White Buddha: Portrait of an ESL Teacher in China (PART 2)

“White lies, though…”

“Outlaw white people.”

“Legalize guns!”

“You crazy? Could you imagine the carnage… Way easier to outrun a mucker on a stabbing spree than a mucker on a shooting rampage…”

“Not as afraid of spree stabbers as I am of escalators, elevators, building collapses…”

“Outlaw crappy construction!”

“A lady died recently because she opened a door marked ‘Exit,’ thinking it was a stairwell, and it turned out the door led to nothing, and she plummeted to her death from the 5th floor…”

“Fucking chabuduo.”

“There’re building collapses almost daily, new buildings too. They’ll throw up a new, fancy looking apartment building and a year later it’s got cracks in the foundation, leaking pipes… Buildings from 5 years ago look 20 years old.”

“Acid rain…”

“Built-in obsolescence.”

“Tofu concrete… The 2008 Sichuan Earthquake… That’s why so many died.”

“Occasionally a building will collapse during its construction, killing all the workers.”

“Man, I feel for those migrant workers, from Anhui, Ningxia, those places…”

“Confiscate government property, reallocate it to the migrant workers!”

“Fill the Forbidden Palace of Zhongnanhai with migrant workers!”

“Purge the rightists!”

“Rise, comrades, start a new revolution! One led by a friendlier, not so genocidal Mao type dude…”

“Democracy. Voting. Preferably a parliamentary system.”

“Chinese democracy. The real kind, not some shitty Guns N’ Roses album.”

“You kidding? Think of who would vote, all those crazy nationalists… Hell, they’d bring in some halfwit who’d wanna nuke Japan.”

“Outlaw the daily anti-foreigner, five minutes of hate in the newspapers and evening newscasts!”

“Outlaw the daily anti-Japan bullshit war dramas!”

“The TV and movies are terrible in China. Those propaganda documentaries, sappy soaps…”

“And their popular music, all those trash love ballads…”

“No wonder they have no soft power globally…”

“Totalitarianism and heavy-handed censors don’t exactly assist the creative process, comrade…”

“Outlaw censorship!”

“Second that. The CCP actually censors portions of its constitution online…”

“Legalize Google! Down with Baidu! Down with Jackoff Ma!”

“Mr. Xi, tear down that firewall!”

“Legalize weed. If they smoked that like they smoke cigarettes, imagine how chill they’d be.”

“Clever idea for when automation hits. 1 billion people out of work. It could be massive chaos, riots, social unrest…”

“Forget that. The facial recognition system, surveillance cameras will have weaponized lasers, flamethrowers to target, incinerate and neutralize counterrevolutionaries, those subverting state power… Really think they’ll only deduct sesame credits?”

“If only they’d had that in 1989.”

“Outlaw security cameras!”

“Troublesome foreigners, picking quarrels! China’s technology will be peaceful and most harmonious!”

“Outlaw foreigners!”

“Outlaw ESL teachers!”

“Definitely.”

“We’re fucked, ultimately, a dying breed… Simultaneous translation apps, talking robots will do away with us…”

“Outlaw robots!”

“It’s like every once arduous process, language learning will be obsolete… Instantaneous translation ear buds, AI, all that; we’re on the precipice of the next industrial revolution… Soon to be washed away by the tidal wave…”

“Outlaw AI!”

“There’s a nerd working on an app right now that’s going to eventually decimate nearly every ESL, language learning job… It’s only a matter of time…”

“Outlaw nerds!”

“And the Filipinos are coming… As a stopgap before the robots, they’ll replace us all with qualified Filipino teachers ready to work for $500 a month and they can spell and know all the basic grammar rules we don’t.”

“We’re dinosaurs waiting for the asteroid…”

“Outlaw asteroids!”

“And outlaw the Filipinos! Except the chicks!”

“Outlaw all fempats!”

“Outlaw any ESL teacher not under 30 and not over 55!”

“Outlaw all expats!”

“The worst people I’ve met in China have been, by far, the expats.”

“Especially the Americans.”

“Especially you.”

“Exactly.”

“A country gets the expats it deserves.”

“Exactly.”

