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‌Scrape the Bones, Dry the Glass

Almost every Chinese pro golfer will complain about the low prize money at tournaments, about how it’s difficult to simply break even trying to live from tournament to tournament. But Zhou Xunshu could occasionally step back and take a look at the big picture, and what he saw made him more depressed.

“People say companies, especially Chinese companies, should invest in the game and become sponsors,” Zhou said. “But if they invest, they want to make money, right? Without any audience, who will invest? Sponsors are very practical. Who will give you money for no reason?”

When the Omega China Tour had launched back in 2005, many players, including Zhou, were optimistic that it would finally bring some stability to their lives. That first year there’d been four events and the promise of an extra two tournaments added to the tour each year. And the promise had come true: in 2007 Zhou competed in all eight events, traveling from Nanjing to Qingdao to Guangzhou to Yanji to Shanghai to Kunming to Xiamen, and then to Beijing. The tournaments were first-rate operations, too. The tour organizers even ensured the Chinese media, mostly golf specialty magazines and websites, turned out to cover the tournaments, paying their travel and accommodation costs, and plying them with gift bags once they got there, so they would stay until the last day of play. Only one thing was missing: spectators.

The tour organizers discovered their most successful events enticed fans with prizes – people were more likely to show up if they knew there was a chance they could win a home appliance or a laptop computer. Getting them to actually watch the golf was another issue. To get them to stay, they were coming up with a variety of new schemes. One year, spectators who got their ticket stamped after every three holes would go home with a free hat.

It was almost comical that the China Tour organizers hadn’t approached a cigarette company about becoming a sponsor, since so many of the players smoked during rounds. Some would sneak a drag during holes, while others seemed to keep a cigarette lit the entire round, only handing it off to a caddie when it was time to take a swing. Zhou was not a smoker, although he’d sometimes light one up if he was “depressed” or needed to “clear his head.” If you saw Zhou holding a cigarette during a round, that usually meant things weren’t going well. Perhaps another sponsor would, in fact, be better.

Zhou said he knew golf was still a young game in China, but he couldn’t help but compare the situation to other countries, where the game was more established, and where being a professional golfer wasn’t such an oddity. “When Padraig Harrington won the British Open, the whole country paraded in the streets and took days off to celebrate,” Zhou remembered. “I read a report online, and all Irish people went crazy because of the win. They treated him as a hero. Can you see this happening in China?”

He brought up the success of Korean golfers, men and women, overseas. “In Korea, golf is a game for everybody,” he said. “Everyone plays golf and the country supports the sport. In China, when people talk about golf it is always about corrupt government officials using public money to play. No one talks about how we can get more people interested in playing the game or how we can make golf more affordable. But this is the situation in China, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

He pointed out that the overall prize money per tournament, 800,000 yuan, didn’t change between 2006 to 2007, but the number of players who were expected to split the prize money had increased from fifty to sixty. “And the prize money for first, second, third and fourth remained the same,” Zhou said. “This is what we call scraping the fat from chicken’s feet. How can a chicken foot have any fat? How can you scrape fat from bones?”

He was angry. “In foreign tournaments those who make the cut won’t lose money,” he said. “Here, sixty people make the cut and the last one’s prize money is 3,500 yuan.” About five hundred dollars. “After 20 percent tax, that might be enough to pay for the round-trip flight.”

Zhou concluded, “The CGA does not care how many tournaments there are for us every year. They just care how much money they’ve made.”

Zhou hadn’t practiced all winter. The decorating of their new apartment in Chongqing was still not done, and Liu Yan was still living with her parents. Zhou was at least living in their new place, but the hot water wasn’t working yet, and the water pressure was low, so he’d been taking his showers back at the driving range.

Worse, the China Tour was starting earlier than ever in 2008, in an effort to front-load the schedule before the start of the Beijing Olympic Games, an event so big it was expected to bring much of the country to a grinding halt. The first tournament was just a few weeks away, at Dragon Lake Golf Club in Guangzhou, the very spot where Zhou and Liu Yan had met. Zhou had begun to hit some balls in earnest at his driving range, but he was unable to practice any putting there. “The putting green here is unplayable,” Zhou said. “It’s a mess. No one maintains it. My putting is not very good.”

He still considered Dragon Lake to be his home course, and he wished the season opener was somewhere else. He wanted time to get his form back before he played in front of people who knew him. He also wanted time to get his finances in order.

Zhou’s house was almost empty. He had a bed, a washing machine, kitchen appliances, but nothing more. “I don’t have money for anything else,” Zhou said. “I spent it all. I don’t even have money for the tournaments yet.”

He wasn’t getting much sleep either. Zhou’s entire building reverberated with the sounds of drills and saws. All his neighbors were going through the same process – buying a new place in the city and trying to make it a home. The air was thick with plaster dust. The insides of the elevators were covered in plywood, on which were scribbled names and phone numbers, hundreds of contractors and handymen peddling their trades.

Perhaps it was all the time alone, but Zhou was in a contemplative mood. He said although he hadn’t been able to exercise his body, he’d been thinking a lot about his game. He’d been playing on the tour for two seasons now, and knew what his shortcomings were. Most of them were in his head. “Sometimes I am impatient for success,” Zhou said. “For example, last year in Kunming, that ball in the tree.” Being so close to the lead affected the way he’d approached that hole. He was trying to play conservatively, to play it safe, and that was not his style. “I should have just played without thinking anything. Sometimes golf is just like this. Your mind says one thing. Your body says another.”

Zhou knew he needed to work on managing his temper, to be able to focus on his next shot instead of his last shot. “The littlest thing can affect my mood. Like trying to land a taxi cab, or having to wait for an elevator.”

