his Yangzong Lake projects was making so many bullheaded decisions that Martin questioned whether the course would ever see the light of day. On another, Martin was once again dealing with villager disputes with the local government over land rights and compensation, which was creating havoc with his schedule. He’d seen it all before, of course. They’d find a way around the problems or, if they didn’t, he would just move on to another one of his new job leads.
For now, though, Martin was waiting to see how the villager disputes would settle. “Currently they are kind of upset,” Martin’s Chinese project coordinator said about the villagers living near the construction site. “I think this is the ugly side of China. The owner of the company paid the money for the land to the government, but the government didn’t give all the money to the villagers.”
Many of the laborers now building the golf course used to grow corn on the land. In fact, corn still grew on what was supposed to be the course’s fifth green. According to the project coordinator, this was the last of many disputed sections of the course. What was the exact problem?
“I have no idea,” the project coordinator said. “Some government thing. The big boss has been drinking with a lot of people just for that one piece of land.”
Indeed, there was lots of determined drinking going on near the golf course projects around Yangzong Lake. While dining at a busy village restaurant near one of his lakeside sites, Martin and a few other members of the project team noticed a colleague – a Chinese man from Kunming – sitting at a large table nearby. He had about twenty men at his table, and an open bottle of baijiu sat atop the lazy Susan.
“He works for us,” said the owner’s representative. “His job is to entertain the farmers, and take care of government issues.”
The drinkfest was one of the aspects of working in China that Martin could do without. But such annoyances were unavoidable, and until the industry picked up somewhere else in the world, he was resigned to the fact they were simply part of his reality.
He may have been working in China longer than almost anyone else in the industry, but the place still had a way of surprising him. Sometimes in a good way, sometimes bad, but the country was rarely, if ever, boring. “I still look forward to the times when I get a new lead in some place I haven’t been to in China,” Martin said. “I like going to a new city. And meeting new people.”
Martin doesn’t want his sons to get into his line of work. “It’s a tough life,” he said. He was spending more time on the road than at home in Scottsdale, Arizona. When he was traveling, his schedule was often brutal – red-eye flights broken up by twelve-hour workdays on a construction site. When he wasn’t working on a job, he was chasing down new leads.
He was usually up and working by 5 a.m. He liked to say he was a living example of the old US Army motto: “We do more before 9 a.m. than most people do all day.” He was averaging less than five hours’ sleep a night, by his reckoning, and those handfuls of precious hours were often interrupted by emails and text messages. He maintained three mobile phones – one each for the United States, China and Thailand – and kept all three at the ready on his nightstand.
“I’m addicted,” Martin said. “It’s almost like I’ve got one eye open. So if someone sends me an email, it’s never one hour old before I read it. If I open my eyes every hour and that thing’s got a red light flashing, I’m checking email. And it’s not unusual that if it’s something that I feel is important, I’ll sit there and answer. Throw it down, go back to sleep – or, you know, semi-sleep. This blows some people’s minds.”
So far, his addictions had paid off. But he knew many aspects of the Chinese market would never be within his control. The China boom, while nowhere close to going bust, was not reverberating quite as loudly as it had in the past. The crackdowns were beginning to have more bite. The numbers were coming back down to earth. Even Mission Hills seemed to be slowing down. “I’ve never seen them say, ‘We’re not doing anything,’ before,” Martin said. It was as good an indication as any that nothing was a sure thing.
Martin was worried he’d put all his eggs in the same Made-in-China basket. He was looking for more leads in Vietnam and South Korea, so he wouldn’t be left with nothing if and when the Chinese market dried up, just like the US market before it.
Martin picked a stone out of the dirt and tossed it in the direction of the lake he couldn’t seem to escape.
“It’s all weird, man,” he said with a sigh. “It makes no sense to me, this moratorium, this golf boom. I sit here every day and wonder about my business. Is it all going to fall apart in a year? Or is it going to go strong for five years? Who knows?”
*
Now a toddler, little Hanhan was attending preschool. Zhou and Liu Yan were paying five hundred yuan a month, which included eight hours of schooling and lunch five days a week, for their only son to have this early start in his education. With Zhou gone for most of the day, Liu Yan’s days had become a bit boring. Lately, a middle-aged woman also from Hunan province, who lived upstairs, would often come down and visit with her. They’d speak in their provincial dialect, watch soap operas and gossip about the neighbors. It wasn’t exactly the life she’d dreamed of as a teenager getting ready to leave her village for a job as a caddie at Dragon Lake Golf Club.