“America doesn’t have the history or culture of expatriation that Britain or Australia does. That’s why only the military, criminals, losers, drunks, crazies, perverts, basketball players or missionaries come abroad…”

“I can understand leaving Britain. The British Empire was really a result of explorers in search of places with better weather…”

“And better-looking women.”

“Elizabeth Hurley, Kate Middleton, Kiera Knightly?”

“Outliers. Probably Viking DNA…”

“All the most mental expats in Asia are Americans.”

“Well, there was the 60-something Australian guy with the pink hair, who wore those long, golden imperial era traditional Chinese robes and was always running around, laughing, poking people in the back or stomach.”

“All he ate was French toast at the café next to school, every day, 2 or 3 times…”

“And he’d ride this unicycle around the campus and be drunk on baijiu by the afternoon, often passed out on the steps of the library. Other teachers, students and security guards would have to carry him, by his arms and legs, back to his apartment.”

“Or how about the South African with the purple mohawk who was always dancing and singing that song Beez in the Trap and taped dead cockroaches to his neighbor’s door…”

“Then there was the Indian who’d throw chalk at sleeping students in class and stalk around the campus, fondling females, touching their legs…”

“The Polish lady into eugenics who claimed Asians didn’t need sunglasses because their eyes are slanted and can block out the sun…”

“My favorite was the Iranian math teacher who got into a running slapfight, shouting match with a hooker outside a KTV…”

“Oh no, the best was the 50-ish British lady whose AC in her apartment was broken so she left the refrigerator door open in her kitchen the whole time… Her lessons consisted of playing duck-duck-goose… with college students.”

“She wore a British judge wig and carried a cricket bat everywhere, although I never once saw her play cricket…”

“I got drunk and had sex with her after the Christmas party… She kept the judge wig on the whole time…”

“You’re a humanitarian…”

“Glasgow guy… Glasgow guy… The shaved head guy from Glasgow who’d go out every weekend to bars, headbutt random people, and get in fistfights and be bashed by the locals…”

“Everyone from Glasgow does that.”

“The Glasgow kiss. A headbutt to your nose. That just means they like you.”

“Sure, you got your winners from everywhere, but the worst overall are American.”

“I’ve never seen ESL teachers who fight amongst themselves as much as the Americans do…”

“The Americans are the worst.”

“Remember that fat redneck guy with the mullet and baggy FUBU shirts and jorts… He’d go out into the crowded Shanghai city streets and scream out ‘NIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGGUUUUUUUUUUURRRR’ simply because he could. He’d look so relieved afterwards.”

“Or the short, hairy wackjob from Maine, who called himself a ‘Maniac’ and was constantly talking about his bowel movements, in graphic depictions, bragging about how highly rated they were on ratemypoodotcom…”

“The craziest American I remember was that white supremacist, skinhead guy who taught his students the hail Hitler salute, hit on students, and went off on an anti-Semitic tirade at the Christmas party and later tried to steal a cell phone from a hooker.”

“Didn’t that guy get his contract renewed?”

“No, they actually fired him because he had a psychotic breakdown in class over students playing on their mobile phones…”

“But they did let him stay rent free in his apartment for 4 months afterwards, and he flipped out on an African girl exchange student, calling her racial slurs, and they still let him stay another month even after that.”

“I got drunk and slashed that guy’s bicycle tires.”

“Was he the guy who bottled Melvin?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Didn’t Melvin get bottled twice?”

“Three times, I think. Definitely once by a Chinese dude at a bar.”

“Melvin also got jumped by a group of taxi drivers in Beijing, something about them demanding he speak Chinese because it’s China and Melvin freaking out over it…”

“That Boston dude, the one who’d do Bill Burr impressions, he ran up on Melvin. I remember.”

“Boston guy, that crazy fire-red hair ginger, he’d get piss drunk, every night, go to McDonald’s, and strip bare-naked, sit down and eat his food… Then he’d put his clothes back on, leave, and go out and pick fights, mostly shoving matches, with random people.”

“Boston dude tried to choke out Melvin. On Thanksgiving, I think…”

“Sneak attack, ninja shit. Ran up from behind, jumped on his back, piggyback style, and started strangling him.”

