director of All Nations told the New York Times that Chau was
"one of the best participants in this experience that we have
ever had."
1970s onward, Korean missionaries began flocking in, and
now Korean Americans would be coming too.
+++
John Chau is someone who I, a Korean American, Christian,
college-aged male, could've seen myself become. John Chau
exemplifies the conditions of what it so often feels like to be
Asian American, to belong to nowhere and to be beholden
to nothing. Yet this is not just about his race but also his
masculinity, shown through his idealism, and his religion,
as Chau embodied a sense of exploration and travel that
he only thought could last within a Christian paradigm,
that evangelical mission was the only way to live fruitfully in
foreignness.
+++
Like John Chau, I, too, went on an overseas mission trip after
my freshman year of high school. But unlike Chau, I had no
such conviction of a "calling," nor did I have faith that my
presence overseas could change anybody other than myself.
It was the fall of 2012, and my dad had told me to come with
him to Thailand the next summer. It would be for two weeks,
right in the middle of our two month family exodus to South
Korea. I had no say in the decision.
The mission team from San Diego Korean Presbyterian
Church to Thailand started off with five: the senior pastor
of our church, my dad, myself, an older woman, and a
middle aged man. We would be spreading God's light in a
country where approximately one percent of the population
is Christian, compared to the eighty or so percent of
Korean Americans who identify as Christian. Historically,
evangelism efforts in Thailand had been going on for over
half a millennium, ever since Jesuit priests tagged along with
Portugese colonizers in the 1550s. American Protestant efforts
began in earnest in 1828, as Congregationalists were followed
by Baptists who were followed by Presbytarians. From the
Chau's heart had been set for years on the North Sentinel
Island, which the neighboring Onge people, part of the
overarching Andamanese people group, call Chia daaKwokweyeh.
Like in so many other parts of the Global South, new diseases
introduced by British expeditions in the late 18th century,
such as measles, pneumonia, and influenza, wiped out the vast
majority of the population. The number of Sentinelese today
is approximated to be around 100-150 people.
After showing much resistance to more British settler
colonialism, the British responded by creating penal colonies
on Andaman lands, encroaching even further on indigenous
lands. In the 1940s, even the Japanese bombed the islands.
However, in 1991, a team of Indian anthropologists led by
Madhumala Chattopadhyay successfully met the Sentinelese,
passing along gifts like coconuts. As a whole, virtually nothing
is known about the Sentinelese people outside of this sparse
contact with outsiders. Perhaps this impossibility is what drew
Chau in, this idea that he could join a history that no one had
ever been successful in doing.
It is easy to label John Chau as assimilating into what Teju
Cole calls a “White-Savior Industrial Complex,” one in which
well-intentioned westerners blithely go on humanitarian
missions to have “a big emotional experience that validates
privilege.” However, the contemporary world of Christian
evangelism, although retaining strong doses of neocolonialism,
has become complicated by the mess of globalization. It
was only a few decades ago when Pyongyang was called
"The Second Jerusalem," and today, South Korea officially
commissions around 30,000 missionaries annually, falling
second in numbers only to the United States. Now, the global
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