‌5

‌No Choice

“At night there are mosquitoes.”

From Zhou. A text message. And by his standards, a lengthy and informative one. He had sent it from the driving range, two hours before his 10 a.m. opening round tee time. So there were mosquitoes in the hotel in Qingdao – but still no word on where the hotel was. Or its phone number. Or its name. The message did represent progress, however. In the days leading up to his second stop on the 2007 China Tour, Zhou’s electronic missives had been even shorter. He had sent word that the hotel was “bad” and then “very bad,” but no more than that.

In Qingdao the odd communications continued: 华山洗浴宾馆. Huashan Xiyu Binguan. Huashan Shower Hotel. It didn’t sound good, in English or Chinese. And first you had to get there.

Zhou had discovered early on that finding transportation to golf courses in China is rarely easy and often expensive. Because they are so new, the courses, like China’s airports, are almost never close to a city center. Qingdao’s Liuting International Airport was twenty miles north of the city, and Qingdao Huashan Golf & Resort was twenty miles further to the northeast, where all you’d find otherwise was farmland and factories. No Chinese taxi drivers earned enough to play golf, and they rarely knew how to get to the far-flung courses. If a Chinese cabbie knew one thing about golf, it was that it’s a rich man’s game – and rich men in China have their own cars and drivers. They’d often refuse the long trip, because they knew there wouldn’t be a passenger available for the return fare.

One China guidebook says visiting Qingdao is like “stepping into a replica of a nineteenth-century Bavarian village.” The city had been a German concession from the late 1800s until the early 1920s, and many Teutonic buildings still stand. But for anyone participating in the Qingdao leg of the China Tour, there was no need to visit Qingdao. Instead you had to go to Huashan.

Huashan hadn’t aged well. The town had only officially been around since 1992, and the buildings along Zhifu Road, intended to serve as its “Main Street,” were all less than ten years old. Yet the whole scene looked worn and depressed. The tan tile exteriors of the buildings were coated in a permanent layer of dust – the road was not yet fully paved – and the steps leading up to their entrances were cracked and crumbling. The facades of the buildings were split in half by large plastic billboards announcing garishly what was inside: a bank; a clothing store; an insurance agency; a mobile phone dealer; a man who would fix your eyeglasses or your wristwatch, or both. Some shop signs were so big they made it difficult to see out of the windows on the second floor.

In a way, downtown Huashan and its dusty main drag was nothing more than a modern version of a frontier town in America’s Old West. It seemed as though it had been cobbled together hurriedly, in anticipation of the rush of people to come. There was a hint of lawlessness. In an effort to ward off intruders, every ground floor shop window was veiled with jailhouse-like metal bars (though many were beginning to rust). The occasional street lamp lit Zhifu Road, but beyond its parallel rows of tiled buildings, it was pitch black. That darkness was deceiving, however, because out in the unlit distance was where all the life was: the countryside villages, where most of the area’s fifty thousand residents lived. Maybe some day that rush of people would come, but in 2007, Zhifu Road felt like a deserted, bankrupt strip mall.

The Huashan Shower Hotel was on Songshan Road, the only Huashan side street that glowed, thanks to the buzzing purple, red and yellow signs announcing the Arc de Triomphe (Kai Xuan Men) Music Bar. Kai Xuan Men occupied the same new three-story pastel-green building as the Shower Hotel. It was a karaoke bar, or “KTV,” the widely accepted Chinese genteelism for “brothel.”

The bar’s entrance faced the road, and the door was always open, revealing what could have been, to the casual observer, a sparsely decorated Chinese living room. Placed conspicuously near the doorway was a red sofa decorated with large white cartoon paw prints. Next to the sofa was a Christmas tree. It was almost June. Usually, one or two girls – they looked like they could have been in their late teens, but it was hard to tell – sat atop the sofa dressed in clothes one would wear to go shopping on the weekend. They lounged listlessly, staring at the opposite wall as if they were getting ready to watch a rerun of the evening news. Occasionally, a toddler would be seated with them. They’d all giggle when the rare foreigner walked by.

The bar and the hotel shared the building with Xiang Yun Ge Restaurant, a banquet-style Chinese restaurant boasting plenty of private rooms and enough space to host a large wedding reception. On the first day of the tournament, the dining hall was filled to capacity for a private party, or so the hostess claimed. It didn’t seem she was lying, given the number of cars scattered about the street. The restaurant – not the pro golf tournament down the road – was the hottest ticket in town that day. According to the hostess, their customers were mostly government officials or executives with local state-owned enterprises. But this was still the countryside, and the men filing in and out had an agrarian glow about them – crew cuts, weathered brown skin and dirt on their shoes.