“Then Melvin fell backwards on him, with all his weight, which was a lot, and knocked Boston guy out cold and stomped on him a few times before some other teachers pulled him away, all kicking and screaming and shit.”

“With two Chinese coppers watching, one smoking and laughing. The other staring, jaw dropped, practically a deer in headlights.”

“Chinese cops are useless. The whole place is lawless, basically.”

“I got physically attacked by a crazed nationalist Chinese guy at a bus station in Hangzhou. Accidentally bumped into him when he was trying to cut in line, and he started screaming insults at me, laowai this, that, and he punched me in my chest a few times, right in front of a Chinese cop, who stood silently, watched and did absolutely nothing.”

“Boxer Rebellion 2.0”

“No, comrade, that’s just ‘The Wild Wild East.’ No laws. Cops are only there to smoke cigarettes, bust people for jaywalking, and torture dissidents… They otherwise don’t do shit.”

“Shi de. Piss off a rich person or someone in the government and the cops will move quickly then. You’ll have a knock on your door, be invited for tea, disappeared, promptly…”

“The CCP is like the mafia. You gotta know someone to get in, be vouched for, then you’re in for life, and if you fuck up, they off you…”

“I wonder how long they’ll last, the CCP, their dynasty…”

“Can’t currently envision how they’ll fall… With their tech, facial recognition software, control of all media, communications systems, malware and spyware and bugs in smartphones…”

“People said the same things about East Germany, the Stasi…”

“True. But no totalitarian regime ever had such weapons in their arsenal…”

“The next revolution will be the ‘Smashed Surveillance Camera Revolution.’”

“Won’t happen as long as the proletariat have rice in their bowls…”

“Let them eat rice!”

“For all their ills, the CCP has improved many people’s lives and at least care somewhat, unlike Cambodia… I mean, if you’re a PRC citizen would you really want to go back to the Warlord Era?”

“They could probably last for a while, so long as their economy keeps up and they don’t go full fucktard and invade Taiwan…”

“Won’t make a difference, Taiwan. The world, US included, won’t give a damn about it, a tiny Asian island… Maybe lip service will be paid, but there’s too much money, business done in the Mainland…”

“I think most people anywhere are quite happy to trade human rights and privacy for food, housing and jobs…”

“But how would they feel if they knew seventy percent of their soil and groundwater is toxic?”

“And that the Red Nobility have their princelings, princesses and wealth in Vancouver, and the technocrats in Beijing have their own protected farms, water supplies, industrial air purifiers…”

“I think most people would choose technocrats who give them contaminated food rather than technocrats who give them no food…”

“The CCP is a lot better than what preceded it. That’s for sure… The Qing Dynasty was a bunch of corrupt shitbags…”

“And Chiang Kai-shek was a cunt.”

“Whatever becomes of the CCP, they won’t go quietly, riding off into the sunset… They began violently and will end violently…”

“The barrel of a gun…”

“A bunch of gangsters…”

“Kleptocrats.”

“Don’t they make you scream out an oath and kill a live chicken and drink its blood when you join?”

“Prostrate, prostrate before an 88-meter-tall jade statue of Xi Dada!”

“I for one certainly hope they don’t takeover the world… The ‘China Model’, that sort of totalitarian, Orwellian society, with world domination, total hegemony… It’d be the end of art, creativity, thought…”

“Won’t happen. In the end, authoritarian systems always flame out…”

“They’ll lose the Trade War, Tech War, any new Cold War. They can’t innovate. They’ve got no allies, no soft power, nothing better to offer.”

“Best hope for the CCP is getting back to reforming and opening…”

“Then losing the Poohbear and his bootlickers. A transparent, benevolent CCP could be beneficial for everyone…”

“Make China Great Again!”

“Bring back Hu!”

