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‌First Club

Zhou Xunshu’s parents had always dreamed of having a police officer in the family. In 1995, at the age of twenty-three, Zhou enrolled in the Guizhou People’s Police School in Zunyi, a large city about six hours east of Bijie by bus. The school’s name was deceiving. It had been a state-run police academy, but by the time Zhou arrived it was a privately owned vocational college that churned out security guards. Most students didn’t stay the full two years, opting instead to sign on with an agency, arranged by the school, that placed them in low paying jobs throughout southern China.

During Zhou’s first few months in Zunyi, the mornings were filled with exercises: wushu (Chinese for “martial arts”), self-defense, bodybuilding. It was akin to basic training. But there was little to do the rest of the time, and Zhou became bored. The curriculum seemed poorly managed, the school disorganized. When they did have classes – on topics like fire prevention theory – he couldn’t see how they were relevant to his career. In late October, after six months, he dropped out. He took a job guarding an aluminum factory in Guiyang for 350 yuan ($42) a month.

Zhou hated the job. It was tedious, and the fumes from the factory floor made him sick. When he learned there were jobs available in the southern boomtown of Guangzhou in Guangdong province, and that thirteen of his former classmates were dropping out and leaving for the city the following day, he saw his chance. He was desperate to escape. He didn’t tell his bosses at the aluminum factory he was leaving. He had worked there only two days.

No one in Zhou’s family knew he was heading to Guangzhou. They didn’t even know he’d left police school. Zhou had no phone at the time, and it would take at least ten days for a message to reach his remote village by regular mail. He wasn’t in a hurry to discuss this decision with his parents anyway. They had paid his tuition – five thousand yuan, a lot of money for peasant farmers in Guizhou. They had saved it up for several years, and now it was gone.

*

Qixin – stuck on the side of a remote mountain, elevation six thousand feet – is perhaps the poorest village in Guizhou, perhaps the poorest province in China. Of course, there’s no way to prove this, but although the villagers aren’t starving these days, as they were a generation or two ago, there’s no denying life in this tiny collection of crude stone homes is harsh and antiquated.

The road to Qixin is narrow, barely a single lane, with tall walls of rock and earth on one side and a steep cliff dropping off the side of the mountain on the other. There are no guardrails on the road, and storms often render it impassable. But there’s only one other way to the top of the mountain – a four-hour hike. In the past, visitors not up for the trek would hop on the back of a horse. Today they must climb into the back of a beat-up blue dump truck. It was hard to imagine why people would choose to live in such a place. “In old China, life was very tough,” explained the young driver of one of the trucks as he navigated the road, which was more rutted and muddy than normal. “Those with power would just kill the people they didn’t like. So many people got scared and ran for the mountains. Later on, those with money or those who became government officials left the mountain. Now, the only people who remain are the poor ones, like us.”

In the back of the truck, the driver’s passengers stood, gripping tight to the bed’s side rails, bracing their bodies as the vehicle lurched back and forth like a rowboat in rough water. At one point, as the driver waited for a van to unstick itself from the mud, his human cargo swallowed an uncomfortable view of the valley floor as the truck leaned towards the cliff’s edge.

The landscape was bleak – everything the color of a brown paper bag. The entire mountainside had long ago been carved into a series of dramatic terraces for farming, the only way people could subsist in such a harsh environment. Down below, on one of those perches, a farmer in mud boots used an ox to work the brown earth back to life, tilling the cold soil for the first time that year. Soon, he’d be planting tomatoes. In the distance beyond the farmer there was a wall built into the mountainside – a series of uniform circular pipe openings, too many to count, stacked atop one another.

These were crucibles, remnants of the dozens – maybe hundreds – of rudimentary zinc smelting furnaces that had been active on the mountainside in the 1990s. “They did not allow them to do it in the town, so they moved to the mountains,” the driver said. “Now, the country does not allow them to do it here any more, either. Too polluted.”

Reminders of the once-booming industry are everywhere. From the heights of the road, the remains of the demolished dome furnaces look like alien crop circles – and redundant graphite and terracotta crucibles, known as retorts, are ubiquitous. Rounded cones, about the size of an adult human thigh, they are now used by the villagers to build walls, reinforce walking paths and stave off soil erosion on their terraced farms. But most retorts go unused, littering the forest in piles that resemble spent artillery shells.

Who knows what else the zinc smelters have left behind? Their methods of distilling metallic zinc from its ore (the end result is used in the production of brass) were crude, not much different than the process used in China hundreds of years ago. They’ve been known to contaminate soil and waterways with lead, cadmium, mercury and other heavy metals.

Today, the zinc plants are rubble, and other industries are eyeing the region for its rich natural resources. Villagers on the mountain say a coal company from Shandong province has expressed interest in buying their land. There is also rumored to be gold in the hills. But residents can’t agree on a selling price. And some villagers aren’t interested in selling at all. They can’t imagine living anywhere else. They feel too much of a connection to their crops. Zhou Xunshu doesn’t understand these people at all.

*

A word that Zhou often uses to describe his childhood is ku, which means “bitter.” Qixin didn’t have electricity until the early 1990s, and despite China’s “opening up” under Deng Xiaoping, the effects of the planned economy days lingered in the village over the next decade. Even today, the average rural family in Guizhou earns less than a hundred dollars a month – just 4,753 yuan ($780) a year. Zhou remembers sharing a bed with two of his brothers. Many days he would grow hungry looking at the family’s boxes of government-provided potatoes, knowing they wouldn’t last. How could those boxes feed two parents, six children and various in-laws, aunts and uncles through the winter?

They were hard times. Sometimes, in the coldest months, Zhou didn’t have shoes to wear. “When we traveled into town we could see other people had better lives than us,” he said.