The lobby was cold, in both temperature and ambience. The floor was faux marble. The walls were cement and painted white. One side of the lobby was decked out with oversized living room furniture upholstered in imitation leather that had begun to blister long ago. Above the sofa hung a large painting of a waterfall. The other half of the lobby boasted the day’s fresh ingredients – arranged in more than forty white plastic and Styrofoam containers on the floor. Huashan is close to the Yellow Sea, and the selection of creatures and animal parts on offer looked like lab prep for a university biology course. Chicken gizzards, pig kidneys, silkworm pupae, plump bamboo worms, entire freshly plucked chicken carcasses, quails, squid two feet long, shrimp, cuttlefish, stingrays, octopuses with bulging, translucent eyes, chickens’ feet, conches, snails, coagulated pig’s blood, and various fish, mollusks, tendons, hearts and other entrails. Each item was sitting in its own fluids or juices or blood or slime, all waiting to be cooked up and served as lunch.

*

In most Chinese cities or towns, regardless of size, there is usually someone willing to take you where you want to go, for a price – whether it’s in a Volkswagen, a motorized rickshaw, or on the back of a motorcycle. But despite all the cars outside the Xiang Yun Ge, not one was for hire. No taxis. Nothing. The only option, it seemed, was to walk. The course was about twenty-five minutes away by foot. How were the golfers staying at the Shower Hotel getting to the course each morning?

Walking north along a newly laid road – almost all of the roads in Huashan were new – you were quickly surrounded by farmland, but signs of the inevitable change soon to come to the area were visible in the distance. The farms were being phased out. Next to each brand-new, multi-story building stood a cluster of construction cranes, ready to erect more new buildings. In 2001, the Shandong provincial government had declared Huashan one of six “high-tech industry development zones” in the province. Multinational companies from Singapore, South Korea and Japan had moved in and opened factories. Toiling in the fields was a thing of the past. The local people now worked on electronic gadgetry: computers and MP3 players.

Nonetheless, Shandong, together with Hebei and Henan provinces, still accounts for nearly 10 percent of the world’s wheat production and 50 percent of the domestic harvest. What arable land that remains is farmed intensely. Fields don’t lie fallow for long. As soon as the winter wheat crop is harvested in May and June, corn is planted. Peanuts, green beans and other vegetables fill in the gaps, planted in long, straight lines, the young leaves protected by plastic sheets over the soil. The carefully aligned crops felt incongruous with the haphazard manner in which the rest of Huashan was being developed.

Another new road signaled the way to the golf course. In contrast to the orderly efficiency of the crop rows, this route was a chaotic blank canvas, two very wide lanes separated by a wide median and flanked by a sidewalk. No one had got around to painting lane markers. It didn’t matter. There were no cars in sight, except for a rickety blue Dongfeng dump truck that was cruising down the wrong side of the road. Tall, modern-looking lamps lined the street, as did several sapling trees, one planted every twenty feet or so along the sidewalk. But the soil around the trees was overgrown with weeds and tall grass. The median was the same way. The road appeared to have been laid recently, but it already felt abandoned.

In the distance, a woman was pacing barefoot along a yellow blanket of wheat. She had spread out thousands of tiny, amber-colored kernels on the flat concrete. The woman had a stocky but solid build, like a retired gymnast. Middle-aged, she sported a short, asexual haircut and was wearing black polyester trousers and a polyester blouse with a drab tan and mauve floral print. Her pink plastic sandals had been placed beside her patch of the road, the boundary of which she had marked with a dozen evenly placed large stones. Slowly, she walked the length of her section of wheat, back and forth, hands behind her back, shuffling through the kernels, her feet rubbing them against the road below.

“I’m rotating the kernels so they all get sun,” the woman explained in a thick local dialect. She smiled, flashing a chipped front tooth.

Not too far away, on the other side of the median, another woman was doing the same thing.

By the time the wheat makes it out to the street in Huashan, it is nearing the end of its journey from the farm. It has already been threshed, the wheat literally separated from the chaff. Nowadays this is done mostly with machines, small threshers and occasionally large combines. Grain acreage has decreased in recent years, partly due to better opportunities with other crops, but also because of urban encroachment, so the government has encouraged the adoption of improved technologies, often with subsidies, to keep production levels high. But for some steps in the process, bare feet and concrete are all that’s needed.