He thought he must have inherited this trait from his father, who was “always strict” and “has a very bad temper.” Over the years, he’d avoided talking to his father, who he said treated him like a child and too often preached “antiquated ideas,” like doctrines from the days of Mao. “How can people living in the new era still follow those old-fashioned ideas?” Zhou asked, his blood clearly beginning to boil. “For example, right now he will tell you it is not necessary to make lots of money. ‘Just make enough to get by,’ he’ll say. Do you think this mindset will work in this world?”

And if it wasn’t quotations from one book, it was another.

“He believes in Jesus, but why won’t he take medicine or go to the hospital when he is sick?” Zhou continued. “They believe Jesus will bless them and they will recover without taking any medicine or going to hospital. And this is total bullshit! What the hell does he know? He just believes what other people say.”

Zhou rarely went back to Qixin these days. He insisted the reason for his infrequent visits home had been due mostly to the arduous journey it involved. Guangzhou to Guiyang by train was already a twenty-four-hour trip, and then, from Guiyang to Bijie, the closest city to the village, could be as much as another half day. In the 1990s, before National Highway 321 was complete, buses snaked along the treacherous mountain roads and inched across old bridges suspended precariously above deep river gorges. One bridge in particular always made Zhou’s heart stop. “It crossed the Wu River, and was held up by iron chains,” he said. “There were armed policemen standing on each side of the bridge. Only one car could go at a time.” He’d actually prayed for fog sometimes, because he didn’t want to be able to see what was outside his window.

On the handful of rare visits since he’d left Qixin for police school, Zhou always brought his father some clothing or food, but beyond that, their interactions were minimal. “I really am afraid to talk to him because every time I did, he would start to talk about those things,” Zhou said, referring once again to Mao quotations and the Bible. “And once he does that, I just turn around and leave. No other way. It is impossible to communicate with him, and if I try he would get mad. So the only way to solve this problem is to move him in with me and get him out of that environment.”

His mother was “honest and simple,” like all people from the countryside, he said. But he didn’t talk with her often, either. “What is there to talk about? When I go back, we just talk about the current situations, and I ask her about her health. Just like that. There is nothing to talk about.”

Yet he planned to bring his parents to Chongqing after Liu Yan returned with their baby. Zhou didn’t think his parents wanted to move, but that made no difference. “Even if they don’t want to come, I will still bring them by force. I don’t want them to be doing the hard labor at home any more. I want to bring them here, and during the daytime they can just wander around.”

It was winter. Zhou’s father wore a thigh-length black jacket that covered at least four other layers of clothing. His unhemmed suit pants were long and rolled hastily at the bottom, and he wore black loafers without any socks. On his head was a tall, black Soviet-style ushanka hat, perhaps most associated in China with the historical (some might say mythical) figure Lei Feng, a People’s Liberation Army soldier canonized by the government as a model socialist shortly after his untimely death in the early 1960s. Zhou’s father wore this bulky headpiece with the earflaps buttoned up, displaying just a hint of his salt-and-pepper hair. His face was dotted with liver spots – it was clear he’d spent many long days in the elements – but his skin was taut and smooth, the only wrinkles forming around the corners of his eyes. When he smiled, which he did often, he revealed a full set of badly stained teeth.

Zhou may have been the most successful person to come out of Qixin village, but for some, including his father, he was still the member of his family who was supposed to become a police officer and had failed. “Police officer” was a concept Zhou’s family, especially his parents, could understand. It’s a concept they knew their neighbors would understand. Golf was different. It was strange. It was foreign. It was completely new. How can you impress your friends with your son’s job when you don’t understand what he does?

“I just leave him alone and let him mature,” Zhou’s father said by way of explanation. “We are from the countryside, and we spent about four thousand to five thousand yuan for him to study and live at the armed police school in Zunyi. He did not stay in that school for very long – less than half a year – and then he got the job at the golf course.”

The first time Zhou brought golf balls back to the village, it had caused a sensation. “Not only my father, even I felt it was very weird, very strange,” First Brother said. “I never saw these things before. There were so many tiny craters on the ball – I was wondering how to play this game. Other people all thought it was very strange, too.”

Now, Zhou was ranked in the top twenty of golfers in China. Things must have changed by now. “I didn’t know what golf was,” Zhou’s father said. “Today, I do not really understand what it is. I was just happy he found a job.”

Wasn’t the family proud of Zhou’s accomplishments?

“We all know he is playing golf,” First Brother said.

But were they proud of him?

“We are in different places. If he can go to every country in this world, if he can go and travel to every one of them, I will be like this,” First Brother said, pounding his fist on his heart. “Very proud.”

First Brother, born in 1963, was Zhou’s only sibling still living in Qixin. He had not seen Zhou – who the family called Fourth Brother – in more than a year. But like Zhou the professional golfer, First Brother spent much of his time on the road, as a migrant worker. He had once worked in the zinc factories in the mountains for thirty yuan a day, but when a friend told him he could earn twice that outside Guizhou, he jumped at the chance. Since 1999 he had been traveling the country working in tunnel construction as a slurry sprayer, one of the unfortunate souls who sprays concrete onto the rough walls of a freshly drilled tunnel. The tunnels were dark, humid, noisy, poorly ventilated and frequently dangerous. Often, pieces of rock would fall; sometimes tunnels would collapse. Projects could range from 100 to 350 yards long, and a job could last anywhere from one to eight months. First Brother had missed Zhou’s wedding because of a tunnel job in Hubei province.

“The people living in this village are lucky to earn two thousand yuan per year,” First Brother said. “My family – me, my wife and my two sons – at best we’d make thirty thousand yuan per year. And if it is a bad year, we could make nothing at all. If we were not migrant workers, it’s probably hard to even earn five hundred yuan per person per year.” He took a long drag on his cigarette. At the brick factory down in the valley, things were better. “Their average income per person per year is fifty thousand yuan. They are all bosses.”