The family home was a short, steep walk up a muddy trail from the road. The house had been expanded in piecemeal fashion over the years. The main structure was a single-story box made of gray concrete, twenty feet wide at the front. Two worn wooden doors were hung on either side of three wood-framed casement windows. The window frames and doors, painted red some time ago, were faded, stained, peeling. By the time Zhou left to go to the police school, this main building had been bookended by two taller brick structures with sheets of corrugated metal covering their tiled gable roofs, and growing off of both of those were two newer shelters made of cinder block. A few steps back downhill was the family pigpen, with a sloped roof and extra insulation provided by a layer of empty plastic rice sacks. In the middle of all of this sat a large cement courtyard, which also served as the roof for an ox shed dug out underneath it. At the far end of the courtyard, a crude lean-to covered two stone slabs and a hole in the ground: the family’s only toilet. Squatting there, one could gaze on a deep forest; in the winter the leafless branches revealed a view of the terraced valley. On clear days, the mountains were never-ending. Songbirds trilled in the trees.

As a child, Zhou attended Qixin’s school, studying by the light of kerosene lamps and seeking comfort from the heat of the coal furnace in the middle of the classroom. The primary school featured two classrooms, housing up to thirty students, grades one to five. This led to a lot of downtime for the children – when the teacher was giving a lesson to first graders, for example, all the other grades, as Zhou says, “did work on their own.” Students sat on long wooden benches behind long wooden tables. Teachers wrote on boards made black by the dried sap from a sumac tree. After class, he went out to work in the fields, cutting the tall grasses with a sickle.

Neither of Zhou’s parents had attended school, and Zhou got a late start to his education. He didn’t begin primary school until he was nine, and he took another two years off after the fourth grade. He said it didn’t feel too strange being older than most of his classmates; when he was in fifth grade one of his fellow students was twenty-five. And lots of people in the village just never went to school at all.

After Zhou finished fourth grade, the school was torn down. “The farmers in the village didn’t think about the kids,” he said. “Parents here only view school as a way to avoid being illiterate. They don’t see education as a way to change their future and help them out of poverty. So they removed the school and split up the bricks, stone and wood among themselves.” After that, he had to walk to a school in a village two hours away.

Zhou said his forced two-year break from school was necessary because he was “very naughty in class.” He couldn’t sit still. He had trouble concentrating.

Zhou eventually graduated from junior high school when he was eighteen. He spent four years studying to pass the senior high school entrance exam – his parents had hoped he would be the first family member to do so, following in the footsteps of the neighbors’ son who had got into university – but schooling had never been Zhou’s strong suit. Four years in a row he went through the motions in Bijie, and four years in a row he failed. “I just couldn’t really absorb anything,” Zhou said. “When I was studying, I always thought about other things.” He could only remember two of the English words he’d learned in school – face and apple – and claimed he “could never spell them right.” Feeling he had run out of options, in 1995 he enrolled in the military police school in Zunyi. Perhaps Zhou could become something after all.

His family always had a chip on its shoulder. They felt picked on. They said that other people – those with power and money – were out to get them. Zhou’s grandfather had ended up in Qixin in 1931 after years of wandering, years of running. They moved to their current home – the site of it, at least – in 1948, when Zhou’s father was eleven. “They were very poor,” Zhou’s eldest brother, the only one of the family’s four brothers to still live in Qixin, explained. “The family moved from village to village trying to find a place they could afford to live. Finally, they settled here.”

There’s a story about the family that’s been passed down from generation to generation. An ancestor named Zhou Youming, from Hunan province, was supposedly a general during the Ming Dynasty, nearly seven hundred years ago, and Emperor Zhu Hongwu asked him to go conquer Guizhou. After doing so, General Zhou, so the story goes, settled near Bijie. “After the general’s generation, we just went backwards,” Zhou’s eldest brother, known simply as First Brother to family members, said, an M-shaped crease forming between his eyebrows as he spoke.

Zhou, also known as Fourth Brother, had never been convinced there was a general in the family. “It’s just a folk tale,” he would say. “There are no historical documents to prove it. We’ve always been peasant farmers. Always.”

Perhaps because of the perceived fall in the family’s fortunes, they were especially conscious of the sting of rejection. “Let me tell you. It was because during my grandpa’s time, our family did not have money, and so we were always looked down upon. They were bullied all the time and that is why we moved to five different places. Over and over again. Finally, they were barely able to settle down here,” First Brother said. He took a long intense draw on his Huangguoshu cigarette, named after Guizhou’s famous waterfall, the largest in the nation. His chain-smoking, combined with his jet-black pompadour hairstyle, recalled a 1950s movie greaser transported to rural China.

“This is why we’ve always wanted to have a policeman in this family – to avoid the family being bullied,” First Brother said. “But Fourth Brother did not want to do this.”

Nope – Zhou Xunshu was on a train to a new life in Guangzhou.

*

When Zhou and his classmates boarded the train, they might have been mistaken for soldiers in their police school uniforms, but for the lack of any badges. Tickets for the thirty-hour trip to Guangzhou were one hundred yuan, and Zhou was lucky to find a seat. The train was overflowing with migrants, all hoping to find work in the city.

Zhou was scared. He had fifty yuan in his pocket and no guarantee of a job. He desperately wanted to prove to his family that he could make it on his own. He didn’t want to have to return to Guizhou and admit he had made a poor choice. In fact, he didn’t want to return to Guizhou at all. He hugged his bag tightly. It contained all of his belongings: a toothbrush and toothpaste, a blanket, two pairs of underwear, one collared shirt, a T-shirt and a pair of trousers.

In Guangzhou, the boys stuck together. They booked rooms in the cheapest hotel they could find: ten yuan a night. Zhou had trouble sleeping that first evening; he knew he’d be out of money soon. There was no way he could return home a jobless, penniless dropout.

But if there was one thing Guangzhou had in the 1990s, it was jobs. After a decade of reforms on the mainland, many firms from Hong Kong had moved production to Guangdong, creating a huge demand for unskilled labor. By 2000, the Pearl River Delta was home to an estimated 22 million migrant workers. Fewer than 3 percent of them returned home permanently. In the previous decade, Guangdong’s population had grown nearly 40 percent.

The day after the dropouts from the Guizhou People’s Police School arrived in Guangzhou, all fourteen had jobs. “You all will start work at Dongguan Fengjing tomorrow,” their contact at the employment agency said.

“Dongguan Fengjing – what’s that?”

“A golf course.”

Silence.

Finally, one of them asked bravely: “What’s that?”

The boys were told golf was a game for rich people, mostly foreigners. That was it.