In the past, most farms had a naked piece of land, called a shai chang, set aside for drying the kernels before the grain was stored for the summer in a warehouse, or in large clay crocks in the home. It’s said that for every acre of wheat a family has, they’ll need around 240 square meters set aside for drying. But now that farmland was growing increasingly precious – and only 12 percent of China’s land is arable to begin with – most farmers agree this isn’t a very practical use of their tillage.

So, as much as they can, farmers try to use development, particularly the introduction of paved roads to their rural communities, to their advantage. Wheat kernels dry several times faster on cement than they do on a traditional shai chang. Naturally, using the roads in this way can be dangerous, sometimes deadly. Accidents often happen when cars swerve to avoid the swath of grain. Around the time of the winter wheat harvest, a car collided with a cyclist as its driver tried to maneuver around a road-top shai chang near Qihe, a city in the province’s northwest – the cyclist died in the wreck. The aftermath provided some insight into how much value the locals place on kernels of wheat (the driver could easily have just driven over the grain) and how much value local authorities place on human life (for causing the fatal crash, the farmer paid only a $1,400 fine).

Further along the road to Qingdao Huashan Golf & Resort, two workers were napping in the cab of a small rusty combine. Further still, sixty-year-old Wang Zhongkui was tilling his sorghum field with a spade near the sidewalk. He had been a farmer his entire life. He lived on the opposite side of the road, in a village just beyond a row of single-story brick grain warehouses, with doors adorned with a square-shaped red and gold sign featuring fu, the Chinese character for good fortune. Wang had a round, friendly face and his crew cut showed only a few specks of gray. Beyond Wang, in the distance, the golf club was now visible – you could just make out the roofs of luxury villas peeking out over a wall. “I have seen it,” Wang said of the course, resting his chin on his sturdy hands, which he had stacked atop the nub of his spade’s wooden handle. “But I have never been inside.”

He thought about his response for a moment, and then corrected himself. “Before it was a golf course, I often visited that land. When the golf course was built, nobody was allowed inside.”

He smiled. “I have less land now.” Then he got serious. “Villagers here used to have two mu of land each, but now they have only a third.” Wang forcefully raised two fingers, and then three, for emphasis.

“It is because of the golf course. The golf course used to belong to us.”

He said that the villagers had seen no financial benefits from the course. “No one is happy about this. But there haven’t been any conflicts. Most now go to work in the factories,” Wang said. “My family eats most of the crops we grow here.” He pointed to his land, split up into rectangular patches of peanuts, corn and sorghum. “We sell whatever is left over.”

Then Wang closed the topic with one of the most vexing and frequently heard phrases in the Chinese language. “Mei banfa,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do.”

Often you hear “mei banfa” used in its defeatist form – when someone is trying to shirk responsibility. The person is unwilling to put in the necessary effort to perform a task that, in most situations, falls within his or her job description. Saying that they have no choice takes it out of their hands.

But Wang was telling the truth. There really was nothing he could do.

*

The final stretch of the journey ran along Route 204, a multi-lane highway that stretches 130 miles from Qingdao to Yantai, a busy seaport on the Bohai Strait in northern Shandong. The road, which opened in 1990, cut the travel time between the two tourist cities in half. And since 1996, when drivers on Route 204 look to the east as they pass through the town of Huashan, they’ll see the province’s first golf course. Or at least they’ll see the wall that protects Qingdao Huashan Golf & Resort from riffraff like Wang Zhongkui.

Beyond the resort’s wall the large luxury homes were mostly vacant. “TAO OF BUSINESS IN HEAVENLY VILLA” a billboard on the wall proclaimed in English. The advertisement featured a heavily Photoshopped golf fairway and three people: a bejeweled woman in a lavender evening gown holding a gold masquerade mask; a cocksure man in a double-breasted suit using an inverted 9-iron as a cane; and, closest to the green, a woman in a black dress, seated and playing the cello. The ad’s Chinese text was no less obtuse: “Leading the dance of business philosophy, one villa can conquer the world.”

A few other billboards were more straightforward, with contact information for the King’s Palace development, which promises buyers a “Unique Villa,” a “Unique Lifestyle” and four luxurious master bedrooms. And above the chimneys and tiled rooftops was a bright red sign announcing that weekend’s China Tour event.

