My Father, the Slingshot Master

For my father, the slingshot seems to offer a moment of creative flight, a brief escape. It isn’t the solution, but it keeps everything balanced.

“别瞎忙活了！快过来看！”

Stop whatever you’re doing and come watch me!, my almost-sixty-year-old dad often shouts at me, especially when he’s drunk. He’ll be carrying two or three of his favorite slingshots, and always the one nicknamed “Little Monster,” which he dotes on because of its slick metallic surface and outstanding performance. He’ll drag me over, set up a tiny coin-sized target on our balcony, and shoot mud pellets from the dining room, about fifteen feet away.

Swoosh. Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh.

“看见没？现在是连中四发了吧。” See? It’s four in a row now, he’ll say, flaunting his skill and seeking my acknowledgement.

Load, aim, pull, swoosh, pop, load. Slingshots teach the fundamentals of good marksmanship. The modern slingshot came from humble beginnings, starting out as a simple wooden fork cut from the branch of a tree, a “do-it-yourself item” associated with juvenile troublemakers.

To shoot it, you grasp the handle with three fingers, bracing the thumb and forefinger up and around the forks. You center the pellet and hold it at a side angle of forty-five degrees. You stretch with your thumb opposite the ear and release. Ah, you missed! Aiming a slingshot is perhaps more based in feeling than technique.

For the past five years, my dad has followed this same routine in his off-hours. He sits on our second-floor balcony and aims with his slingshot for the evergreen camphor leaves far above him. He logs two hundred shots per day, sometimes more—hence all the calluses on his right index finger. His method is still evolving, as he is constantly experimenting with different shooting techniques, ammunition types, rhythms, and materials. Because of his expertise in both slingshot and networking skills, he’s become the 师傅, shi fu (master), of a cadre of slingshot apprentices. Some are his business clients; some have become his best friends.

I remember my mind drifting off whenever he spoke to me excitedly about his slingshots. I remember my mom scolding him for getting the floor dirty with his shattered mud pellets. We wondered for a long time: What was all of this for?

My dad’s passion for slingshot goes all the way back to his childhood. Born to a poor family in a rural village in Henan, my dad migrated to a military compound in Guangzhou with his family when he was seven. He turned fourteen by the end of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. By his own account, he was 孩子王 (“king of children”) and fought with other kids almost every day.

It was then that he, along with other kids, started playing with self-made slingshots, fabricated with tree branches and rubber bands made out of gloves or tubes from a nearby hospital. They shot stones at glass bottles, sparrows, streetlamps, and neighbors’ windows, treating slingshot like a common rite of boyhood. These self-made slingshots not only fostered many lifelong friendships, but also provided these young children with a sense of agency in the rapidly changing world.

Like many of his peers, my dad didn’t finish high school. He found work as a janitor, and then as a fumbling seventeen-year-old apprentice to an electrician, who spent half a year teaching him the art of putting a nail at the exact right angle—straight—into a wall. In 1985, at the age of twenty-one, my dad secured a job as a unit manager through my grandpa, who worked as an official for the Chinese Communist Party. It was a state-owned construction company that offered its employees 铁饭, or “iron rice bowl”—a guaranteed lifetime job with steady income and all kinds of benefits. My dad was given a 600-square-foot apartment, which later became my first home.

As young adults, my dad’s generation experienced the first two stages of China’s transition from planned to market economy, also officially known as 改革开放, gai ge kai fang, or reform and opening-up. One of the most important policies of this gradual, and at times painful, transition from 1979 to 2001 was 转制, zhuan zhi, or the privatization—and, in most cases, the dissolution—of small state-owned enterprises. These, according to economist János Kornai’s theory of “soft budget constraint,” were at the root of the labor- and financial-sector problems, since the government kept bailing out financially troubled and irresponsible firms.

This included the construction company where my dad worked, which went bankrupt in 2002. Like so many of the 75 million small state-owned-enterprise workers in China, he was made to 下岗, xia gang, meaning he was laid off indefinitely due to state policy. Newly jobless, my dad—despite being a shy young man—decided to dive into the 商海, “the sea of trade,” and start his own catering company in Guangzhou.