Their arrival at Fengjing, forty-six miles east of Guangzhou, near the manufacturing city of Dongguan, did not enlighten the confused security team. The Chinese word fengjing translates to “hillview,” and that’s all they could see: brown hill after brown hill, plus some bulldozers. The view went on forever. How many rich foreigners does it take to play this game? Zhou wondered.

Zhou would not find out – not at Fengjing, at least. He left after only five months, before the course was completed, before there was any grass on the ground. Five months was long enough for Zhou to prove himself as a security guard, however. He earned a reputation for being a leader, and was considered the de facto head of security, although he still earned the same six hundred yuan monthly salary as everyone else.

Ironically for Zhou, the young man bored by the fire prevention lectures at the police school, it was his performance in helping fight brushfires in the small mountains surrounding Fengjing that would change his life. The hills were ablaze, and the fire was threatening to spread to Fengjing’s course. Zhou rounded up the team and organized a plan of attack. Armed with hand axes and machetes, they entered the smoke-filled woods, their mouths covered only by kerchiefs. For an entire day, the young men chopped and hacked, chopped and hacked. The result was a twenty-two-yard-wide firebreak that ran the length of the forest. It stopped the fire in its tracks.

His initiative caught the eye of a Fengjing manager who had grown to like Zhou through their daily conversations. When the manager left to work at Guangzhou International Golf Club, less than an hour’s drive to the north, he suggested Zhou should have an interview for a security job there. He gave Zhou the contact details for Frank Lin, a businessman from Singapore. “It will be more money,” the manager assured Zhou. “Meet with Mr. Lin.”

Lin hired Zhou on the spot, at a starting salary of one thousand yuan a month – three times what Zhou had been making as a security guard in Guizhou. “I just got a good feeling from talking to him,” Lin said. “The way he looked, the way he talked. He just came across as a very honest and trustworthy person.”

Zhou had landed his second job at a golf course – and he still had no idea what golf was.

*

Martin Moore had already done his years of “shit duty” in rural Asia. He had paid his dues at Mission Hills Khao Yai, and was now headed for paradise. It was the summer of 1995, and Jack Nicklaus’ team had already informed Martin he’d been tapped to be the project manager at a course set to break ground in Surfers Paradise, part of Australia’s Gold Coast, starting that September or October. Martin was working a course remodel in Okayama, Japan, and he couldn’t wait to start something new. What could be better than sun and sand Down Under? His shaper in Okayama had recently left, and instead of waiting for a new person to arrive, Martin got behind the wheel of the bulldozer himself and started shaping greens. “I wanted to get that project done,” Martin said. “I was going to Surfers Paradise!” He was already daydreaming of topless beaches and snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef.

Then Martin received a call from Lee Schmidt, one of Nicklaus’ designers back in the States. He warned Martin he should expect an unwelcome call – asking him to go to Kunming, China. Martin’s heart sank. He had no idea where Kunming was, but knew it was nowhere near Surfers Paradise. And the reports Martin had heard from colleagues working in China were not positive. Everyone talked about the filth, the crowds, the yelling, the spitting. No one seemed to enjoy it.

“Do you remember, around two years ago, a guy named Arthur came to visit you at Khao Yai in Thailand?” Schmidt asked Martin. “Well, he wants you to be the design coordinator on a new course. He specifically asked for you.”

Martin did recall his one and only encounter with Arthur Yeo, a businessman from Singapore. Yeo had been introduced as a future client of Jack Nicklaus, and Martin had lunch with him, answered some questions and took him on a tour of the Mission Hills Khao Yai job site. It was a pretty standard site visit. Martin had done several of them before. He spent maybe five hours with Yeo, and never thought much about him again.

But sure enough, a few days after talking with Lee Schmidt, he received a call from Nicklaus’ right-hand man, Bill O’Leary.

“Do you want to go to Kunming, China?” O’Leary asked.

Martin had been rehearsing his response for days. “Hell no,” he said.

O’Leary chuckled and said, “Okay, I just thought I’d ask. Arthur wanted us to ask you. I don’t blame you. I’d go to Surfers Paradise, too.”

Three days later, Martin received another call. It was O’Leary again.

“Arthur keeps bugging me. He really wants you to go there,” O’Leary said.

Martin stuck to his original response. Nothing was going to keep him from the beach.

Three more days passed, and another call from O’Leary.

“Martin,” he said, “Arthur says he’s not going to do a Jack Nicklaus golf course unless you’re the project manager.”

“Okay, Bill,” Martin said. “Tell Arthur I’ll do it for an extra three thousand dollars a month.”

“Ha,” went O’Leary. “They’ll never give you that.”

“I know. That’s the idea.”

Twenty-four hours later, O’Leary called Martin again. Arthur Yeo had accepted Martin’s terms.

*

Martin didn’t know what to expect in China, “other than, there wasn’t much golf.” And if the country as a whole was a mystery, the city of Kunming was a secret. While he knew people who had worked in China, he had yet to meet anyone who had heard of Kunming.

That wasn’t too surprising. In the mid-1990s, foreigners who found their way to the capital city of Yunnan province tended to be either students or backpackers. “Westerners were looked at as if they’d just disembarked from a spaceship,” one longtime Kunming resident said. Yunnan province borders Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, and parts of it felt like an extension of Southeast Asia. Martin figured his experience in Thailand was the reason Yeo had been so insistent.

When Martin arrived, Kunming’s population was somewhere around two million, but it still felt more like a town than a city. A few maze-like sections of old Kunming still existed – crooked lanes lined with rickety mud and wood-framed houses with tiled roofs that sprouted grass and flowers. But it was clear where things were headed: to wider roads, taller buildings, vanishing character. The bits of tradition that lingered among the city’s attempts at modernity caught Martin’s eye: old men, their skin wrinkled and dark from the sun, inhaling tobacco smoke from large bamboo bongs; street food hawkers crushing into spaces on nearly every sidewalk, the pungent aroma of their Yunnan spices – if Martin breathed too deeply, the hot chilies made his nose run – doing battle with the stench of the public toilets; members of Yunnan’s many minority groups walking the streets wearing traditional clothing and jewelry, styles that, in many cases, haven’t changed in centuries. Some women wore what Martin thought looked like intricately embroidered tapestries, with bold, bright colors, accented by elaborate silver jewelry that often covered large portions of their arms and chests. If the sun hit them just right, Martin suspected he might be blinded.