“Follow the Taiwan model…”

“Sad irony is that China could rise to ‘Number One’ if they’d only allow freedom of speech, expression, rule of law, reform their schools, truly join the world, but that’d threaten the Red Nobility, billionaires at the top of the CCP, so it won’t happen, and, being as such, they can never surpass a certain threshold…”

“China has loads of smart people… If they let them loose, followed the Taiwan model, they’d be unstoppable…”

“Return the Mainland to the ROC… The capital split between Taipei and Beijing… The CCP as one of multiple parties…”

“Melvin wanted to join the CCP, didn’t he? I remember him having a socialism phase…”

“I can imagine his induction ceremony. That’s sure to go viral…”

“Wasn’t Melvin already in a viral China video? The one with those asshole expats fighting at a McDonald’s in Shenzhen? That was him, wasn’t it?”

“Could have been… I never watched the video…”

“I’m usually too happy at McDonald’s to want to fight anyone…”

“At least those dudes weren’t naked in public. In a McDonald’s.”

“Was the Boston guy naked when he attacked Melvin?”

“I can’t remember.”

“There was a laowai jogging butt-naked, except for running shoes, late nights, early mornings, around the Bund in Shanghai for a while, back in 2010. Not sure if they caught him or if he’s still doing that.”

“It was Melvin.”

“Where is he now, Melvin?”

“Wasn’t he in Cambodia?”

“Deep in the jungle…”

“He joined a cult…”

“I bet he overdosed on smack.”

“Got his kidney stolen. Fucking dead in a dumpster in Manila or India.”

“No, he was in China. I saw his timelines on WeChat. He taught at 6 schools in 2 years or something.”

“His last place he posted about had this terrible on-campus apartment that wasn’t heated and was freezing cold, flooded regularly, and had no working light in the bathroom…”

“Place had moldy walls, flying cockroaches and swarms of mosquitoes, even in winter, and brutally loud honking trucks and fireworks outside, constant drilling sounds at all hours…”

“Sounds better than my first apartment in China…”

“Construction noise, fireworks, hacking and spitting, honking and drilling sounds. The soundtrack of China.”

“The drill is like a national instrument. Children practice it, have recitals at primary schools.”

“Melvin was super salty and posting something about how his boss laughingly refers to him as her ‘enemy’ and that he told her to fuck off at a meeting because they got into it over a chair or something like that.”

“Wasn’t he at a high school in Lanzhou where they made him sit in an office, from 9 to 5, every day, during the summer, when no students were around, with nothing to do, just sit there, and then later the administration tried to force him to join a construction crew outside, paving a road?”

“I saw him post how he went to this training center in a far-flung province near the border with Russia. He was the only white guy in a town of one million people.”

“The teacher at the training center before him, Derek, this tall handsome white guy, was a local celebrity, and everywhere he went, people asked if he knew Derek or where was Derek, and if he could play guitar, sing like Derek, and how much it fucking pissed him off hearing about Derek all the time.”

“Then his boss asked him to sing and dance during his lessons and he spazzed and cursed out the boss and got beat down by a bunch of bao’ans and passersby and was in the hospital for a while with his jaw wired shut.”

“I worked in a small town in Japan that had only one other white guy. First time we met he had a go at me, jabbed his finger in my chest, saying how ‘HE was the only one allowed to be a white person here.’”

“His honorary White Monkey status infringed upon. Hashtag Fuck You.”

“Oftentimes bumping into another foreigner in Asia, especially in a place with few to none, is a conversation starter in itself…”

“At least warrants the polite hello, ‘I’m a foreigner so are you nod’…”

“Hey, that Russian border town place, Derek guy, dancing, mob beating thing, I thought it was Thomas that happened to…”

“AIDS Thomas? The skeleton looking, jaundice, gaunt motherfucker?”

“Nah, not AIDS Thomas, the other Thomas, the one who talked to himself.”

“Schizophrenic Thomas, dude with the nose hair. I remember him…”

“I thought Canadian Thomas was the one with the nose hair…”

“Canadian Thomas? Wasn’t he the one who got extorted by a girl he’d been dating? Like she wanted $20,000 from him after he refused to marry her…”

“Then her uncles started showing up to the school, threatening him, and the girl broke into his apartment, claiming that she’d saved a condom, and had impregnated herself and would press rape charges and she bit his ear when he tried to throw her out and he put her in a headlock, flung her out the door, and was later arrested for assault and spent a week in jail and afterwards did a midnight run.”