That wasn’t to say the life she imagined for herself back then was an elaborate one. Ten years before, Liu Yan’s dreams had been quite basic, actually. She’d wanted a job, someone to love her, and happiness for her family. Now her dreams were more specific. Looking forward to 2020, she hoped her husband would win many golf tournaments, that her son would grow up happily, and that her parents and Zhou’s parents were all at peace.
“I want to live in a villa with lots of pets, children and friends,” Liu Yan said. “I want to live in Hunan. Zhou wants to live in Guizhou.”
As a young boy in Guizhou province, Zhou, too, had his dreams. Most of all, his desire to get out of Qixin. He did that, and then his dreams got bigger. “Ten years ago, I was a security chief in Guangdong,” he said. “I was paid about one thousand yuan a month. I lived in a room with eight people. I didn’t have any good clothes. I knew I wanted to marry a girl and have my own family. But my dreams weren’t detailed. I just wanted a better life with more money. With hard work, we can only live out our dreams step by step. All I wanted was a stable family with a monthly salary of ten thousand yuan.”
So what does a man do when he has already realized all of his dreams before the age of forty?
“It wasn’t easy for me,” Zhou said, “and now I will pursue more dreams. I want to make more money and attend more tournaments. All I want is to create more conveniences for my son. If I can win a tournament, my life goals will be almost complete.”
And that “almost” was at the heart of things. Where the old Zhou’s dreams were lacking in detail, some of the new ones were pretty specific. “I want to buy a new house,” he said, “with a convenient location and good property management. And I hope I can own a car worth 300,000 or 400,000 yuan.” The car bug seemed to be catching in this newly minted middle-class family. While walking past Chongqing’s Olympic Stadium, little Hanhan pointed at a sign featuring the famous five-interlocking-rings Olympic logo. “Audi,” he said.
Zhou’s ambitions for his son were open-ended and expansive. “If he can golf, I hope he can golf. If he can study and go to college, I want him to do that,” Zhou said. It seemed there wouldn’t be a police academy in Hanhan’s future, unless that’s what Hanhan wanted.
For Liu Yan, Zhou simply wanted happiness. “I don’t know,” he said. “How can I plan her life? If she wants to work outside, or just be a housewife, it’s all up to her.” Asked if there was anything he really wanted to be able to buy for his wife ten years from now, he was sure in his answer. “Yes, I would love to,” he said, “but it still depends on if I have that money. If I had the money now, I would buy her anything she wants.”
Dinner that evening was at KFC, followed by a stroll through the French superstore Carrefour. Zhou drove his family there in a black Hyundai loaned to him indefinitely by the management at his driving range in Chengdu. “This car costs around 300,000 yuan,” Zhou announced dryly during the drive over.
He was wearing a navy Nautica sweater vest over a royal blue golf shirt and a pair of khaki trousers. Liu Yan wore a yellow hoodie and skinny jeans. Walking down the store’s aisles, the couple were affectionate and full of laughter. Hanhan, wearing a Uniqlo fleece jacket, stood at the front of the shopping cart as though he were king of the world.
Back in the Hyundai on the drive home, Hanhan sat on his mother’s lap in the passenger seat. Zhou quickly turned up the volume on the car stereo.
“Oh, listen,” he said excitedly. “It’s Hanhan’s favorite song!”
First, there was the sound of the Chinese flute. Then, a man sang:
Hair so long
Eyes so brown
Have I seen you somewhere before?
The tundra roses are blossoming on the mountains
And I’d love to pluck one of them just for you
Smiles so innocent
Conversations so coy
Seared into my heart, I won’t forget
Butterflies waft over our heads
I just want to say I’ve fallen for you.
“Sing it, Hanhan!” Zhou urged his son.
Dear girl, I love you
Please let me into your world so I can be with you
Dear girl, I love you
I would do anything for you one lifetime after another
The little boy sang, and Zhou and his happy family laughed. They were on their way.
Epilogue
These days, when golf in China makes international headlines, the topics are less often crackdowns and mega-complexes, and more the action taking place on the golf courses themselves.