“The most important event in golf, Heroes gather in Huashan.”

Five golfers were pictured. Zhou Xunshu was not one of them.

*

“A long day.”

Frank Chen, the China Tour’s Chinese media director, seemed to exhale the words in a sigh. He was staring at the media center leaderboard – a Hisense flatscreen TV. He shook his head.

“Lots of blue.” And blue was bad.

Blue numbers meant bogeys, or worse. Bad scores. Black numbers signified par. Red was used for birdies. The rare eagle was highlighted in yellow. But on this day, the board was awash in blue. Only five golfers had finished the day under par.

Late in his round, Zhou had managed to splash some red beside his name to turn what could have been a horrible day into just a bad one. He scored birdies on two of the final three holes to finish 6 over par with a 78. He was in a tie for sixty-first place, and was at risk of missing the cut. One golfer Zhou was tied with, Dong Caihong, had made history on the Qingdao Leg – she was the first female player to tee up for a China Tour event. Zhou could not be pleased.

In the nearly three weeks between the season opener and the Qingdao tournament, Zhou had played on an actual golf course only once. He was too busy teaching, trying to save enough money for the coming month. He knew the tournament schedule – packed, by Chinese golf standards – would have him away from his home, his girlfriend and his paying job for several weeks. After Qingdao, he would fly to Beijing for a non-China Tour event sponsored by China Unicom, a state-owned telecommunications company. Then it was down to Guangzhou for the third leg of the tour at Dragon Lake Golf Club, Zhou’s former employer. Because of his familiarity with the course, Zhou was putting pressure on himself to perform well there. Friends and former colleagues would be in attendance.

But it’s hard to perform well when you don’t have time to practice. Zhou’s training schedule was dictated by his teaching schedule. He squeezed practice in before and after his students. And he was doing both at the public driving range, which didn’t have a playable putting green. It wasn’t ideal. Not even close. This, however, was the lot of a pro golfer in China. He had bills to pay, plane tickets to buy, a girlfriend to support. There were no sponsors beating on his door offering to chip in. When he was away from home, on the road at tournaments, for a full month, there was no income. “Mei banfa,” Zhou said. “If you don’t play, you can’t win. I’d never get better.”

Zhou had changed out of his golf shoes and into a rather garish pair of lace-up brown loafers. They were shiny, and a section of their thin soles was made of metal. They surely didn’t go with his outfit – the same fading maroon trousers and pilling baby blue golf shirt he had worn during his round.

Standing there in the Qingdao Huashan clubhouse lobby, he pointed to the large gold clock from Omega, the China Tour’s title sponsor, which was mounted to a red plastic display stand. He urged a young golfer from Chongqing, making his China Tour debut, to pose for a photograph next to the clock. “It will be a good souvenir,” Zhou said, his gruff voice making it sound more like an order than a suggestion. Zhou lined up the shot – “two steps back, one step to the right” – and then snapped the picture. He looked at his work on the camera’s display screen and nodded, satisfied. “Bu cuo,” he said. “Pretty good.” Then it was Zhou’s turn. They were both still tourists.

The ride back to the hotel was in a Chinese classic, the box-like minivan known throughout China as the mianbao che, or “bread car,” because of its loaf-like appearance. Despite their tiny 1.3-liter engines, the vans are workhorses, and wildly popular, thanks to their versatility and price tag – they start at around four thousand dollars. On any given day, you might see a mianbao che overflowing with schoolchildren, watermelons, furniture, livestock, or, in this case, Chinese professional golfers.

The van belonged to the owner of a small grocery store near the Shower Hotel. Zhou had met him during his first day in Huashan; he had needed to find a ride to the course, and saw that the grocer also owned a car. A weeklong relationship was born. Zhou saved the man’s phone number in his mobile phone, and the mianbao che became his taxi for the duration of the tournament. The price: ten yuan each way. Expensive, but much better than walking every day. Zhou had learned quickly that, upon arriving at a China Tour event, securing a reliable ride to and from the golf course was second only to finding an affordable hotel. At the driving range and putting green, the golfers would gossip about who had negotiated the best deals.

Two rows of seats had been ripped out of the grocer’s mianbao che to make more room for passengers. In their place he had put tiny plastic stools, which slid along the greasy exposed metal of the van’s floor every time he made a turn.