“Yeah, Canadian Thomas was my neighbor. I saw the cops knocking on his door after he bailed… He fucked one of his college students, too, and broke her heart, was telling her ‘she’s the one’ and all that, took her virginity. I hear he’s in Korea now…”

“I remember Canadian Thomas saying how he’d taught with that Laowhy86, C-Milk, YouTube vlogger guy, at a college in Inner Mongolia, and that C-Milk would fuck tons of the students, and the two of them had a contest to see who could fuck the most students that semester.”

“Canadian Thomas talked about fucking students all the time… Even loudly in the hallway of our apartment building… And you couldn’t get away from him either. He’d corner you, start talking, and just not stop.”

“Schizophrenic Thomas was like that too. He’d corner you in the hall, talk and talk, not let you go… I did all I could to avoid him…”

“What happened to Schizophrenic Thomas? Where’s he now?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I know AIDS Thomas started a restaurant in the Philippines and had gotten married to a Filipina lady, but she divorced him the day after she got her Green Card.”

“So then he went back to Colorado and was working in a factory. Or living in the woods, in a tree, I think.”

“No, Melvin was working in a factory. A packing plant or something. He’s been back and forth between China and Portland several times.”

“Melvin got his ass beat by security guards. I know he did. Somewhere.”

“It was one of those times when a foreigner hits on a Chinese girl in a bar or public place and the local males in the vicinity begin slapping and kicking at him.”

“It’s never one on one. Ask Wendell Brown.”

“Mainland China bars, dark and evil places…”

“I’m shocked Melvin didn’t wind up like Wendell Brown… Melvin would go apeshit, constantly, in public places, people on the street, random people, especially bicyclists or motorcyclists who passed too closely to him.”

“Which is everybody.”

“Or people not covering their mouths while sneezing. Or picking their noses…”

“He really fucking hated when people smoked in elevators. He’d go ballistic over that.”

“Pretty much every China thing, he’d spaz out over, but he stayed, year after year.”

“He never developed the healthy love/hate relationship with China most longtime expats have…”

“I made the mistake of telling him to chill one day when he screamed at a random bicyclist. He went off on me about ‘lecturing him’ and we stopped hanging out, but were cordial, after that… He lived across the hall from me and I’d see him and hear him going in and out of his apartment, at all hours, always slamming the door.”

“I remember seeing him winding up like a pitcher and throwing imaginary baseballs in the hallway.”

“He’d throw imaginary baseballs or shoot imaginary basketballs at random times when I talked with him…”

“Last time I saw Melvin was at the cafeteria… He snuck up behind me, tapped me on the shoulder, and when I turned around, he was grunting and twitching, crouched down, arms spread, in a defensive basketball stance…”

“He never slept. Seriously, I don’t think he slept at all…”

“Didn’t someone he raged at tell him to learn to meditate or do yoga?”

“It was me. I told him Buddhism or Sam Harris. Both preferably.”

“That must have really driven him mad. He told me he fucking hated Buddhism.”

“His apartment was so filthy. Way past normal single guy, bachelor shit. I don’t understand how someone could live like that.”

“You’d think he’d be cleaner, too. He’d go off about discipline, posting quotes from David Goggins on his WeChat. Then he was overweight and living in a pigsty. I can’t understand it.”

“He’d always come by my apartment unannounced. Just banging on the door. Police knocks.”

“I wouldn’t let him inside my apartment. I’d be afraid to…”

“He often complained to me about none of the other teachers having any ‘social skills’ and our school being a ‘social desert’…”

“He alienated everyone by the time he left. I don’t think he had any friends, anywhere.”

“One of his students told me that, during a lecture, he asked his students if they could help him make friends with local people. They told him ‘no’, laughed, and thought it was a joke. But I think he really meant it…”

“A class I shared with him told me Melvin misspelled words on the board quite frequently and would shout down any student who’d mention it or attempt to correct it…”

“Another student of his said she’d politely suggested he relax a little in class because his ‘enthusiasm was scaring a few of her classmates.’”

“So next time he had that class, he demanded to know ‘who had any problems with his enthusiasm’, asking anyone who had a problem to raise their hand. None did. They remained quiet. And later he said to me how annoying it was that students rarely spoke in his classes.”

