The Awful Other – Part III
You can know all the facts, but you can't know what it's like to be someone else.
We
don’t have much information about precisely what John Allen Chau did on Little Andaman Island for the last two weeks of October 2018. It is a good assumption that he enthusiastically—and, by all accounts of his character, with kindness and gentleness—set himself to the task of locating from among the few remaining members of the Onge tribe still living in the reserve at Dugong Creek a companion for his trip to North Sentinel Island, just as Portman had recommended. But what shape that search took and whom he spoke with we do not know, except that it was ultimately a futile effort.
By November, Chau had resigned himself to venturing onto the island without a cultural attaché. Hoping to evade the notice of the police, who might catch wind of his plan, he spent the next eleven days in a safe house in Port Blair.
“The benefit of that is that I was essentially in quarantine,”
wrote Chau in his journal. He eventually secured passage from a small village just east of North Sentinel Island with a set of fisherman, who spoke almost no English. They set off in a small dinghy under the cover of night in the earliest hours of November 15. “Depending on the darkness,” wrote Chau,
“I might land briefly at dark and bury a cache—a Pelican case for later. We might even send the kayak laden with gifts toward shore.”
By that evening, he had attempted contact twice: First, in the morning, he had ventured toward a small hut they had spotted, with a barracuda and half of what he thought was either a giant trevally or a tuna flopped atop his kayak, and was quickly confronted by men pointing bows and arrows. He’d dropped the fish and back-paddled for his life. Then, in the afternoon, he had been shot at but uninjured by a young boy, possibly ten years old. Unfazed, Chau returned the next morning. When the fishermen—who had gone about their work and stayed out of close proximity to avoid catching the coast guard’s attention—returned, he was already dead. From a distance, they could see the Sentinelese burying his lifeless body on the beach.
Chau’s
story broke when then Director General of Police for the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Dependra Pathak, issued a press release. The story was quickly picked up by the media, and within hours it was commanding the world’s attention, stealing the spotlight from another perplexing murder with international intrigue. Pathak might have been caught off guard by the intensity of the interest, but perhaps he shouldn’t have been. The tone of his release vacillates ever so subtly between the bureaucratic and the sententious:
“The enquiry revealed that one US national, Mr. John Allen Chau, who came to Port Blair, Andaman & Nicobar Islands on 16.10.2018, allegedly got killed at North Sentinel Island during his misplaced adventure in the highly restricted area while trying to interact with the un-contacted people who have a history of vigorous rejection towards outsiders.”
You don’t have to be a beat reporter trawling your sources for that sentence to pique your interest. Allusions to un-contacted tribes and misplaced adventurers attempting to contact them arouse all sorts of gut reactions—most of them sanctimonious.
Faced with data, we integrate it in the most parsimonious way. We’re all the unwitting descendants of William of Ockham. Unfortunately, there’s nothing more parsimonious than following your own biases. In his magisterial essay, "The Last Days of John Allen Chau," Alex Perry outlines the reactions of the public to the story:
“In a stream of tweets, takes, and TV segments over the months that followed, Chau was characterized at best as a dumbass backpacker and at worst as a Christian supremacist indifferent to genocide. His ignoring the tribe’s wish to be left alone and the risks he posed to them were attributed to imperialist arrogance. His attempt to “save” the Sentinelese was ascribed to delusion and brainwashing.”
To be fair, even the most explicit of Chau’s motivations were not initially apparent. There were reports that Chau was a missionary, but these were countered by assertions that he was simply a thrill-seeker. At least some of the confusion can be attributed to Dependra Pathak. Perhaps because the most conspicuous and copious information about Chau came from his Instagram page, where he fashioned himself as an adventurer and micro-influencer plugging a brand of beef jerky, or perhaps because Pathak simply didn’t want to debase the missionary calling, he went out of his way to obfuscate the missionary angle to reporters. “‘He was on a misplaced adventure in prohibited area to meet uncontacted persons,’” Pathak told the News Minute.
“‘People thought he is a missionary because he had mentioned his position on God and that he was a believer on social media or somewhere online. But in a strict sense, he was not a missionary. He was an adventurer. His intention was to meet the aborigines[.]’”
But John Chau most decidedly was a missionary. He firmly believed that the message of his faith was the most unequivocal good. Spreading that message to people who had never encountered it was his highest priority. At first, this fact came as a surprise to reporters. The Baptist minister and Duke University Divinity student Kaleb Graves, who had briefly befriended Chau while both were studying at the Canada Institute of Linguistics at Trinity Western University, read the news of Chau’s death in the very early morning hours of November 21 and quickly wrote a Facebook post of grief, noting his fond memories, then went to sleep. When he arose later that morning, he’d been contacted by numerous news outlets. “When I spoke of John’s faith and missionary work,” Graves wrote in 2020,
“media representatives were surprised. They already had worked John’s story out for the morning news. To them, he was a wild-eyed adventurer, an Indiana Jones type, who had met his end in search of a thrill. His missionary activities were not yet known to them. . . . After a few more days, GQ, the New York Times, and other outlets began contacting me about John, but this time, they had the religious angle. He was a zealot. Or, perhaps an imperialist. Or, a brainwashed member of a yet unknown cult. Or, as one reporter suggested, a deeply repressed gay man. None of them could understand what would drive a young twenty-something to do what he did. So, they came up with their own bizarre or simplistic stories where John played the victim or the villain.”
I reached out via Facebook to Graves in the hopes of getting to know who John Chau was, who he was, and perhaps discuss how difficult it is to know who anyone is. We had a pair of cordial interactions, and I offered to let him read an early draft of this essay to prepare before we talked. I sent him the file and we set a time for a Zoom meeting. The next time I tried contacting him, however, I discovered he’d blocked me on Facebook. I wrote an email but received no reply. I was left wondering what it was about the text that had made him skittish. When Chau was shot by the young Sentinelese boy in 2018, the arrow hit his Bible, which he had been holding in front of his chest. “I’ve never felt this much grief or sorrow before,” Chau wrote in his journal.
““WHY! Why did a little kid have to shoot me today? His high pitched voice still lingers in my head. Father, forgive him and any of the people on this island who try to kill me, and especially forgive them if they succeed. What made them become this defensive and hostile?”
What makes any person lump another person into a category and react with extreme prejudice? In a sense, that question informs my critique of Alex Perry’s essay on John Allen Chau. I admire it deeply: Perry renders the many moral riddles surrounding the story with empathy and concision. But to the central riddle—what drove Chau to do what he did?—Perry offers one more pat answer: He had been left bereft after his father, a Chinese immigrant to the U.S., who had pulled himself up by the bootstraps to become a medical physician, suffered the public disgrace of losing his medical license after illegally prescribing pain medications. “This,” Perry writes, “finally, felt like the heart of John’s story.”
Did it? It doesn’t feel like that to me. Targeting the personal turmoil in John Chau’s family history as an explanation for his actions seems like a stretch—like flesh and guts in need of a skeleton to cling to. Perry goes in search of a skeleton by appealing to the linguistic anthropologist Daniel Everett.
In Part 4, we’ll look at the coiled serpent that is the history of anthropology and linguistics. . . .