In 2012, twenty-two-year-old female golfer Feng Shanshan earned a two-stroke victory in the LPGA Championship at Locust Hill Country Club in Pittsford, New York, becoming the first professional golfer from China, male or female, to win a major championship. Yet she was still struggling for recognition in her home country, especially when compared to someone like Chinese tennis star Li Na. “In China, I can still have a hamburger and Coke in my hand and eat on the street and nobody would recognize me,” Feng said. And, like male pros Zhang Lianwei and Liang Wenchong before her, Feng was still finding it a challenge to attract sponsors from mainland China’s companies. (By early 2014, Feng had three LPGA Tour victories to her name and was the sixth-ranked female golfer in the world.)
Over the course of 2013, rarely a week went by without mention of some teenage Chinese golf sensation making history somewhere in the world. Most notable among these phenoms was Guan Tianlang, who, aged fourteen years and five months, became the youngest golfer to make the cut at a major championship – the US Masters at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia. That summer the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story positioning China as an “unlikely incubator for golf prodigies.”
With China coming to the fore in professional golf, in 2014 the China Golf Association and the US-based PGA Tour launched the PGA Tour China, the latest attempt at a domestic professional golf series in the country. The tour was expected to feature twelve tournaments, each with at least 1.2 million yuan ($200,000) in prize money. Organizers said this iteration of a “China Tour” would provide “open competition and a quality tour for elite players from China and other countries and the opportunity to advance to the world stage.” The debut event took place at Mission Hills Haikou in April.
If any of the participants or spectators decided to leave the Sandbelt Trails Course and walk southwest, to just beyond the complex’s massive employee dormitories, they’d find Wang Libo doing steady business. He said things were “very good.” So good, in fact, that he’s added another level to his restaurant and shop, and hired four new employees – none of them family members.
Business wasn’t as robust for Martin Moore. He was “pretty lucky” to still have a handful of projects going on in China these days. “It’s a shaky market. I believe the government is being more aggressive now than I’ve ever seen them,” he said. Every year Martin hears whispers that things are going to change, that the crackdowns are coming to an end, that the golf course moratorium will finally be lifted. But each year, Chinese New Year comes and goes, and very little changes. Initially, there were rumblings that the Xi Jinping government would be “pro golf” – Xi is rumored to be a golfer himself – and that soon there’d be a pathway to legitimacy for golf courses in China. “He’s totally anti-corruption,” Martin said of Xi. And, to most in the industry, it didn’t seem likely he’d give golf the official green light any time soon.
The only place in China, Martin said, where golf courses seemed to have some sort of green light, was in Hainan. Martin knew all too well that nothing was guaranteed, so he was regularly chasing other leads, in Thailand and Vietnam – but not in the United States. There wasn’t much new being built there.
Zhou Xunshu didn’t compete much after the 2010 season. He participated in six tournaments in 2011, finishing fourth in the event held at Sun Kingdom, his home course in Chongqing. He had expected to win. In 2012, he played in four of eight domestic tournaments, and in 2013 entered just one. Zhou said his reasons were purely financial. It was becoming harder for players of his generation to do well in tournaments, because more and more of the younger, well-off players, with coaches and nothing but time to train, were coming onto the scene. He couldn’t support his family from tournament winnings alone, and thus he couldn’t justify the time for practice – time he could and should spend earning money. Zhou knew stepping back was the right decision for Liu Yan and Hanhan, and even for his elderly parents, who now lived in Bijie with Zhou’s brothers, but it still ate him up inside. “I miss competing. I just enjoy the whole experience, the process of playing the game,” he said, and added he might try to play in a couple of the stops on the new PGA Tour China, which he thought would be a “great help for Chinese golf.”
Zhou didn’t have much time to stew, however, because he’d been working long hours as head pro at a local driving range. Still known as the best golfer in Chongqing, he was having more and more wealthy parents bring him their young sons and daughters, in the hope he might help them realize their dreams of becoming the next Guan Tianlang or Feng Shanshan. And these parents paid well. Enough so, that in 2012 Zhou could at last buy his dream car, a Volkswagen Sagitar (the Chinese version of the Jetta). The following year he bought two more apartments, banking on the hunch that Chongqing’s real estate market would continue to grow.
There was one young student Zhou was especially excited about. He was quite young – just six years old in 2014. He’s called Hanhan, and he’s coached for free.
“I’m happy, but I have bigger goals,” Zhou said. “I want to earn one million yuan a year, so my son can have a better starting point. I am getting there.”
Was he living the Chinese Dream?
“I’ve heard of this, but I am not sure exactly what it is,” Zhou said. “Something about China achieving this or that. I am not sure how it relates to me, but if the Chinese Dream is successful, then I guess we’ll all be successful.”