“Really can’t see why they didn’t want to help him make local friends… A headscratcher that…”

“Probably didn’t help either that he’d teach students curse words, literally snatch phones from their hands, and yell and curse at them, start arguments, and hit on females, send strange messages on WeChat…”

“Those aren’t qualities that’ll endear you to most people, no…”

“He seemed to desperately want friends, seek connections with others. Like he’d talk to random people, strike up conversations and invite ’em to eat, coffee, but then there’d always be a falling out, he’d flip over something.”

“And all his social media posts about him being ‘lonely.’”

“He always needed to be the center of attention.”

“He was easily triggered by fat-shaming. Think he’d be used to it after so long in China.”

“Lots of expats in China lose weight because they get so tired of being relentlessly called a fatty by the locals…”

“He sure said ‘bro’ a lot. Completed nearly every sentence with it.”

“That fist bump thing he did was so 2012.”

“Constantly snapping so many selfies, that guy. Always of him running, too, how many kilometers he did that day. Maps of his running routes. Posting shit like ‘While you were off in dreamland snoozing, I was running a half-marathon.’”

“He never slept.”

“That would explain the puffy eyelids.”

“He never flossed. His teeth were gunky and gross as fuck…”

“He always wore the same two shirts.”

“Those faded Jordan brand t-shirts and raggedy old Nike basketball shorts every day, even to his classes, and even in the dampest, coldest days of winter.”

“The ayis always shuddered when they saw him wearing those shorts in the cold.”

“Where do you think he found that neon green vest, you know, the type traffic cops wear?”

“Stole it off somebody he killed.”

“He’d wear that neon vest running through campus, with these bright orange shoes he had, and his big ass bald head all bobbing up and down… You could see him coming from a mile away.”

“Like a rhinoceros. A rhinoceros attacked by a paintbrush.”

“Damn, he ran a lot. Walked so fast down the street too.”

“He was always gonna get ‘ripped.’”

“I think he said he used to be about 300 pounds, though. What was he like, 5–7 and 240?”

“It was mostly on the belly.”

“A pretty squat, muscly fuck, otherwise…”

“Could have been, should have been a lumberjack.”

“He looked like a lumberjack.”

“Lumberjack Shrek.”

“I never saw him without his phone in his hand. Dude was on it all the time and got so pissed if you’d didn’t ‘like’ his posts on social media or reply to his texts quickly enough.”

“He was always pissed off…”

“Our building managers, those ayis, despised him. He was arguing with them nearly every day, and they’d ignore him in the hallways when they saw him… And then he’d get mad that they ignored him…”

“Same with the office staff… He’d fight with them, too, over the littlest things, like how a secretary rolled her eyes at him or wasn’t friendly enough… He’d show up to the office once a week or so, airing his latest list of grievances…”

“He had a crush on this secretary there, a married lady, and he was messaging her daily, trying to have her come to his apartment or buy her dinner, and he was so upset when she declined his invitations. Posted on his WeChat that people in China are ‘incapable of normal social relations.’”

“This other admin, this pretty, tall lady, who he also flirted with, had to get her boyfriend to tell Melvin to leave her alone and later Melvin and her boyfriend almost came to blows…”

“He once got in a shouting match with a grad student intern over the office staff being tired of Melvin always losing his apartment key… Later he tried to date that same grad student and got mad when she turned him down and asked him to stop flirting with her…”

“He’d hit on all the ladies at our school, relentlessly, random women on the street…”

“Pretty much everyone at the shops on campus couldn’t stand him. The women most of all. He was always using broken Chinese, the same couple phrases, to try to pick them up. His go-to pickup line was asking if she was a ‘chir huo’ (a foodie)…”

“But when he said it, he mangled the tones and made it sound like ‘che huo’ (a car accident). They’d awkwardly giggle, and he never got their WeChat.”

“They called him ‘White Buddha’ because of his bald head and big belly.”

“His students called him that too.”

“It was a running joke around campus.”

“Really a good thing his Chinese was so shit. Think of how many more fights and confrontations he’d have been in if he knew what the local people were saying.”