Before getting back to the Huashan Shower Hotel, the grocer stopped the van at his shop, so people could stock up on mosquito coils and food. He knew his market.

Zhou, who had a 7 a.m. tee time the following day, chose to buy his breakfast in advance: three cans of Red Bull, two juice boxes of whole milk and three chocolate pastries. He seemed happy, bubbly even, the day’s bad round seemingly behind him.

He ran out into the empty road, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath.

“Fresh air,” he said with a comfortable smile. “Not like the city.”

Zhou then turned his attention to an apartment block on the other side of the road. It had a bright orange tile roof and a surprisingly clean white exterior. Windows were spaced uniformly across the width of the structure. The building was new, three stories tall, boxy and boring. Zhou, still standing in the middle of the road, put his hands on his hips and took in the scene, nodding slowly, right to left.

“The countryside here is not bad,” he proclaimed. “They even have buildings like this!”

Huashan Shower Hotel wasn’t the worst hotel in China. Indeed, there are much, much worse. As a bare-bones, downmarket hotel, it was typical. At the Shower Hotel, 120 yuan – about fifteen dollars – a night got you a double room with ceramic tile floors, two hard single beds, a small color television and, a special surprise, a private bathroom with intermittent hot water – thus, the name. No toiletries were included, not even towels or toilet paper. But all necessities were available to buy downstairs at affordable prices, if not top quality. The bath towels for sale in the hotel lobby and the street-side shops were thin, and the size of washcloths. There was no kind of barrier between the shower and the rest of the bathroom, no door or curtain or ridge in the floor – and the shower nozzle was affixed to the wall facing the toilet and sink. Instead, the floor was purposefully higher on one side and angled slightly, so water would flow to a drain between the toilet and sink.

The screens in the windows had large holes, providing a warm welcome to the mosquitoes. Outside, there was commotion. Several tall construction cranes were busy erecting a group of six-story apartment buildings, twice the size of the one Zhou had marveled at. A small dog barked as it raced around the large pieces of concrete piping that littered the vacant lot behind the hotel. Zhou went to bed early, keeping his tee time in mind. Shortly after midnight, a loud truck arrived at the construction site. Its horn beeped repeatedly, perhaps warning that for the next fifteen minutes it would be dumping large quantities of rocks, one on top of another. Two hours later, the dog was barking again. At 4:44 a.m., dawn light flooded the east-facing rooms, and a rooster began to crow. Around 6 o’clock, the public address system from a local school began blaring its musical morning calisthenics instructions: “Stretching exercise! Ready, and go! 1! 2! 3! 4! 5! 6! 7! 8!”

Zhou’s tee time was in an hour.

The nighttime noise did not seem to bother Zhou. He followed his 78 with a 76 on Friday, an even-par 72 on Saturday and a 75 on Sunday. He was 13 over for the tournament. Not exactly the kind of numbers that would have sponsors beating down his door, but at this tournament, on this course, which had the entire field befuddled, it was good enough. Qingdao, or Huashan, ended up being the best result of Zhou’s young career. He finished twelfth, seven strokes behind the legendary Zhang Lianwei. After phoning Liu Yan back in Chongqing, Zhou celebrated what he called a “breakthrough moment” in his career at a tiny, empty restaurant in Huashan town. His companions were two people he barely knew, an American journalist and his translator, and a round of cold Tsingtaos.

“Today, my plan was even-par,” Zhou said. “If I got even-par, I’d definitely be in the top ten. Then my name would be on the leaderboard. Today, I made so many mistakes on my tee shots, but I still saved a lot of pars, so I felt I improved a lot.” It was one of the first events in which Zhou actually turned a profit. After taxes and travel fees, Zhou’s total earnings for the tournament were around eight thousand yuan – one thousand dollars.

Zhou fiddled with the cap to his bottle of beer. He still had the hands of a farm worker – that would be true no matter how well he played golf. They were covered in scars, as though he’d used a porcupine as a punching bag. “It’s from cutting the wild grass in the village,” he explained. “We used sharp sickles. I started when I was ten.” Zhou started to count his scars. He lost track after thirty.

He pointed to the biggest one, on his left hand, which drew a curved line between the middle and base knuckles on his index finger. “You could see the bone,” he said. But they’d never use stitches in the village, he said, just “put the flesh back on” and wrap it up.

“There’s also this one,” Zhou said, pointing to a divot above his left eyebrow.