For his part, Zhou’s father had simple aspirations for his sons. “Every time they call and tell us they do not have any problems, we are very happy,” he said. “Because now there are many disasters out there, and the world is very complicated. We are very worried they might steal things and go to jail. We are worried they might do illegal things. In our family, before they left the village, we taught them not to do bad things, otherwise it would humiliate us, the elders.”

Zhou’s nephew, Xiao Hu, or Little Tiger, emerged from the house. “Let’s go eat,” he said. “We can chat more later.”

Zhou’s mother was hard at work in the kitchen. She looked strong, and her pleasant face was hard to read, an exercise in stoicism and seriousness. Her husband chatted away while she prepared the evening’s meal, picking the stems off of a clutch of wild mushrooms, barely saying a word. For warmth, she wore a charcoal gray men’s suit over her other clothing. Her silver hair was tucked inside a light gray stocking cap emblazoned with the word PING, an American brand of golf equipment.

Little Tiger led the way to the huolu (literally “fire oven”), a coal-burning stove common in the mountainous regions of southwest China, that serves three purposes: space heater, hot plate and dinner table. Atop a single pedestal sat a square metal table top, with a hole in the middle filled with burning coals. The opening was the perfect size for heating a teakettle or a pot of soup. An exhaust pipe attached to one corner of the table sent the fumes – some of them, at least – out the window.

Like the kitchen table in Western culture, the huolu is the heart of the village home. All meals, card games, dramas – and family drinking fests, when First Brother is around – play out around the huolu.

On this day, the huolu’s only job was to hold the dishes that had been prepared for dinner, and it was failing. Today, though Zhou had declined to make the trip – he was too busy, he said – the village was hosting his American friend, its first foreigner, and there was far too much food, despite the fact that food was hard to come by. There is no refrigeration in Qixin village, and after that year’s brutal winter, there was almost no fresh produce, either. When it snows heavily, as it did in the winter of 2008, no vehicles can access Qixin, and the simplest items are a luxury. Villagers must lug heavy bags of rice up the mountain on foot. The cook of the family must get creative with the handful of non-perishable ingredients available. The colorful array of dishes laid out on the huolu belied the forced culinary restrictions of the season. “These are fried potato slices. That is tofu. That is fried wheat gluten. Those are rice noodles. Those are pig’s ears. That is larou. That is also larou. And that one, too.” Preserved pork, three ways.

In a Chinese village, guests have to pace their consumption cannily, because each time a visitor finishes a bowl of food, someone immediately fills it up. “Eat more,” they say. “Eat more pig’s ears!”

Nearly everyone seated around the table remembered when there was barely enough to eat. And Zhou’s parents remembered when people were starving. In today’s relative plenty, it’s important to prove you have enough. “Ni chi fan le ma?” – “Have you eaten?” – is still often used as a greeting. Guizhou was among the provinces hardest hit by China’s great famine, in which anywhere between twenty million and fifty million people died of starvation, the result of Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Some estimates say Guizhou experienced close to one million famine-related deaths – some 5 percent of its total population. Some remote towns and villages saw losses as high as 10 and 20 percent. Widespread reports suggest people resorted to eating tree bark and mud. Evidence suggests many turned to various forms of cannibalism, as well.

Zhou’s father spoke of the hard times matter-of-factly, with little emotion. It was as though he was reciting from a timeline in the back of a book. His wife, as usual, didn’t say a word.

“The tougher times were before 1949 and around 1960,” Zhou’s father said. “Life before 1949 was really hard.”

“That time, every three households could only share one pig!” First Brother interjected.

“China was under Kuomintang control at that time,” Zhou’s father continued. “This area was liberated in 1949, but the land-change policy didn’t come until 1952 and it took another several years after that to have any effect. In 1956 and 1957 we all joined the cooperatives, and from 1956 to 1958 they started the Great Leap Forward – people did not grow crops and focused on steelmaking. Then, in 1959 and 1960 – starting from September 1959 – the supply of the crops became very tight.”

“The whole village shared a certain amount of food,” First Brother added.

“Each production team had one cafeteria,” Zhou’s father went on. “The first two months, the food supply was pretty good, but later on it became worse – just two servings of rice. You could only get a little bit. The rest was things made from corn gruel and wild plants in the mountains, like grass and tree leaves and tree roots. By the second half of 1961 the shared cafeteria was canceled, and you could start to cook on your own. Life got a little bit better. But the 1970s were also pretty bad, a bare living.”

”Just barely enough to eat!” First Brother said.

“Probably not one tenth of what we have today,” Zhou’s father continued. “The farmers’ life started to get better in the 1980s, after the land was distributed to each household. You see, we two people raised two pigs these past two years and sold one for over a thousand yuan!”

“It is all because of Uncle Deng,” First Brother said. “He started the ‘opening-up’ policy and the common people’s life got better. And in recent years, it is even better, since Hu Jintao is in charge. The farmers do not need to hand in crops any more – just grow and eat their own crops. And for kids going to school, you do not need to pay tuition fees. This is the best policy for the common people.”

Sometime between serving six and seven, the faint warble of recorded music could be heard coming from somewhere in the darkness beyond the house. “Ah, the electricity is back. Good,” First Brother said. “You see, it is a tradition for this family on the other side of the village to play music through a loudspeaker so everyone in the village can hear it and know the electricity is back.”

This was not a very old tradition, since Qixin only got electricity in the mid-’90s. “Right now the countryside has the best conditions ever,” First Brother said. “Before, only when celebrating festivals or having friends visiting could we eat meat. Nowadays, we can eat meat any time, every day. Before, drinking beers – no way. Drinking rice wine – no way.”