“Seriously, never learn Chinese. One guy I used to work with had left teaching, went into business, was making bank, but eventually left after he learned enough Chinese. Said China is way better when you don’t know what people are saying. The dude got laid a lot too…”

“Shit, even Melvin got laid from time to time. Amazingly.”

“Sure did. He hit Tinder and Tan Tan hard.”

“Told me his strategy was to machine gun swap on every profile and carpet-bomb dick pics to hundreds of girls…”

“Said sometimes Chinese chicks would reply, saying they thought he’d be bigger.”

“They think all white dudes have porn star dicks.”

“Must be like a black dude with a smallish dick. Chick pulls his pants down, expecting a hog, is unpleasantly surprised…”

“Are there black dudes with small dicks? I’ve never heard of one…”

“I’ve not seen enough black penises to say. Porn and hearsay are my only reference…”

“Whatever the case, Melvin did get ass.”

“But he’d only pull these really large ladies.”

“I’m not hating. Some people like the BBW. Cushion for the pushing.”

“And some ladies in their fifties…”

“I think he’s the only white guy in Asia who ever fucked a lady 20 years older instead of 20 years younger.”

“I don’t think he ever had a girlfriend. Maybe the only white guy to stay in China longer than a year and not have one steady girlfriend for like at least a month or two.”

“A Mongolian lady he’d spent a weekend with wouldn’t return his calls… I told him that maybe she just didn’t like him and he should move on, find another, plenty of fish, you know, and he got legitimately pissed, asking, in all seriousness, how it was possible for a girl not to like him… Thought he was going to physically attack me. Never talked much to him after that…”

“Honestly, I’m not sure he ever had a long-term girlfriend anywhere…”

“That one Russian chick, wasn’t she his girl? She was hot.”

“She looked like a hooker.”

“Nah, supposedly she was a businesswoman.”

“And she ghosted him after one weekend.”

“He was broken up after that. Had a panic attack. Had a student bring him to hospital, got a CAT scan, reckoned it was a heart attack. They sorted him with psych meds.”

“Think he said he’d had a panic attack like that at another school… Was freaking out, on about how, if he died, no one would know, no one would find him… Had a CAT scan then too…”

“Didn’t he have a thyroid thing?”

“Yeah, this big lump on the back of his head, atop his neck. Kinda like a tumor. Scary, that.”

“What the fuck is a thyroid? How do I know if I have one?”

“ESL teachers don’t have thyroids.”

“Was his thyroid what made him so… animated… all the time and quick to rage?”

“A rage-aholic maybe.”

“He’d really wear you out. Being around him for more than a couple minutes was totally exhausting.”

“He was an alpha-male. And proud to be an alpha. Talked about it with everything, ‘Gotta be the alpha, bro.’”

“As a kid he said he was bullied relentlessly and was on Adderall from age 10.”

“Everyone in his, what he called, ‘white trash’ hometown picked on him. His stepfather threw a glass of milk at him and always called him a ‘fag’ because he liked reading.”

“He said his mom was married six times and fucked an 18-year-old student of hers.”

“It was probably him…”

“He liked reading, really? We were talking lesson plans and he didn’t know what syntax was…”

“I saw him posting about making outlines for short stories. Said he was going to be a writer…”

“He posted a poem once about how he was pissing sitting down…”

“In Melvin’s apartment he had stacks and stacks of books, classic novels, Infinite Jest, top-notch, cream of the crop literature, many of which I’d read, but when I asked about them, he’d read none of them. Not one. At all.”

“He was from Portland and had never read Fight Club. Or ANYTHING by Chuck Palahniuk. How the fuck does that happen?”

“He was no alpha-male.”

“An alpha doesn’t call himself an alpha.”

“His becoming an alpha story. That was classic. Inspirational. He should do a public speaking tour, like Jordan Peterson.”

“I never heard his becoming an alpha story.”

“He’d be dramatic telling that one.”

“So one day he finally fought back against his childhood bullies. Snapped. Bludgeoned some kid, picked up a math book and smashed it over the kid’s face, again and again, and, after that, he got into self-help audiobooks, PUA forums, and alpha-male websites.”

“Then he found his swagger.”