He thought for a bit, then added, “I think I might be living the American Dream. It’s the same in China. It doesn’t matter where you come from, as long as you work hard and put your heart into your work, you will get rewarded.”
Acknowledgments
I first interviewed Zhou Xunshu at an Omega China Tour stop near Shanghai in late August 2006. I got married a little more than a month later. I bring this up now – I am writing this in late March 2014 – to point out that my dear, dear wife has lived with this project for a long, long time. And she never wavered in her support: even when it was unclear what all this research would amount to; even as I paid for flight after flight to all corners of China out of our own bank account; even after the first attempt to sell the book failed; even after, once the book finally did sell, I missed one deadline, then another, and if we’re being honest, probably another after that. Bliss Khaw, thank you for your love and encouragement, your generosity and patience. I love you, and I owe you several years’ worth of distractionless vacations.
I will be forever indebted to Zhou Xunshu, Wang Libo and Martin Moore for giving me intimate access to their fascinating lives – in some cases, for several years. This book is as much theirs as it is mine.
The Forbidden Game would not have been possible without the help of the following people, who served as travel companions, translators, transcribers, researchers, advocates, videographers, tech specialists, website caretakers, carpenters and suppliers of writing cabins in the Poconos: Neil Brown, Boruo Chen, Peijin Chen, Elaine Chow, Paul Chung, Bo Feng, Aaron Fleming, Liz Flora, Paul French, Frank Harris, Chris Horton, Shawn Lei, Alice Liu, Kristin Shen, Jay Sheng, Kenneth Tan, Luis Tapia, Sherley Wetherhold and Johnson Zhang.
Many who work in the golf industry in China helped me considerably at various points along the way. I especially want to thank Stewart Beck, Sally Chang, Brian Curley, Michael Dickie, John Higginson, Jim Johnson, Frank Lin, Lu Zhan, Tim Maitland, Richard Mon, David Paul Morris, Patrick Quernemoen, Ray Roessel, Aylwin Tai, Wang Shiwen, Simon Wilson, Xiao Zhijin, Arthur Yeo and Yuan Tian. Due to the off-the-record nature of many of my conversations for this book, the above list is woefully incomplete. Thank you to everyone who helped me try to make sense of things – you know who you are.
For their hospitality and openness, I’d like to thank the good people of Meiqiu, Qixin and Flagstick Golf Course Construction Management; the blue-collar golfers on the Omega China Tour; and the extended families of Zhou Xunshu, Liu Yan and Wang Libo.
Several publications helped me keep my research going as I tried to find a home for the book. For taking an interest in my stories over the years I’d like to express sincere gratitude to Jason Sobel and Kevin Maguire at ESPN.com; Bill Fields and Geoff Russell at Golf World; Josh Levin at Slate; Andy Davis at FT Weekend Magazine; Blake Hounshell and Britt Peterson at Foreign Policy; Anders Peter Mejer at Omega Lifetime; and Noel Prentice at the South China Morning Post.
I’d like to thank Steven Jiang at CNN and Adrienne Mong at NBC for bringing Zhou Xunshu’s story to a global audience, and photographer Ryan Pyle for bringing so many of my stories to life.
I owe many a beer to my colleagues at the Asia Society – notably the online team of Megan MacMurray, Tahiat Mahboob, Shreeya Sinha, Geoff Spencer, Bill Swersey and Jeff Tompkins – for being so understanding of my occasional irregular hours and frequent “writing vacations.”
Thank you to Oneworld Publications for believing in, and waiting patiently for, this project. Robin Dennis, my wonderful editor at Oneworld, helped turn what was merely a good story into a good book, and meticulously weaved three disparate storylines into one cohesive narrative. You are likely reading this page thanks to the labor of Oneworld’s publicity team – Jennifer Abel Kovitz in North America and Henry Jeffreys and Lamorna Elmer in the UK – as well as the hard work of Alex Billington, Alan Bridger, Ruth Deary, Gail Lynch, and Paul Nash.
None of this would have been possible were it not for the tireless efforts of Zoë Pagnamenta, my indefatigable agent, who stuck with me through thick and thin (mostly thin). For my first foray into the mystifying world of book publishing, I couldn’t have asked for a better guide.
Finally, to my mother, Sandy Washburn, my father, David Washburn, and my brother, Dave Washburn, thank you for four decades of love, inspiration, and support – and for learning, eventually, to stop asking, “So, how is the book coming along?” It’s finished, and it is for you.