And that was certainly no longer the case.

“Before we did not know each other, and now we do,” First Brother said, raising his glass of beer in a toast to me, his first foreign guest. “So we are friends. Ganbei!”

This was the first of many toasts First Brother would make that evening. And the toasts continued at breakfast and at lunch. He insisted on drinking alcohol with every meal, saying he could “hardly walk” without sticking to such a regimen. “In Guizhou, good friends just drink together,” First Brother explained. “I do not like other forms of communication. For me, no matter whether at home or outside, if someone is not drinking with me, I cannot get along with him. I like drinking the most.”

First Brother’s toasts got more flowery and dramatic the longer the drinking went on. The intensity of the alcohol increased, as well. He started with beer, a rather forgettable lager from Henan province, purchased at the market at the bottom of the mountain, 180 five-hundred-milliliter (half-quart) bottles at a time. He then graduated to a dubious local moonshine made from corn sold at the market for just three yuan per liquid pound. Finally, First Brother would bring out a bottle he received from his wife’s brother-in-law. It was filled with a pinkish-brown substance and hundreds of tiny flecks. It was called yaojiu, or “medicine alcohol,” and First Brother claimed it contained twenty-five different medicinal herbs that could cure problems with your “lung, liver, kidney, spleen and bones.”

He never sipped. It was always ganbei, “dry the glass.”

“From our grandparents’ generation until our next generation, it is impossible to have the chance to have a foreigner come to visit us,” he toasted.

Ganbei!

“In our hometown, this is probably a chance every thousand years that you come to our home. We are very happy. So drink more. This is our Guizhou people’s custom. You are our friend coming from far away.”

Ganbei!

“Our place, although in the mountains of poor Guizhou province, has beautiful views in the spring. Cheers. Three cups, good friend. Three cups for my good friend from far away.”

Ganbei!

“Today, you came to visit our home and I am very excited. This is something not even money can buy.”

Ganbei!

“Gan three cups. You are my best friend. You are the best friend in my heart.”

Ganbei!

“In my heart, you are my best, best friend.”

Ganbei!

“You are my best friend, and it is not easy for you to come all the way here to be friends with us.”

Ganbei!

“Okay, my friend. Finish this corn wine and I promise I won’t give you any more.”

Ganbei!

Zhou’s father would drink a glass or two of beer with meals, but showed little interest in keeping up with his first-born son.

Zhou Xunshu’s childhood bedroom was being used as a storage shed. Initially, it had been the old tangwu – or south-facing, central room – of the original brick structure on the property, and Zhou had shared the room with all five of his siblings; he’d shared a bed with at least one, often two, of his brothers, as well. It had a dusty concrete floor and a rustic wood-and-bamboo ceiling strengthened by two simple floor-to-ceiling posts, bare logs worn smooth. Two of its walls were built with brick, the other two with mud partially covered by newspaper, the dates on which provide the only evidence it existed not in the nineteenth century, but in the twenty-first.

The room was now home to corn, potatoes, fertilizer and coal, although there was little evidence of any of those items at this point of the year, late winter. Up against a brick wall were some mismatched end tables that looked like they once served as a crude kitchen. Two iron woks lay askew on the floor in front of a shadowy corner of the room piled high with wicker baskets and a hand-powered wooden grain thresher, still used today, that looked like it belonged in a museum.

Zhou’s parents slept in a cave-like room that had once been the ox pen. Behind the current tangwu, it had been their bedroom for more than twenty years. “We always liked this room,” Zhou’s father explained. “And after the children moved out, we just started to live here. It’s quiet and cool.” The single tungsten light bulb dangling from the ceiling illuminated the room’s hand-laid, irregular stone walls. An unfinished twin-sized wooden bed frame was topped with an area rug instead of a mattress. The rest was clutter – old fruit boxes, and plastic bags full of clothing and other personal items. More clothing was strewn over a wooden branch suspended from the ceiling by two pieces of rope. Plastic tubs stored lard and cornmeal. Large sections of smoked pig carcass hung from the top of one wall like crown molding. A bowl of homemade white tofu rested at the foot of the bed.

In fact, food was on display in every room of the house. Cured pig parts swayed from nearly every ceiling, and almost every room contained a large vat of ground corn, clusters of dried chili peppers and sacks of garlic bulbs. There was no artwork or photographs adorning the walls. Instead, there were constant reminders no one was starving these days.

First Brother and his wife made their home in a newer cinderblock structure attached to the old house. There was a door in the back of one of the rooms that opened onto nothing – no steps, just a drop-off to the forest and fields below. The door’s primary purpose, it appeared, was trash receptacle. Family members regularly opened the door and tossed their waste into the darkness.

“People just throw garbage to a certain place,” Little Tiger explained. “We throw ours in back of our house. No one comes to get it. The garbage will just rot.”

What about plastic?

“For plastic bottles, there will be people who collect them to sell.”

What about plastic bags?

“They will be buried in the dirt and rot.”

This was the countryside. “It’s not like in the city where there are people to sweep that garbage away,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do.”

Qixin in the winter is absent of color. The ground is brown, the sky is gray, the trees are bare and the houses are covered in dust. The only splashes of color come from the villagers’ clothing, but even that is muted – it’s hard to keep anything clean here for long. When Zhou was a child, he used to bathe in a nearby river. That river had since run dry. Now, the villagers washed themselves in large basins at home. First Brother said most people bathed about once every ten days.

But the village was bustling with activity. Walk through the village and you’d see schoolgirls braiding palm leaves for binding dried grass; women washing clothes by hand; a little boy walking on stilts someone fashioned from branches of a tree; a small old man, hunched over, inching up the trail with a load of dried corn stalks ten times his size strapped to his back. Chickens, dogs and geese roamed freely. And every ten minutes or so, a villager walked by with his or her back weighed down by a tall, funnel-shaped wicker basket filled with a heavy load of coal, fertilizer or corn lugged three miles from the bottom of the mountain. Children carried some of the baskets.