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In recent years, my dad has used slingshot in the same way many American businessmen use golf—as a tool for networking. By showing off his shooting skills in front of clients—many of whom eagerly want lessons—my dad has made vital professional connections. At these meetings, he’d aim his slingshot at seemingly impossible targets, like the cap of an extravagant Maotai bottle or the tip of a burning Zhonghua cigarette. The clients, most of them government officials, would cheer and applaud. His performance livened up the atmosphere and paved the way for smooth negotiation.

But this was not always the case. There is a reason why, in Mandarin, business is compared to the turbulent sea. In China, drinking is integral to business networking. People toast eloquently and then pour down burning baijiu, often 80- to 100-proof, in order to respect the social hierarchy and negotiate deals with those in power.

During the first decade of his catering business, my dad came home most nights drunk. It was all business dinners followed by karaoke bars, night clubs, or massage parlors. When he returned, anywhere between 10 p.m. and dawn, he would yell nasty curses at my mom and sometimes break into tears. They would argue and throw things. He would take long breaks in the middle of his sentences, as if struggling to find direction, before eventually giving in to the dizziness and collapsing into bed, or sometimes onto the floor.

My dad has used slingshot in the same way many American businessmen use golf—as a tool for networking.

My father was following the rules of guanxi, where gift-giving is seen as the primary way to develop relationships. But guanxi can sometimes become a cover for crony capitalism, Chinese-style—namely, a private entrepreneur bribing government officials to gain economic benefits. After the former Party chairman Deng Xiaoping’s famous declaration of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” in 1984, China gradually incorporated capitalism into central planning, creating a hybrid “socialist market economy.” Corruption and growth went hand in hand. The state’s influence in decision-making and its control of resources pushed private businesses to make deals with state enterprises and local officials. It resulted in serious problems like illegal land seizures by local authorities who conspired with private developers, and the official “looting” of public assets for enormous personal gain.

Under this Chinese version of crony capitalism, people without wealth and connections were pushed out of competition. The abuse of power—both petty and sinister—permeated the fabric of everyday life. In order to seek opportunities or even maintain a livelihood, individuals in China often had to bend to those with more power, resort to illicit transactions, and thus adapt to the corrupt system. This process of social adaptation is a traumatic experience in and of itself.

I remember myself, as a kid, arguing with my parents and even their clients about how unethical it all was. I told my middle school classmates that I would never accept bribes if I held some kind of official power in the future. But I hadn’t realized I was already part of the system. Why was I able to live in a decent apartment, own an iPhone, study abroad, and think about what I loved to do instead of what I had to do? Not least because my dad entertained clients and slid thick red envelopes into their pockets.

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Before I discovered my dad’s relationship with slingshot, I saw him first and foremost not as a father but as a businessman. My memories of him were defined by both him cajoling clients in Chinese business dinners and him collapsing into weary silence at home during the day, shrinking inside his signature blue robe.

My mom and I used to deliberate about what we felt his virtues were, which were always tied to work. He was good at creating a great atmosphere for business dinner. He was good at drinking. He was good at complimenting people (an excellent ass-kisser). He was good at getting close to strangers (if he wanted to). He was good at giving the right gifts to the right people at the right time (we call it 天时地利人和, tian shi di li ren he). But who was my dad besides a businessman? I couldn’t figure it out.

My dad, whose worldview aligns with so many of his generation, reminds me of a passage from 《灵之舞》 (The Dance of Spirit, 2009) written by the influential Chinese philosopher 邓晓芒 (Deng Xiaomang). Deng uses the metaphor of a daffodil bulb to characterize human life and writes:

人似乎一直都在‘准备生活’，为将来的‘正式的’生活‘打基础’，到了老年，又为下一代人的生活打基础，却从来没有自己好好地生活过，他总是来不及体验生活。在这种繁忙与奔波中，人漫不经心地将自己生命的鳞片逐一丢弃、失落，直到将生命本身也整个地失落。

People seem to constantly be “preparing for a life,” or “laying the foundation for” some kind of an “official life” in the future. But when they get old, they start preparing for the lives of the next generation without ever getting to live and experience their own lives. Amid the hustle and bustle, people inadvertently lose the outer scales of life one by one, until eventually they lose life itself.