Martin saw nearly no private cars on Kunming’s streets. Traffic consisted almost entirely of buses, taxis and bicycles. He slowed as a bicycle passed him, carrying a slaughtered pig, its split carcass stuck on a spike mounted above the bicycle’s rear wheel, the pig’s head and tail flopping with each push of a pedal. To be sure, Martin had not landed at a beach resort in Australia.

In the days before construction was set to begin, Martin settled into the Holiday Inn in downtown Kunming. It was a brand he recognized. “That Holiday Inn was the only place civilized at all in Kunming,” he said. “You could actually order a pizza in there. And they had a bowling alley in there. Every couple weeks, Arthur and I would get together and bowl a few games, order pizza and drink some beer. But that was it. There wasn’t anything else.”

He had been called to Kunming to work on Spring City Golf and Lake Resort. It was prime, undeveloped land, situated on the eastern shore of Yangzong Lake, about thirty miles east of Kunming. Across the water from Spring City, there was one floundering resort, where Martin eventually moved to be close to the construction site, but otherwise the lake was fringed by farmland and a few small villages. At the far end of the lake, Martin could see a smoke-spewing, coal-fired power plant to the north and an aluminum plant to the west. He was told that local government officials had assured Yeo that both of these eyesores would soon be closed down.

Culture shock was less of an issue for Martin this time around. Like Arthur Yeo, Spring City’s developers were from Singapore, and so were many of the staffers; most spoke English, so language was not much of a problem. The most common gripe was the remoteness of the project. There were a couple of “total shithole restaurants” they’d go to in the closest village, and sometimes they’d slurp a bowl of noodles in a tent on site provided by one of the contractors, but Martin would often cook something up on the two-burner stove back at his place.

Trips to Kunming were infrequent because the only way to the city at that time was a circuitous two-lane road that looped around most of the lake. The journey was a good ninety minutes if there wasn’t an accident. But there were often accidents. One in particular, Martin will never forget.

The power plant was nestled on the edge of the lake because there was a coal mine nearby, and the road was often lined with creaky, overloaded blue dump trucks that created a sooty dotted line between the mine and the plant. There were tractor-trailers, too, which barely fit on the road and struggled to make it up the inclines. So Martin was used to slow traffic to and from the course, but this wasn’t the usual traffic jam. Something was wrong. When his truck finally crawled up to the scene of the accident, he cringed. There was a truck so mangled it was hardly recognizable. Another car had rolled down an embankment. For some reason, a pickup truck on the side of the road caught Martin’s eye. There was a blanket or tarp laid out in the truck’s bed, with something protruding from underneath it, hanging out over the open tailgate. Suddenly, Martin realized he was looking at a human leg. The image stuck with him for several days – as did the actual body.

“On my way to the job site the next morning, he was still there,” Martin said. “Left the job site that evening, he was still there. He was there for three days on the back of that pickup truck.”

It seemed things operated differently in China.

*

According to Arthur Yeo, the political climate surrounding golf was “pretty good” when Martin took the Kunming job. Modern China had around fifteen golf courses by this point, and it would be another decade before Beijing announced that building new golf courses was illegal. As Yeo put it, “nobody knew what golf was about” in China. And in many ways, nobody knew what China was about, either.

Yeo said Spring City’s developer, Straits Steamship Land Limited (now known as Keppel Land), insisted on the course being legal. “Being a Singapore publicly listed company, we don’t take risks,” he said. “But it wasn’t easy. Nothing is easy in China. It took us a while to get it.” Yeo maintained that Spring City was legal in the eyes of Beijing, meaning its business license specifically mentioned the word “golf.” This is a status perhaps only a dozen courses in China today can lay claim to, although you’d be hard pressed to find anyone working in China’s golf industry who could list such super legit courses with any certainty. For what it was worth, the local Yiliang county government was quite open about its involvement in Spring City – it owned a 20 percent stake in the project.

As Spring City was winding down, Martin knew there was something he had to do before he left: watch an execution. It wasn’t something he particularly wanted to do, but he felt obligated to do it all the same. The mayor of Yiliang county had been very persistent, and the county’s support had been instrumental to the project.

Perhaps, Martin thought, the mayor wanted to introduce his new foreign friend to some local color that never got mentioned in the guidebooks. “He kept inviting me the whole freaking job,” Martin said. It’s estimated that China executes several thousand people per year, more than the rest of the world combined, and Yunnan province accounts for a good portion of those deaths due to its close proximity to Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle, a hotbed of heroin and opium production. Drug trafficking is a capital offense in China. “‘Come on down and watch us execute a drug dealer.’ He asked me at least twenty times during my year and a half at Spring City,” Martin said.

They got drunk before they went out to watch the men die. Normally, Martin tried to avoid the mid-day drinkfests with local officials, but this was one liquid lunch he was happy to partake in; the beer and baijiu might dull his senses before the main event. He didn’t realize it at the time, but in a way he was watching history. Death by firing squad had been China’s modus operandi for executions since 1949, but starting in 1996 Yunnan province began experimenting with lethal injection as an alternative, and formally adopted it as its primary practice in 1997, even introducing mobile killing units called “execution vans.” One of the stated rationales for the change was to lessen the spread of HIV from blood splatter.

That day, Martin didn’t see much blood. He didn’t see much of anything. He and the mayor stood gazing out onto an empty field, empty save for a single wooden stool located about half a football pitch from them. Five uniformed men holding rifles waited as a prisoner wearing what looked like a white pillowcase over his head was guided to the stool and lifted on to it. (Martin was thankful he couldn’t see the man’s face.) Then the execution happened: a thud of simultaneous rifle fire followed fast by the thud of a body hitting the earth. The dead man was carried off, and another live prisoner was placed on the stool. And it all happened again. Then it was time to go back to Spring City. “We all went back to work,” Martin said. “I remember finishing up the day. It didn’t seem to bother me that much at all.”