This work was what Zhou blamed for his aching back.

On the China Tour, Zhou occasionally popped a painkiller or two before rounds. Back in Chongqing, he saw a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner regularly for rigorous massage treatments. Some blamed the unorthodox swing Zhou employed during his formative golf years for his back problems. But Zhou blamed his village.

In his hotel room one evening, while talking to a fellow golfer he worked with back at Guangzhou International, Zhou had recalled emotionally the hardships of his youth. He stood up and acted out the words coming from his mouth, a sad game of charades where every answer was the word ku – “bitter.” He talked about malnutrition not allowing his bones to form properly. And he talked about his mid-teens, when he was the one carrying heavy loads of coal, fertilizer and corn on his back up and down the mountain.

“But that is why your legs are so strong and powerful,” the other golfer said. Indeed, Zhou’s calves were hulking, and he had the thick thighs of an NFL running back. But it was his back that Zhou wanted to talk about. If it wasn’t the burdensome loads he carried upon it that did the damage, surely it was the unwieldy cement poles he had helped to haul and install when Qixin first got electricity.

Zhou’s years in the village haunted him. But he seemed to enjoy letting people know how much of a struggle his early years had been, perhaps so they’d realize just how far he’d come. His aching back would often lead to a more general tale of rural Guizhou in the 1970s, of people not having enough to eat (“If a family ate rice twice a week you thought they were rich”), or of nearly tumbling to his death down a cliffside while cutting grass with a sickle (because he was overworked and tired). In Qixin they had only one month of rest per year – the remainder was hard labor.

Zhou also wasn’t shy about saying who he blamed for this life, and it wasn’t his parents. “If Mao would have lived ten more years, China would have gone backward ten more years,” he always said, emphatically.

Little Tiger’s brother, Xiao Long, or Little Dragon, walked past the old tobacco smokehouse, past the terraced fields that would first produce potatoes and then corn, past a tall evergreen tree the family used for pine oil. His father had planted it two decades ago. “Down the hill, there is a big walnut tree,” Little Dragon said. “It’s so big it takes seven or eight people holding hands to circle its trunk.” He was going to a landing overlooking the valley, which was still partially obscured by fog. The terrain was dry and brittle: tall yellow grass, white rocks, naked trees. As a child, Zhou would take the family oxen to graze on this spot. This was where he once played the golf-like game with a wad of paper and a long-handled sickle.

On this day, four village boys were taking part in a much more primitive pastime. One would hold a lighter to the land until something caught fire. They’d wait a few moments for orange flames to appear. And when the blaze got to about knee high, they attacked, pounding the fire with tree branches until all that was left was a patch of black grass and smoke in the air. This activity kept them occupied for quite some time.

The boys, who ranged in age from seven to eleven, looked like a gang of Chinese Huckleberry Finns, “fluttering with rags,” long blades of grass held between their teeth. They all recognized the name of the village’s famous son – Zhou Xunshu – but none of them had heard of golf. Nor had they heard of soccer, basketball, Yao Ming or the Olympics. The only sport they really knew was the calisthenics they performed at school each morning.

So, what do you want to do when you are older?

The boy who appeared to be the leader of the little group thought for a moment, and then, straight-faced, recited the Mao-era slogan, “Wei renmin fuwu” – “Serve the people.”

The other boys were uninterested and started playing leapfrog in the meadow.

What did they want to do in the future?

They didn’t stop their game to answer, “Learn jumping from the frog!” They all laughed.

At home, First Brother was preparing a chicken for slaughter. This was a special gesture, to honor the visiting American guest. Normally, the family would only kill a chicken for Spring Festival. Meat was even more of a luxury when Zhou was growing up. If the family did not slaughter a pig for the new year, there would be no meat until the next year. Mostly, Zhou’s family lived on vegetables, cornmeal and rice – which was also a scarce commodity in the village. Families traded two pounds of corn for one pound of rice. And while Zhou’s family raised chickens that laid eggs, they rarely ate either, because they needed to barter the eggs for salt. No family would kill a chicken for meat, because no chickens meant no salt. Only when chickens could no longer lay eggs, would they be killed and eaten.

A cigarette heavy with ash dangling from his mouth, First Brother held open the beak of the chicken while his wife poured a clear liquid into its mouth from a white bowl.

“Rice wine,” he explained. “That will make the chicken taste better.”

Over dinner, with the family crowded around the huolu, it was time to turn to the subject of Zhou.

“Yes, I miss him,” Zhou’s father said. “All of these clothes I am wearing were bought by Zhou Xunshu and Liu Yan.” But it was true Zhou Xunshu was the son to visit home the least. “He rarely comes back.”

“When he comes back, he still helps the family doing some work. Like plow the field,” said First Brother.

“Not in the past several years,” First Brother’s wife mumbled as she placed some dishes on the table.

“He can also still use the bamboo to make some baskets,” First Brother added, as compensation.

And Zhou was well liked. “Every time he comes back, people will ask him to play cards or do farm work with them,” First Brother said. “Also, drinking and chatting. But he can’t drink too much and he does not gamble.”

By the reckoning of his family, what made Fourth Brother the most successful person to come from the village, was that he had a “real profession.” That was something.

“For us, going out to work, we may have a job, but not a real career,” said Little Tiger.

First Brother agreed with his son. “And my Fourth Brother is not working for money, he is pursuing something he wants. If he was only working for money, he’d already have millions by now.”