Sometimes I look at my dad and wonder, am I the daffodil, growing from the bulb that is shedding its scales and dying?

My dad is fifty-seven now. He still wears the blue robe while smoking nonstop on the balcony. He still watches those theatrical WWII Chinese dramas on TV or stares at his phone most of the time. He still goes out to business dinners and gets drunk. But he also has begun to value and cultivate his personal space, preparing himself for a retirement that may radically transform his life at any time. He goes sea fishing more frequently now, embracing all kinds of uncertainties while drifting on a little boat amid the vast ocean. He hangs out with several friends who have no connection to his business. He is an avid knife collector. He has fallen in love, again, with slingshot.

And after a few years of practicing with the $200 “Little Monster” made of high-end titanium, he has recently adapted himself to a new favorite: a three-dollar black plastic slingshot, probably the cheapest you can buy nowadays. When I asked him why, he said, “玩这个，越简单越好。” Simplicity lies at the heart of this game.

Sometimes I look at my dad and wonder, am I the daffodil, growing from the bulb that is shedding its scales and dying?

Perhaps this lifestyle change has something to do with president Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign, which launched in 2012 and ensnared many people, including my uncle, who was briefly imprisoned for business bribery. People were frightened; networking activities had to be toned down—which was happy news for small-business owners like my dad. Of course, corruption hasn’t gone away. But there are now fewer “lavish” dinners my dad must go to and fewer officials whom he needs to seduce.

Aging wisely is a craft. My dad is trying to live with a new sense of balance between his age and his desires, his self and the system he is embedded within. He often jokes about moving to a seaside village and living a self-sufficient life after he saves enough money for my education and retires—as if by doing so, he can finally return to a place free from all the things that are entangling him now. He is getting older, but he also seems happier. I now see his eyes light up every time he tells me about the art of slingshot, as if the small Y-shaped toylike weapon has excavated youthful energy within him.

In early 2020, right after universities in the US switched to online classes due to the pandemic, I returned home to Guangzhou. I joined my dad and his two best friends on a trip to the nearby city of Qingyuan. After a delicious homemade dinner in the small courtyard of his countryside house, my dad and his friends took out their slingshots and started shooting at the tips of incense sticks from twenty feet away. Like teenage boys, they stubbornly competed with each other for hours, shouting and waving their arms excitedly whenever they hit the target.

For them, slingshot seems to offer a moment of creative flight, a brief escape from their involvement in the network of corruption that marks their careers. Slingshot isn’t the solution, but it’s part of the formula that keeps everything balanced.

During this “competition,” one of his friends sat down next to me and we started chatting with beer in our hands. He told me that my dad always talked about me, especially when I was away, across the Pacific. He told me that my dad spoke of how much he missed me, and how proud he is of who I have become. I turned around to look at my dad, who I have gradually come to understand more as I grow older—I wanted to let him know that I am proud of who he has become as well.

A few days ago, my dad told me that he now has a new slingshot idol: a young Chinese man who shoots with paramount precision using only a rubber band and no handle. Inspired by this true master (a Chinese proverb: “人外有人，天外有天”—there are people beyond people and sky beyond sky; this idea of infinity and boundless mastery is essential to Chinese culture), my dad has put away his various slingshots and now practices with only a single yellow rubber band and his callus-covered fingers, pursuing an even purer and lighter kind of simplicity.

Load, aim, pull, swoosh, pop, load. In slingshot, there is no limit to improving as long as you practice with dedication, strength, and creativity. Your mind concentrates on the small space between your slingshot and the target. And that small space, which belongs to you, is where the beauty of this art lies.