In the spring, before there was grass to cut, Zhou and his childhood friends would attach sickles to long pieces of bamboo, and then use the contraptions to cut leaf buds off of the tallest trees. One of Zhou’s friends took a wild swing, missed a tree completely, and connected with Zhou’s forehead instead. He almost lost an eye.

Zhou seldom went back to the village these days. Just talking about doing so could change his mood, and he’d often try to change the subject. “Life in the mountains was pretty rough,” he’d usually say when asked about his youth. It was, he said, a page in his life. “Conditions were bad, and there was nothing we could do about it.”

Now he simply wanted to get his elderly parents out of the village.

“My father has arthritis in his leg,” Zhou said. But there was more to it than that. “He also believes in Jesus. My parents are home alone and they needed to find something to attach to, and there are some people in our village who are believing in that,” he continued. “So my father started to believe, too. He gets on his knees every day and prays. He’s got a cross and reads the Bible every night.”

Zhou was not pleased with this development. He said he realized older people in China may search for some kind of meaning “because they suffered from the old traditions in the old society,” but he was worried. It seemed his father was starting to rely more on prayer to heal his leg than on medicine.

“Last time I went back for Spring Festival I tried to teach him that science is what he should really believe in,” Zhou said, referring to the Chinese New Year, the biggest holiday of the year. “I said, ‘Look at the planes in the sky, do you think Jesus made that happen?’ I gave him some medicine that made his leg feel better, and I thought he understood what I had told him. But after I left, he could walk again because of the medicine, and so he went out and met those people in the village, and he started to believe again. I think it will be fine once I get them to Chongqing.”

Zhou said his parents, who were in their seventies, didn’t have much longer to live.

“They’ve never taken a plane before,” he said. “I want to get them to Guiyang so they can take a plane to Chongqing.”

*

In the village of Meiqiu, on Hainan island, nearly any event of any significance takes place under the phoenix tree, which sits in the clearing where three of the primary paths out of the village converge. Concrete Chinese chess tables are arranged near the knotty trunk of the old tree, the branches of which cover much of the open area like a giant parasol. For Wang Libo, and many of his fellow Meiqiu villagers of a certain age, walking past the big phoenix tree is like being on an episode of This is Your Life.

When he was just a teenager, Wang had led the construction of the cinder volleyball court that takes up much of the courtyard. This new, bigger court (he still knows the exact dimensions – twelve meters wide by twenty meters long) replaced a smaller, shabby, dirt playing area. Wang’s team laid the bricks to mark the boundaries of the court. Then they installed the posts and the net, which were all paid for by the village committee.

Volleyball was a big deal. Each village had a team, and every summer Wang and his Meiqiu cohorts would play home and away matches with other squads from the area. They’d line the court with powdered limestone, and large crowds would cycle for miles to watch the action. “We gambled on every match,” Wang said. “I remember one day we lost seven hundred yuan. That was a lot of money!”

Just on the other side of the phoenix tree stands one of the most important relics from village history. It looks like a pile of vine-covered lava stones – not exactly an uncommon sight on this part of the island – but it’s actually one of Meiqiu’s original entry gates. Closer inspection reveals a trapezoidal section of stone wall with a rectangular opening in the middle. No one knows for certain how old the bit of wall is – lava rocks appear to be ancient even when they’re “new” – but “hundreds” of years is what most people say. Typically no one pays it much mind, until somebody from the village gets married or dies.

There are three such old entryways in Meiqiu, each denoting a specific section of the village. Every family belongs to one entryway, and that is where they congregate on the occasion of a wedding or a funeral. All weeds and vines are removed from the stones, and the married couple – or on bad days, the coffin – is walked beneath the lintel. “The old men in the village say this village gate is the only way to welcome new people in, and to send daughters and the dead out,” Wang explained. “When these important things happen, people must walk through the old village gate. It means God will bless you in the coming days. If you walk around the opening, it is not auspicious.”

Wang and his wife walked through the old gate behind the phoenix tree when they got married in 1997. The whole village was there to wish them well. They set off firecrackers. They killed pigs and goats and chickens in their honor. It was a day of celebration for everyone.

But ten years later, in August 2007, Wang found himself and about one hundred other villagers gathered under the phoenix tree for a decidedly different occasion. And no one seemed to be in a celebratory mood. The blood-red flowers of the phoenix tree had come and gone with the season, but the curved seedpods remained. In the gloom of the early evening sky, they hung from the tree like hundreds of dark sickles.