There was little pomp and circumstance. It all seemed unusually routine. Still, Martin was sure the viewing was bestowed upon him as an honor. “He was a very nice guy,” he said. “He was one of the reasons we didn’t have any trouble.”

But that was not to say everything at Spring City went smoothly. As Martin’s first experience dealing with Chinese contractors, it was “an eye-opener.” “It was like, Jesus,” Martin said. “Just contractors lying to you. Lying and cheating and trying to cut every corner and, you know, just doing poor work. If you rode them hard, they’d try to backstab you. It was tough.”

For the most part, they weren’t contractors Martin had chosen as project manager. They weren’t contractors he could replace, either. It was all pre-ordained through back-room handshakes and side deals that happened long before Martin arrived on the scene. “They’ll flat out tell you, ‘We’ve already chosen the dirt contractor. It’s a government company,’” Martin said. “It happens a lot. It’s black and white.” Occasionally a contractor seems to have a stranglehold on local business. Or maybe somebody’s cousin runs the state-owned firm. Sometimes it’s clear that certain permits or approvals are granted more swiftly to a specific contractor.

In golf course construction, “dirt contractors” play an important role. They’re the initial earth movers. They do the bulk grading, the cut and fill. They dig out the lakes and build the hills. If they don’t do their job well, it slows the whole project down. “Usually they’re absolutely horrible,” Martin said of the Chinese crews. In Kunming, he realized, “you can’t tell them what to do – and you’re told that. They’re a government company. They hire us as the management company, but good luck managing that.”

Martin learned rather quickly that much would be beyond his control, and that there were local rules he’d need to navigate around. Like, for example, the unofficial toll stops that would often delay truck deliveries. In China, golf courses are commonly thought to be magnets for local business development. What they don’t say is how much of that business is outside the scope of the project itself. Everyone wants a piece of the action, a fact Martin observed one day as he pondered why a large shipment of sand had yet to arrive on site. He heard the contractor’s trucks were not too far down the road, held up by the local cops. The trucks were forced to stop and negotiate for a permit to display in their windows to be allowed to complete their deliveries. Otherwise, deliveries would stop until the police moved on. “There were times when the deliveries would go good for a month and then, suddenly, they would stop again,” Martin said. “Well, the trucks got stopped by the police again.” And they’d have to wait for the roadblocks to be cleared.

It reminded Martin of Thailand, where, before major holidays, or any other time of the year when the police were running low on money, they’d set up random roadblocks that most people knew to be a kind of forced donation line. Martin learned to stay silent and keep his passport hidden. Back in Thailand, he’d just roll down his window, hand over five hundred baht and go on his way, no questions asked.

Martin longed for the simplicity of Thailand.

*

Unlike at Fengjing, when Zhou Xunshu arrived at Guangzhou International Golf Club, the course was finished. There were bunkers instead of bulldozers, and more grass than Zhou had seen in his life. His first day there, Zhou inspected every corner of the course. He found the green hills and lush lawns calming, and for the first time in months he thought of Qixin, with an unusual sense of nostalgia. “It felt like I was grazing my cows in the village,” he recalled.

Zhou’s early days at Guangzhou International were carefree. For a short time, he was a man unburdened by aspiration or expectation, unencumbered by any knowledge of golf whatsoever. When a colleague brought a camera to work and suggested he and Zhou take photographs on the golf course, Zhou did what came naturally to him: in his khakis, black loafers and a bright yellow “Marlboro” windbreaker, he acted out maneuvers he had learned in his wushu training. At a tee box, he chose a “horse-riding” stance; near the main gate he did a “flying kick”; and in a sand trap he posed as “golden rooster standing on one leg,” raising the bunker rake like a weapon. “Those photos of him doing kung fu moves on the golf course make me laugh,” said Zhou’s wife Liu Yan, years later. “He’s so thin, and he has hair! It seems he lived a happy life back then. Happier than now.”

When Guangzhou International opened, it was one of the most exclusive clubs in the region. Memberships sold for 240,000 yuan ($28,500) – more than a poor peasant boy from rural Guizhou could fathom – and mostly businessmen from Hong Kong and Taiwan snatched them up. In a way, Zhou already felt as though he had “made it,” though he was only twenty-three. He was earning more money than anyone he knew back in Guizhou; his “office” was the most beautiful place he’d ever seen. Every day, though club rules didn’t allow him to interact with the clientele, there he was, standing in close proximity to men worth millions of yuan – men worth more than everyone in Qixin, probably worth more than a dozen or so neighboring villages, combined.

The course was one of the area’s nicest, designed by the international firm Nelson & Haworth. But it was emblematic of the Guangzhou boom, an island of luxury surrounded by industry. Guangzhou International was sixty miles east of the city, in Xiancun town, part of greater Zengcheng city, which was home to mainland China’s heaviest concentration of cement factories – and, according to some, the worst air quality in all of Guangdong province. There were hundreds of factories in the area, each spewing a noxious mixture of smoke and cement powder from their redbrick kilns. After playing eighteen holes, golfers would sometimes return to the clubhouse looking like ghosts, their bodies coated in gray dust.

Zhou didn’t care about a little cement dust. He was taken with his new surroundings. He called back home to inform friends and relatives of the fascinating new world he had discovered. “You must come,” he said. One of Zhou’s brothers did a stint working in the club’s cafeteria. Eventually Zhou’s security force was composed entirely of Guizhou exiles. Lu Zhan, a classmate from police school, was one of them. Lu’s career move was a lateral one – he left a security guard job for the one at Guangzhou International – but he saw it as a step up. “Even though there weren’t many golf courses,” Lu said, “we all knew golf as a noble sport – a game for rich men. We all felt that by just being in that environment, we had already raised our social standing.”

*

Soon, just being in the environment wasn’t enough for Zhou. He was drawn to the game, and desperately wanted to be part of the action. This had nothing to do with money or fame – the concept of “pro golfer,” which had existed as an official vocation in China for less than two years, was still unknown to him. Instead, he wanted the challenge. Zhou had always been athletic – he grew up playing basketball on a dirt court in his village – and he was fiercely competitive. He wanted to give this golf thing a try. But he couldn’t: security guards were forbidden to play.