First Brother was among the family members who hadn’t made the journey to attend Zhou and Liu Yan’s wedding in November. Second Brother, too, was absent, as was their little-discussed sister, who had married a man from the northeast and moved there. And what of Zhou’s parents? First Brother said that they were “too old, and it was too far” for them to make the journey for the wedding, though they had wanted to. “It’s because of my leg,” Zhou’s father explained. “I suffer from hyperostosis and rheumatism.” He said he planned to visit the young couple in April or May. “When it gets warmer, my leg will feel better.”

Of course, Zhou hoped the visit to Chongqing might persuade his parents to leave the hard life in Qixin. “Zhou Xunshu has called me before and asked us to go to Chongqing,” his father acknowledged. “But we can’t go. If we were young, we could go.

“Living here now, the conditions, I can’t say they are good – just normal,” he went on. “Before, my sons tried to help me improve my living conditions, but I did not let them. I just tried to lighten their burden. That is what I am thinking. They asked me if I needed any money, and I just told them you just live your life, take care of yourself.”

He was afraid that life in Chongqing would be too new, too strange. “But I am not thinking about this now. We will visit when the weather is warmer and Zhou Xunshu’s personal and financial situations are more stable. I’ll wait and see after I stay there for a while.”

Zhou’s father wanted to make it clear he wasn’t a stranger to the city. He had been to Chongqing once before. In the late 1960s, he was in Chongqing for ten minutes. He spent the time changing cars on his way to “learn from Dazhai,” in Shiyang county, Shanxi province, 1,200 miles northeast of Qixin.

For the generation that came of age after the Great Leap Forward, Shiyang county had become a holy land of sorts. It was home to the fabled Dazhai Production Team, which Chairman Mao held up to the nation as a model farming community, built on hard work, self-reliance and a passion for proletarian politics. Like Qixin, Dazhai was desperately poor and situated in a steep mountain valley prone to drought and soil erosion; China’s Loess Plateau, on which Dazhai sits, has many of the same traits as the “Dust Bowl” of the American Midwest. But by the mid-1960s, thanks largely to the backbreaking efforts of its residents, the eighty-family commune at Dazhai had transformed itself into a production phenomenon. The people of Dazhai, with their famously callused hands, literally moved mountains. They carved hillsides into terraces, built dams and reservoirs and erected aqueducts that carried water for miles. Their grain yields were astounding.

“In agriculture, learn from Dazhai!” Mao proclaimed in 1964. The slogan became a common sight in rural China, plastered across walls and riverbanks. There were others, too: “Move hills, fill gullies and create plains!” “Destroy forests, open wastelands!” “Change the sky, alter the land!” The propaganda campaign sparked a pilgrimage. Village leaders from across the country trekked to Dazhai by the thousands to study its ways. Some estimates say Dazhai saw fifteen million guests between 1964 and the late ’70s.

In the 1980s, a government campaign (some called it a smear campaign) discredited the Dazhai way, as Deng Xiaoping moved to privatize farm production. State media ran stories saying Dazhai had falsified harvest reports and was less than self-reliant, receiving outside labor from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Some of the reports claimed the PLA had brought in heavy machinery to move the earth. Later, environmentalists suggested some of Dazhai’s techniques actually exacerbated the region’s problems with soil erosion.

Still, traveling across the country to Dazhai was a proud moment for Zhou’s father, who was one of very few villagers at the time to venture beyond the mountains of Guizhou. “From Shanxi, I went to Shijiazhuang and bought a train ticket for six yuan to go to Beijing,” he recalled. “We stayed in Beijing for three days and four nights. Then from Beijing to Wuhan, then back to Guizhou. We also went by Hunan and other places: Guiyang, Zunyi, Chongqing, Chengdu – I was in Chengdu for three days – Baotou, Zhengzhou. I cannot remember all of them now. Now, the route is much better than at that time. When we were in Beijing, we visited the Forbidden City. It was December 1969. I was gone for twenty-eight days.”

Back then, Zhou’s father was the leading cadre of a production brigade that oversaw six production teams. In modern terms, he was the village leader. And when he returned from his travels, his teams began the arduous – and dangerous – task of carving up the mountainside just as the villagers of Dazhai had done.

“It was very hard,” Zhou’s father said. “All we used were explosives, sledgehammers and spades. We carried all of the stone with our bare hands.”

Zhou’s father stepped down as village leader in the early ’70s after some villagers suggested he was unfit for the job. He didn’t put up a fight. The salary was low – around fifty kilos of crops and 180 yuan (around 1,000 yuan by today’s standards, he said) per year – and there were too many mouths to feed at home. Zhou had just been born and Fifth Brother was on the way. Zhou’s father figured he’d be of more use working in the family fields anyway.

This was not the expected trajectory for a man who once seemed set to become a city-level government official in Bijie. In his mid-twenties, Zhou’s father sold cloth at the city’s Supply and Marketing Cooperative. It wasn’t a glamorous role by any measure, but it was a steady job with a government agency, and he felt lucky to have it. Back in the village, however, things were far from stable. Zhou’s father’s father was prone to fighting. They were the only Zhous living in a village full of Zhes and that added to the bullying. It didn’t help that Zhou’s grandfather had a temper and often drank too much corn wine.

Tired of making trips to the hospital and worried about his father’s well-being, Zhou’s father left his job at the cooperative abruptly and headed back to the village to look after his dad. By failing to go through his employer’s proper exit procedures, Zhou’s father forfeited his right to a government pension. Years later, after the Cultural Revolution, Zhou’s father returned to the Supply and Marketing Cooperative and asked to be rehabilitated, but he was denied – they said they had no record he ever worked there.

“If I didn’t quit the job I probably would have become some big official, too,” Zhou’s father said. “The people I worked with in the Supply and Marketing Cooperative, who are not as capable as I was, all became some kind of leader later on.”