It was cooler than normal for the middle of the Hainan summer, but the crowd was hot with anxiety. For several weeks, rumors had been swirling around the local teahouses that a company was interested in renting land in the area. But no one seemed to have the details: What land, for what price? And who was the mysterious company interested in large swaths of rocky terrain previously thought only good for growing fruit trees? Meiqiu’s residents wanted answers, and they were finally about to get some.

The village governor stood atop a cement bench next to a lychee tree and told the crowd that the rumors they had heard were indeed true. There was a developer interested in village land – in fact this company, named Junhao and based in Hong Kong, was intent on buying up property from many villages in the area, not just Meiqiu.

The government had determined that each plot of Meiqiu land in question would fall into three categories, with three different prices: “garden,” where most of the land was covered by fruit trees, at 29,000 yuan per mu, a Chinese unit of measurement equal to roughly one-sixth of an acre; “fruit tree land,” where a portion is covered with fruit trees, at 26,200 yuan per mu; and huangdi, or “wasteland,” earth covered in wild plant life, rocks and grass, at 12,500 yuan per mu.

The meeting went on for more than an hour. The governor did most of the talking, but the crowd did plenty grumbling, muttering among themselves as he talked through what he knew of the proposals. Some villagers flatly refused to sell their acreage. Some expressed disappointment with the prices. Others worried what the future would hold without large portions of their family land.

Wang didn’t say much. He just listened. Conflicted, he agreed with some of what everyone had to say. He admitted that the numbers being bandied about were tempting for a poor villager like him. It was more than he ever thought someone would want to pay for his “wasteland” near Meiqiu. But when he learned that land laden with fruit trees was also to be included in the deal, his mood changed. The fruit reaped from one mu of fruit trees could fetch around ten thousand yuan at market in one year. “Do they think we’re stupid?” he asked. “We can make back the compensation money in two or three years selling fruit.”

The villagers also didn’t agree with the “Red Line,” the literal red line that encircled the entirety of land planned for development on the proposal map. They felt it came too close to their village. They didn’t want to feel surrounded. Wang noticed that some of the land he owned fell right inside the Red Line.

He thought about his children, and their children. These lands had been passed down from generation to generation. Meiqiu people took pride in private land ownership. They felt it set them apart from other parts of rural China, where land is typically owned by a collective. Wang felt a duty to hold on to his family’s land legacy. His initial inclination was to refuse to sell. But as the governor continued, it became clear to Wang and everyone else in the crowd that the decision to sell or not to sell had already been made for them. This deal was going through, whether the villagers liked it or not.

“The situation became very chaotic,” Wang said. “The governor said we had to sell. He said the prices were not negotiable. So why assemble the entire village for a meeting when nothing is open for discussion? He may be one of us, but the village governor is just a mouthpiece for the government.”

The meeting came to an end, but the village remained abuzz. There was too much information to take in. Too much to think about. Too much change, too soon. Lost in all of the chatter was the village governor’s off-handed, and perhaps off-script, remark that the land the villagers were required to sell was to be turned into golf courses – probably because no one in Meiqiu knew what a golf course was. There was also no reason for the villagers to know that Junhao, the company purchasing the land, also had an English name: Mission Hills.

None of the villagers signed off on the land deal, but the government had. And the bulldozers were soon on their way. While talks between Mission Hills and local government authorities had no doubt been ongoing long before that meeting under Meiqiu’s phoenix tree, most agree the “Yangshan District Land Consolidation and Ecological Restoration Project” was officially launched on September 1, 2007. Many villagers assumed the numbers associated with that date explained the project’s code name: Project 791.

*

Ken Chu and Mission Hills were at it again. And this time they were determined to go bigger and bolder than ever before. In July 2007, Chu reached out to a small circle of associates with news of a project so ambitious it far exceeded almost anyone’s wildest dreams. Mission Hills was looking at two sites, both in Hainan, and had plans to build forty-eight courses, three times the number of golf courses that existed in the province at that time. The smaller location, where just twelve of the courses would go, was forty-five miles up the east coast from Sanya, Hainan’s southern resort city. The other plot was to the north, not far from the capital city of Haikou, and it was massive. Ken was intent on building thirty-six courses there – and he wanted construction on all the courses to be simultaneous. The Haikou project was currently on standby, he said, but it might start moving by the autumn. His people were already working on a plan to get 1,500 pieces of heavy machinery to the island. Ken noted that the Hainan government was especially keen to work with Mission Hills, given the company’s reputation and track record for aggressive thinking. The government, he added, was eager to see the world-record-setting project completed in eighteen months.