It’s not uncommon for people from mainland China to speak openly about their distrust of the Taiwanese. Taiwan, the orthodox line goes, is a breakaway province, and the Taiwanese are traitors. This is what many are raised to believe, even if they’ve never actually encountered someone from Taiwan. Zhou thought differently. Sure, he held an irrational hatred of all people from Taiwan, but for Zhou it wasn’t political. It was personal. The one Taiwanese person he’d met in all his life – the general manager at Guangzhou International – was the only thing standing between him and golf.

Guangzhou International was a private club with a wealthy clientele, and keeping up appearances was important. Thus, the club’s manager made it a rule that non-managerial staff were not allowed to play the game or even use the driving range. Zhou, despite overseeing a large portion of the security force, was not officially a manager, and the rule proved torturous for him. One of Zhou’s duties was following playing groups around the course, and reporting their whereabouts back to the clubhouse via walkie-talkie. He studied the golfers carefully. The shapes their bodies made when they hit the ball. The way they dressed. The way they interacted. The strange etiquette of it all. He was fascinated. The more Zhou watched, the more he appreciated the nuances of the game. This was more than grown men hitting a white ball into a hole in the ground, more than trying to see who can make the ball go the farthest. There was strategy, and Zhou appreciated this. He started taking note when golfers reached into their bags to select a different club, and used his binoculars to try and make out the number printed on the bottom. He didn’t quite understand what it meant, but he knew it must be important.

Zhou spent his days watching other people play the game. “I loved it crazily,” he said. “I even dreamed of hitting balls in my sleep.” Often, his dreams were so vivid he could feel the softness of the fairway grass beneath his feet, the texture of the club’s rubber grip in his hands. Backswings gave him goosebumps, and the moment of impact – when clubface and ball would collide – was an explosion of excitement he could feel move from his fingertips to his arms to a place deep in his chest cavity. The elation would often jolt him awake. He’d sit up in bed, out of breath and sweating. Then Zhou would spot his security guard uniform hanging in the dormitory window. He’d see the cement floor and walls, the mosquito nets, the three roommates asleep nearby, the metal fan that did little more than move hot air around the room. He’d lie back down and close his eyes, hoping to be transported once again to a world where he was allowed to play.

“It was like having a delicious piece of meat in your mouth, but not being able to eat it,” Zhou said. “So bad.”

For two long years, Zhou walked and watched, hoping one day he’d get a taste of the game that captivated him so. Then, in 1998, representatives from PING, an American golf club manufacturer, visited Guangzhou International. At the driving range, the PING reps, the club instructors and the club’s executive team – led by the Taiwanese general manager – tested out some top-of-the-line drivers. Zhou, dressed in his security guard uniform, looked on as the men tried to hit the ball over a tree-covered hill about fifty yards behind the yardage marker that read “225.” A small crowd had formed, including Zhou’s immediate boss, Wang Shiwen, a serious-faced but friendly northeasterner. Nobody could clear the trees. Not even the Taiwanese GM, who often boasted about his credentials as a professional golfer.

Then, a voice from the distance. It was Zhou.

“Leader,” he said, addressing Wang. “Can I have a try?”

Several in the group responded by laughing. The security guard wants to take a swing? The general manager teased Zhou: “This is a really expensive club,” he said in a sarcastic, sing-songy tone usually reserved for children. “If you break it, can you afford to pay three thousand yuan on your salary?” Everybody in the crowd knew the answer to this question, especially Zhou, who worked the numbers over in his head: it’d take him a quarter of a year to earn the value of the club.

Wang knew of Zhou’s desire to golf. “If he breaks it, I’ll buy it,” he jumped in. “Give the boy a try.” Based on Wang’s tone, this was not a request; it was an order.

Years later, Wang would admit his actions that day were fueled in part by nationalistic pride. “At that time, for people like us, people from the mainland who worked at golf courses but didn’t have lots of money, it was rare to see such a good club,” Wang explained. “And if we did see one, no one would let us play with it. Usually we only played with old discarded or reassembled clubs.”

Zhou was a fixture at the driving range. Whenever he had free time, he’d carefully watch the instructors as they practiced. But Zhou had never hit a ball before. He was very much a novice, a greenhorn. And now he was going to take his first swings of a driver in front of a crowd? A snickering, unforgiving crowd? This was a gamble, to be sure. There was little chance that anyone would be losing three thousand yuan – something would have to go horribly wrong for Zhou to actually damage the club – but a loss of face seemed guaranteed.

This did not deter Zhou, who was just ignorant enough about golf to fail to understand how substantially the odds were stacked against him. Vegas would have had him a long shot even to make contact. But Zhou, seeing this as his only chance, stepped forward. He removed his hat. He removed his tie. He loosened the collar of his white button-down shirt. He took the three-thousand-yuan club in his hands, which were shaking.

Zhou’s world became distorted. Everything seemed so much bigger now. The driver was massive and unwieldy. The 225-yard marker was barely legible, it was so far away. The tree-lined hill seemed like a distant village, and the crowd surrounding him now numbered in the thousands. Everything was huge! Everything, that is, but the ball. The ball was a white speck of dust on the green mat beneath Zhou’s wobbly legs. How could he possible hit that?

“Come on, security guard, what are you waiting for?” the general manager taunted.

Zhou blinked repeatedly, trying to bring his world back into focus. He took a deep breath and settled himself the best he could. He lined up his shot, and swung.

Whiff.

Zhou missed the ball completely. He heard chuckles in the crowd. But he picked the ball up and carefully placed it back on the rubber tee. He swung again.

Whiff.

More laughter. Zhou felt his face go flush. The hill was no longer the goal. Contact. Just make contact, Zhou told himself. Again, he lined up the ball.

Whiff.

Baseball was another sport Zhou was unfamiliar with, so three strikes didn’t mean he was out. Although some in the crowd said they had seen enough, Zhou wasn’t going to leave unless someone forced the club from his hands. He had waited so long for this chance. He had to at least hit the ball. He couldn’t let Wang down.

Zhou called on his wushu training, one of the only things he remembered from his short stint at military police school. He focused on his yi, or intention, remembering something his instructor had said: It is the thought which guides the movement. He blocked out the crowd from his mind. Blocked out the jeers, the yardage markers, the hill and the trees. He focused only on the small white target. He just wanted to hit the ball. He stared at it with so much intensity his entire field of vision became white and dimpled. He saw nothing but the ball.