This was one of the many chips weighing down the collective shoulder of Zhou’s family, and Zhou’s own ambitions in Qixin and beyond. “If he didn’t quit that job, we would be much better off now,” Zhou said later. “And we probably would’ve already left that place, the village. According to my dad’s level at the time, he would have been promoted to a position in the city. It was just a bad decision made at the spur of the moment.”

His father’s stories from the old days had gone on too long. First Brother tried to shift the conversation around the huolu.

“Eat more,” he insisted. “This is our local chicken.”

“It didn’t even lay eggs yet!” added Zhou’s father, as a boast.

Zhou’s family had answered so many questions about their history. And Zhou hadn’t explained to his family why such questions were being asked of them by their American guest.

“No, Zhou Xunshu did not tell us why you were visiting the village. I never thought about it,” First Brother said, raising his glass of beer in a toast. “Ganbei!”

“It was my fifth uncle who called and said someone is coming to visit, but he did not say who,” Little Tiger said. “He called my uncle in Bijie and my uncle in Bijie called the village.”

“We are friends now. I do not care if my youngest brother called or not,” First Brother said. “As long as you are my friend I will treat you the same way. We welcome friends, no matter whether from China or abroad.”

Later that year, on the Shanghai leg of the China Tour, Zhou was acting the way any proud father would, displaying photos of his newborn son on his mobile phone to anyone within eyeshot. Zhou’s pride was genuine, but the photos also gave him an excuse to talk about something other than the awful round of golf he had just played.

“The doctor said he is taller than the average baby his age,” Zhou said, beaming. “If he can grow to be 1.9 meters tall [six foot three], I’ll let him play basketball.”

But if the child wanted to play golf like his father, Zhou said he’d send his son somewhere else, some place other than China. “I won’t let him be like the current domestic players,” Zhou said. “If I have the financial ability, I will have him study golf in America.” He figured he’d need to save around five million yuan to be able to afford that.

These were lofty goals for a man who just shot an 80 and was in a seven-way tie for seventy-fourth place in the Shanghai championship. It was mid-May, and Zhou’s mind seemed to be off in Hunan province, where he had recently left his wife and baby boy. Or perhaps, like so many others, he was distracted by the devastating news of an 8.0-magnitude earthquake that had struck Sichuan province just three days before the tournament’s opening round. Or it could have just been the wind. Whatever the cause, it was not the kind of effort Zhou had come to expect.

Despite starting the season feeling ill-prepared and unfit, 2008 was shaping up to be Zhou’s best year on tour. He had placed sixth, the top performance of his career, at Dragon Lake, and followed this with an eighth-place effort in Xiamen. Two weeks later, he placed twenty-second in Kunming. He was three events into the year and ranked ninth on the China Tour’s money list. It seemed this could be the year Zhou finally earned his pro player credentials.

These days, there was a new Chinese star Zhou could look to for inspiration. The hero of the previous year had been Liang Wenchong. He was the son of a peasant farmer, just like Zhou, had won the Asian Tour’s Order of Merit, and had been the first Chinese golfer to crack the top one hundred in the world golf rankings. The only reason Liang, six years younger than Zhou, started playing golf was because he happened to grow up near modern China’s first course, Zhongshan Hot Spring Golf Club. Liang was fifteen when the golf club, then not a decade old, decided it wanted to start a golf team. Club officials visited local schools, Liang’s included, and asked curious students, most of whom had never heard of the game before, to line up and swing a golf club. Those who showed promise were offered a spot. Liang was one of the lucky ones, and he accepted. Playing golf, he thought, must be better than helping his father in the peanut fields. Many of Liang’s teammates, unable to handle the club’s strict training regimen, quit. But Liang persevered, turning pro just six years after his first swing. Players like Liang, and Zhang Lianwei before him, gave Zhou hope. A humble boy could make it, not just in China, but beyond its borders, as well.

Zhou, too, was beginning to catch people’s attention. The media, both local and international, were taking an interest in his story, and on the Guangzhou leg he had signed his first sponsorship. There was no money involved, but Titleist and FootJoy agreed to outfit him with shoes, gloves, hats, balls and clubs free of charge. It was a big shift in his fortunes. Then, a golf course in Chongqing had made noises that they might be interested in sponsoring him on the tour, paying his travel expenses for as many as ten events per year.

“All the groundwork for life and work are finally starting to pay off,” Zhou said. “Before I was married, I wanted to find a wife. This was one goal. After getting married, I wanted to buy a house. After buying a house, I wanted to build a perfect family. So we had to have a baby. We planned it, and had a baby this year. Once I had a child, suddenly the pressure was much greater. I’m no longer doing it just for my own happiness. I’m doing it for my family.” He told the reporters asking for interviews that his mental game had got stronger after he got married, which meant he had to be more responsible, more mature. He said becoming a father had made him more confident.

But Zhou still wasn’t satisfied. “Of course things are better than before, but my ideal life is not like this,” he said. “Now that I have a house, I also want a car and some savings.” He also wanted to win a tournament or, at the very least, finish in the top three. He wanted more sponsors. He wanted to give up teaching and just focus on playing. But he knew he’d have to shoot much better than an 80 if he wanted to accomplish any of that.

The evening after his poor opening round performance at Shanghai, Zhou lay on his hotel bed watching news reports from the earthquake recovery efforts in Sichuan. He shook his head and sighed. “Every night I watch these reports and cry,” Zhou said. “Too sad! But I don’t want to donate to any of those official relief organizations. I’d rather give money, even two thousand yuan, if I could directly give the money to the people.”

He decided he needed to go out.

“I never thought I would be in such terrible form today,” he confessed at a restaurant across the street from his hotel. He wanted to get something to eat, and drink some beers, so he could relax. He was drinking with more vigor than usual.