Thirty-six courses. Eighteen months. When word finally made its way to Martin, the numbers hit him like a tsunami. He was excited – this had all the makings of a historic, not to mention wildly lucrative, project – but he was also cautious. He didn’t want a repeat of Mission Hills Kunming, which had fallen through a little more than a year before and left Martin red-faced, trying to explain to dozens of foreign workers why the big job he had promised them was no more.

“What are my chances of calling these same guys back and telling them now I’ve got thirty-six golf courses I’m going to build?” Martin thought. “They’re going to look at me, and I’m going to be the laughing stock of the world.”

On top of that, the schedule seemed impossible. Martin spent days crunching the numbers, and the fastest timetable he could come up with for the construction was thirty-two months. And even that was working at an unprecedented pace. “We don’t have near this much time,” was the response from Ken Chu.

Ken reminded Martin of the logic that had made the five courses a reality in Shenzhen in 2003. “If someone asked you to build two courses in eighteen months, would you tell them you could do it?” he challenged Martin, who saw where this was going, and said yes. “Okay, well, just treat this like eighteen separate two-course projects,” Ken explained, making it sound simple. Too simple?

Martin started doing the sums in his head. He’d need eighteen project superintendents. He’d have to have four shapers per project. “We’d need sixty-four shapers,” Martin told him.

“Confirmed!” Ken exclaimed.

“Ken, I don’t know if there’s sixty-four shapers in the industry.”

Martin spent the better part of the next two months at his desk in Scottsdale, Arizona, trying to wrangle the army required to meet Ken’s audacious demands. He called everyone he knew in the industry: project managers, superintendents, irrigation specialists and, of course, shapers. He called them all. “If a guy knew how to turn a fucking key and run a bulldozer, bring him on,” Martin joked.

But with each call, Martin made sure to remind everyone that this was China. Building golf courses there was a tricky business. Everything could fall through at any moment. He couldn’t make any guarantees. The new hires would soon realize what he meant.

It was a “huge undertaking” getting all the foreign workers to Hainan, as Martin expected it to be. But he didn’t expect the headaches that continued once everyone had arrived at the job site. He’d usually spend around six days at a time on the site. Two of those days would be consumed by dealing with, as he called it, “the white guys fucking whining,” just like he did in his first days working in Thailand. Most of the crew had never worked in Asia before. And much of their whining had to do with the food brought to them in Styrofoam containers during lunchtime. They sent me soggy French fries today. My salad and my spaghetti got all mixed together.

“I have to get all the expats in one big group and tell them all to shut the fuck up and work,” Martin said. “I said, ‘I got a list of thirty other guys who want this job.’” He tried to explain that the conditions were good, really good, for a Chinese construction site. “I mean, I go down to a different job and they’re fucking eating fish heads. Mission Hills did a very good job.”

In fact, the Chus had a little cinder block village built just for their foreign workers. Cereal was served for breakfast in the morning. There was a karaoke bar, an internet café and a basketball court. “The only negative was that they’d pack six to eight people in one room,” Martin said, remembering the conditions in the employee dormitories, which were pretty typical.

Even though nice hotels in Haikou were on offer, Martin would make a point to stay at the compound with the rest of the employees. Everyone would laugh and ask, “Why do you stay at that shithole?” Martin had his reasons. First, he worked long hours whenever he was on site, usually at least 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., and he had no interest in spending an additional two hours on the road. In the mornings, he could grab breakfast and a coffee and be out on one of the courses in a matter of minutes. In the evenings, it was just plain fun. All his Thai workers were there, and they often barbecued and cooked Thai food and sat outside, drinking beers, smoking cigars and catching up.

But Martin also had another, more business-minded, reason for staying on site. “I wanted to gain respect from other workers. I didn’t want them to think I was a cocky bastard who had to go stay at a five-star hotel. That wasn’t my style.”

He also knew he needed to give some of his new hires a lesson in how things worked in China, and how their new bosses operated. Several of his coveted shapers were trying to dissect their contracts and make changes. “You’re wasting your time,” Martin told them. “What are you going to do? Take them to Chinese court?”