Zhou raised the driver and swung. At the bottom of his motion, he heard a pop. Suddenly, Zhou felt as though he had been transported to one of his dreams. His hands tingled. His body filled with warmth. He wasn’t exactly sure what had happened – but he knew he wanted to feel this again.

At first there was silence. Followed by a gasp or two. Then cheers. Any laughs were now those of disbelief. The security guard had done it. He had hit the ball. Long. Straight. And over the trees. No one, including Zhou – who stood there, dumbfounded, his hands still welded to his three-thousand-yuan weapon – could believe it.

“I was happy, and I was proud,” Wang recalled, nearly a decade later. “I was right about choosing him. But none of that matters. The most important thing is that he hit the ball over the hill! He had so much explosive force. To hit the ball past the trees on the hill, more than 280 yards – I’ve worked at the course for ten years and I’ve only seen three to five people do that.”

Some in the crowd thought it was just dumb luck. That’s what the general manager from Taiwan said. He told Zhou he’d never be able to do it again.

“I didn’t dare take another swing,” Zhou said. “To be honest, I was scared I’d have to pay for the club. It was much too expensive for me.”

Zhou retrieved his hat and his tie and floated all the way back to the workers’ dormitory. He sat on his metal bunk bed, his body still trembling.

“That was the moment I started thinking that, if I worked hard, maybe one day I could become good at golf,” Zhou said.

But there remained one problem: Zhou was still forbidden to play. He was determined not to let that stop him, however. He had caught a fever.

He started building up an arsenal, scouring the course’s wooded areas for lost balls, collecting broken clubs discarded by members. He dragged a worn-out driving range mat back to the workers’ dormitory, where there was a narrow swath of grass just outside Zhou’s ground-floor window. It was a secluded area. On one side was the faded green wall of the dorm, on the other was a wall of thick tropical trees and foliage. Beyond that, well, that was no longer the club’s property. In his free time, Zhou would steal back there with his mat, his balls and some clubs he’d repaired. He’d spend hours chipping and pitching in that constricted space, the fear of losing balls and breaking windows teaching him to drive the ball straight. This, of course, did not always happen – especially early on – and Zhou worked out an arrangement with the maintenance staff: He’d fix any windows he broke, in exchange for their silence.

At night, Zhou would hop out of his dormitory window and sneak over to a practice green with just a ball – no putter. Under the moonlight, he’d roll the ball, again and again, and study how it moved atop the curves of the closely cropped grass. He read any golf book he could get his hands on, and watched golf videos (John Daly’s Grip It and Rip It, to name one) in the driving range office when he was off duty. He may never have been a good student, but Zhou taught himself golf.

He took every opportunity to watch the golf instructors as they practiced at the driving range. He’d scrutinize their mechanics carefully, and then race back behind the dormitory and try to mimic them. On Monday evenings, club managers gathered at the driving range to drink beers and hit a few balls. Zhou, while not a manager, would often tag along, like a dog waiting for scraps of food to fall from the dinner table.

“He always went with me, and he always asked me to let him have a try,” Wang said. “I knew it disobeyed the rule, but I’d let him take several swings. At first I did not really see his talent – I only knew he had explosive power and could hit the ball very far.”

Even then, Zhou had a very compact, aggressive swing. Much of his power came from his strong legs, which he’d bend in an exaggerated fashion. This unique stance wasn’t something Zhou had picked up from a book or a video. It was a technique borne of necessity – many of the second-hand clubs he was using were much too short for him. He also swung with a certain amount of anger and resentment. He hated that other staff members were allowed to play golf, yet he had to practice in secret. During his infrequent opportunities to hit balls at the driving range, Zhou would picture the Taiwanese manager and swing with fury.

“I still didn’t know what a professional golfer was at that time, but everything about it was so interesting to me,” Zhou recalled. “The leaders sometimes played videos showing a guy called Tiger Woods. I said, ‘Wow! Look at the atmosphere.’ So many people watching. I wanted to be under the spotlight like Tiger Woods. I knew I couldn’t reach his level, but I wanted to attend my own tournaments. I wanted to have that feeling.”

In early 2001, when Zhou returned home to Qixin for the first time in more than five years, he brought back ten golf balls, and the villagers looked at the strange foreign spheres with wonderment and curiosity. His mother bounced one, and everybody clapped. Then some neighborhood children took the balls, and they played with them like marbles. Zhou figured he’d choose another time to explain his new dream to his family.

*

Martin Moore’s team had put the finishing touches to the Mountain Course at Spring City in December 1996. The driving range and clubhouse were completed the following year, and in November 1998, Spring City celebrated its official grand opening, with leaders of the Yunnan provincial government and the prime minister of Singapore in attendance. Construction on the club’s Lake Course, designed by Robert Trent Jones, Jr., began that same month. In 1999, Golf Digest magazine named the Mountain Course the No. 1 golf course in China and Hong Kong.

It was a nice thing for Martin to be able to put on his resumé, but by that point Spring City, and China to some extent, were already in his rearview mirror. Throughout the ’90s, China had remained a mystery to most Westerners in the golf scene. “It just wasn’t on people’s radar,” Martin recalled. “Nicklaus was actually very active then, but there were definitely a lot of people in the industry that wouldn’t have a clue.” After Spring City, Thailand and the Philippines were still seen as the boom markets, and Martin was fully on board to go back where things were easier. He got jobs in both countries managing projects for Paragon Construction International, part of the mighty Nicklaus empire, for what promised to be a steady flow of work. But that came to a crashing halt with the Asian financial crisis of 1997. As Martin put it, “the whole shit hit the fan.”

When the crisis hit, Martin was working on a Greg Norman course in the Philippines. The peso plummeted from 26 to the US dollar to 41. “We stopped getting paid by the client, and it just really fell apart,” he said. Nicklaus shut down operations in the Philippines in 1998 and laid off everyone there, except for Martin. They offered him a gig in Mexico, but he balked at the opportunity – if he was going to move that close to home, he might as well go home, was his thinking. He had spent nearly a decade in Asia. He had met his wife in Thailand. They now had two sons. His eldest boy was almost old enough for school. It seemed like a good time to move the family to the United States. There’d always be golf courses to build there, he thought. And at that time, he seemed to be right – more than 750 new courses would open between 1999 and 2000, the biggest golf construction boom in history.