He explained that his son’s name, Hanhan, was chosen because, according to his birthdate, he was lacking in two of the five elements from wu xing, the traditional Chinese philosophy used to explain the cosmos: metal (associated with ambition and determination) and wood (associated with flexibility and growth). He had consulted with a university professor, the father of one of his golf students, to help come up with the appropriate name.

“My wife said my son has a big temper like me,” Zhou said. “He cries really loud.”

The dishes on the table were empty. So too were the beers. But Zhou didn’t seem interested in calling it a night. On his way out, he spotted a table full of fellow golfers and decided to pull up a chair. Based on the number of bottles sitting before them, they too had had a rough day on the course. More beers were ordered. Some huangjiu, a local alcohol, too. And cigarettes were passed out like so many toothpicks.

Zhou began to get tipsy, and talkative. “I miss my son,” he announced to everyone. “I’ve only spent several days with him so far. The first two days I went back, I couldn’t even sleep. I kept getting up to check on him. Too excited!”

More beers were ordered, and the men drank to Zhou’s son. Ganbei! But soon the festivities came to a close – it was the first day of the tournament, after all. Zhou, however, now more than tipsy, did not follow the others back to the hotel.

“Let’s get a massage!” he barked. “My neck is sore.” It was late, and he was drunk, but Zhou called his wife as he lightly stumbled to the massage parlor.

“I am very annoyed… I played golf for so long, and I’ve never had no birdies at all in a round. Never happened… I just felt very annoyed out there,” he told Liu Yan.

“There was a film crew following me these past two days. And this morning a golf magazine shot photos of me. I don’t know if these things affected me – I was just very annoyed. The photo shoot took an hour. I drank a lot tonight…”

He stopped for a moment, then started up again.

“I called you because I wanted to talk to you. I don’t need you to tell me what to do. I want you to trust me, and believe in me. I can play well… I am in very good form, and I still played like this… I am so annoyed. Fuck… I have been competing for such a long time and today I was annoyed more than ever… I am so annoyed. I do not care what you think…”

Another pause, and then he decided to end the call.

“You treat our son better than you treat me… Just take good care of my son. I shouldn’t have called you tonight.”

Zhou had been to this massage parlor once before, earlier in the week. Then, the masseuse inspected his rough hands. She seemed concerned.

“What are those bumps?” she asked.

“Calluses,” he said. “I’m a construction worker.”

The girl said, “Ah, no wonder.” She added that it also explained why Zhou was so tanned. She told Zhou that the earthquake in Sichuan could be good for people in his line of work – they’re going to need people to help rebuild.

Zhou explained why he hadn’t just told the girl the truth. “If I tell them I am a golfer, they will judge me,” he said. “They are going to say, ‘Oh, you play golf, that is a rich people’s sport.’ It makes me angry hearing that. What rich people’s sport? For rich people that is just entertainment. For us it is a job.”

He would not be exposed as a golfer this time, either. The moment he hit the massage chair, he was asleep. His snoring was so loud it drowned out the TV.

An hour went by. Zhou’s name was yelled repeatedly in an attempt to wake him, but he couldn’t be stirred. A second hour of massage followed, after which Zhou’s phone was called repeatedly in hopes the familiar noise might finally rouse the slumbering giant – whose second round tee time was just eight hours away.

First one eye opened, and then the other. Zhou groggily took in his surroundings. Helped to his feet, he slurred, “Am I like John Daly?”

There’s a statistic in golf called the “bounce back.” Normally, it measures a golfer’s ability to score a birdie or better on holes that immediately follow a bogey or worse. But perhaps there should be another gauge for how well a golfer can bounce back from a bender the night before. Zhou would have scored well in that regard. So much so that Michael Dickie had no idea that anything might be amiss.

Dickie, a Scot based in Shanghai, was the head instructor at the city’s David Leadbetter Golf Academy at the time (later he would be named coach to the Chinese women’s national team). He’d never met Zhou before, but agreed to follow him around the course that Friday, and he largely liked what he saw: an aggressive, modern-looking golf swing and a lot of brute force. Sure, maybe his swing was too short, maybe he stood too low, but he agreed with Jim Johnson, who had assessed Zhou on the China Tour in 2007: the tools were there. “I’m really impressed with his swing,” Dickie said. “He’s just pure muscle, isn’t he?”

Sure, Dickie had his criticisms, too. Zhou’s putting and course management skills needed work, as did his distance control. And at times Zhou appeared rushed, unfocused. But none of these faults seemed too surprising for a man who taught himself how to play and who had never had a coach.

As the round wore on, however, and Dickie witnessed how Zhou handled adversity – usually, with a long string of expletives – the instructor’s observations grew more perceptive, more personal.

“What’s going on in his life?” Dickie asked after one of Zhou’s eruptions. “Is there something missing? He doesn’t look at peace with himself. All that swearing and the attitude. Not necessarily a chip on his shoulder, but maybe something to do with his upbringing – a sense of inferiority, perhaps. Usually, when everything around a golfer’s life is calm, when they start feeling good on the inside, that is when they start playing well.”

Dickie’s assessment: “He needs to get some Zen about himself.”

Zhou didn’t find any Zen that weekend in Shanghai. Although he made the cut with an even-par 72 on Friday, he finished the tournament tied for fifty-first, after rounds of 77 and 78 on Saturday and Sunday. It was one of the worst China Tour finishes of his career.

Unfortunately, he didn’t find Zen anywhere else, either. Over the rest of the season Zhou placed in the top twenty just once, and finished the 2008 China Tour ranked sixteenth on the Order of Merit. He’d earned 86,525 yuan in before-tax prize money. It was the best total from his four years on tour, but it still didn’t cover his travel expenses.