In August 1998, Martin, his wife and his two sons moved to Gulfport, Mississippi, where Martin took a job as an independent shaper on a Nicklaus course while he figured out his next move. He began talking to two American golf course designers about a possible business opportunity. Lee Schmidt, who Martin had met in Thailand while they both worked for Jack Nicklaus, and Brian Curley, who at the time was president of golf design at Landmark Golf Company in Indian Wells, California, had worked together at Landmark in the ’80s, and in 1997 they decided to join forces once again. Their partnership would eventually be known as Schmidt-Curley Design. They were looking to form a golf course construction firm that would focus solely on their designs, and Martin was the first person they reached out to. “I jumped all over that,” Martin said. “I was shaping all day, and opening this company all night.”

The trio formed Flagstick Golf Course Construction Management, and landed their first project in late 1998, in Indio, California (then called the Landmark Golf Club – today it’s called The Golf Club at Terra Lago). Within a year, the course was open and playing host to the 1999 Skins Game between Fred Couples, David Duval, Sergio Garcia and Mark O’Meara. Over the next few years, Martin, along with Schmidt and Curley, worked on a dozen or so courses in the American Southwest.

They thought this could be the start of something big. They had no idea just how big it was about to get.

*

Despite all of his stealthy preparations, Zhou Xunshu wasn’t able to start playing golf regularly for years. Things began to look up in April 2001, five years after he had arrived at Guangzhou International, when the Taiwanese manager left the club. The rules changed, and after hundreds of clandestine practices, Zhou could finally see how his skills translated to an actual golf course. It was like a dream. But it only lasted three months.

“It was my fault,” Wang Shiwen, Zhou’s boss, said. “I made a mistake when I was playing on the course. I teed off too soon at hole No. 9. It didn’t hit the members playing in front of me, but it scared them. The course punished me and the whole security department. Banned us from playing.”

Bans like this would happen with annoying frequency. They could last anywhere from a couple of months to a half a year. And Zhou became extremely frustrated. “He was very depressed,” said Lu Zhan, Zhou’s old friend and roommate. “By then, his goal was to be a pro golfer. We talked about that a lot.”

During one such low point, Zhou rounded up some shafts from broken clubs and fashioned his own set of practice drivers. To make the club heads, he’d cut water bottles in half, fill the bottoms with a concoction of cement, water and soil, and then stick the shafts in the mixture until it dried. To further bind the shaft with the cement head, he wrapped the joint with iron wire. Zhou was afraid of being laughed at, so at night he’d carry his weighted Frankenstein club up a metal staircase to the dormitory roof. “I wouldn’t go to sleep without practicing a hundred swings,” he said.

In autumn 2001, Zhou received his first partial set of proper golf clubs, after he’d led the security department to victory in the club’s interdepartmental basketball tournament. As a prize, Frank Lin, the Singaporean who had hired Zhou in 1996, offered Zhou a barely used set of MacGregor clubs he’d originally purchased for his wife. He told Zhou he could have them for whatever price he wanted. Zhou was too proud to take the clubs for free, so he offered eight hundred yuan, more than half his monthly salary.

“I cherished those clubs,” Zhou said. “I used to watch the instructors clean their clubs with a special foam. It made them so shiny. I didn’t have access to that foam back at the dorm, so I used a toothbrush and soap. And then I polished them with a rag. I did this almost every day.”

At this point, he was allowed to play on the course twice a month. He considered this unacceptable. How could he become a pro golfer by playing only a couple of dozen times a year? He approached his bosses with a proposal. He’d work without pay in exchange for free access to the course. His younger brother, who was working as a cook at a nearby construction site, had offered to pay Zhou’s daily expenses, which were minimal. Zhou said he’d do any type of job they wanted – caddie, gather balls at the driving range, clean them – all he wanted to do was golf. He made the offer twice. Twice he was turned down.

In spring 2002, Zhou approached Wang with an ultimatum: Let me play, or fire me. Wang had always liked Zhou. He admired his determination and realized, although he was very good at his job, Zhou had little interest in being a security guard for the rest of his life. “Okay,” Wang said to Zhou. “This is what we are going to do. But you have to promise not to tell anyone.”

Zhou started working the night shift. Every morning after his shift, at 6:30 a.m., before most of the customers would arrive, Wang and Zhou would play a round. Because they didn’t use caddies to carry their bags, it was obvious Wang and Zhou weren’t members, so they had to sneak around the course like cat burglars. Wang was risking his job with the arrangement.

“Sometimes, if someone was coming, I’d have to go hide in the bushes,” Zhou said. “And before each swing, I’d have to look around to make sure nobody was looking. If the coast was clear, I’d swing quickly and race after the ball.” After a year of racing around the course like this, he was hitting in the 70s.

“He made great progress,” Wang said. “At that time, we were developing lots of players, including some teams, and they were all jealous of Zhou’s fast improvement.”

Zhou started playing in amateur tournaments, putting even more strain on his work schedule. Lu often covered for him. “We are like brothers, so I’d do anything to support him,” Lu said. “We all hoped he could achieve something. Most of us had the same dream he had. But he was a little bit crazier than us, and he was also more talented. He was our hope.”

But something always got in the way. In April 2003 it was local peasants. The club’s tee boxes were marked with decorative metal golf balls, oversized and painted in a variety of colors. They were about the size of grapefruits and stuck into the turf with metal spikes. Late one night, a group of local farmers sneaked onto the course and stole the tee markers to sell as scrap metal. The entire security team was blamed, and Zhou was banned from golfing. He was crushed.

He again offered to work for free. “Just let me golf,” he pleaded.

No.

“I can’t live without golf. Leader, please reconsider.”

No.

“If I can’t golf, I’ll have to quit.”

Are you sure?

“Yes. This time, yes. Either I golf or I quit.”

Then quit.

After seven years at Guangzhou International, that’s exactly what Zhou did.