“Bro…”

“One time he came by my apartment, unannounced, late at night, crying. He was on about how he’d never be a father, never be married, never even owned a suit…”

“Not sure it matters so much, the whole marriage, kids thing. Like can you really leave a legacy? Does it matter so much…”

“Just think, where we sit, here, this whole planet, Earth, the solar system, fucking everything, everything will someday be gone… Swallowed by the sun, a black hole, incinerated by gamma rays, a neutron star, a mushroom cloud, a supervolcano, humanity overtaken by AI, the CCP, killer robots… Global warming… Us all bashed into oblivion by an asteroid or a comet…”

“The whole concept of time is flawed.”

“There’s matter from the Big Bang in your DNA.”

“Nihilism is the only truth.”

“There’s no such thing as death, really.”

“There was no such thing as Melvin. We imagined him. A collective delusion.”

“Oh no, Melvin was real. Never told anyone this…”

“But after a big mass shooting, I can’t remember which one, he confessed to having planned a school shooting attack himself and being into mass killers, that he understood them. That he thought of going back to his high school, with an AR-15, bushmaster rifle, the kind from Sandy Hook, him gunning down everyone, his footprints in their blood.”

“Or maybe he’d hijack a plane and crash it into his high school. But then he started laughing about it, and I’m still not sure if it was a sick joke or not. I hope it was a joke, like the Louis CK, Parkland kid thing.”

“As long as he’s not jerking off in front of people…”

“I know he jerked off in front of someone. Somewhere. It happened.”

“He jerked off in front of a bao’an.”

“He jerked off in front of a cleaning lady.”

“And she grabbed his peter and finished him off for a cool 50 RMB.”

“He told me he was into studying plane crashes. Said he curated Wikipedia pages about them…”

“I was done with him after the Christmas party incident… Albert went through all that trouble, booked the restaurant, bought turkey, real turkey from Hong Kong, actually fucking turkey, in China, which is no simple task.”

“Then about 11 of us got there at 6 and soon after the food was served. I remember Melvin saying he’d be there late because he had class, so we made sure to save a plate for him.”

“But when he found out we started eating without him, he flipped out in our WeChat teachers’ group, and decided ‘he’d go elsewhere.’ How ‘we must have really been hungry.’”

“Told me later, casually, no hint of emotion, that he stayed home alone on Christmas night, doing sit-ups and eating microwave pizza.”

“The nerve, to think 11 people would all wait to eat, for another hour or two, only for him. Malignant narcissist, that guy.”

“I mean, I know he was fighting a war in his brain; he was mentally ill, was bipolar, probably, for real, but to be that much of a dick, on Christmas, nonetheless, and post a shitstorm online about how ‘everyone must have been really hungry.’ Yes, we were hungry. Fuck that guy.”

“I think he posted more negative comments about our school on more China ESL forums than anyone ever.”

“A Guinness World Record.”

“Dave’s ESL Café banned him, didn’t they? He had a flame war that went on for ages.”

“He even went to the US Consulate in Shanghai and demanded they investigate our school. It was about his electric meter being rigged and the school owing him money.”

“Well, he told me he was leaving our school because he didn’t feel valued enough.”

“Sometimes I think China purposely hires people like him only to keep the local people afraid of foreigners.”

“See, kids, here, this is what they are…”

“And you?”

“Exactly.”

“Melvin was the sorta guy who, in America, made me want to own a gun, but, at the same time, made me afraid that people like him could have guns, too…”

“Remember his idea to invent drones, with harnesses, large enough to strap in, transport people, fly them around town? You could summon the drones with an app. It would be the next Uber.”

“He could be the next Elon Musk, and we’ll all be assholes for mocking him.”

“He’s in Silicon Valley right now, amassing venture capital.”

“Nah, last I talked to him he was looking into applying to a school in Thailand.”

“God, that’d be the worst place for him. Bet he’d be beaten down BAD by the locals. They DO NOT take kindly to aggressive foreigners, ‘falangs’ starting shit.”

“He’ll be drugged and robbed by ladyboys.”

“There really are violent gangs of ladyboys there, you know. Pattaya late at night… They go out looking for foreigners… Out looking for honkies…”

“Whatever becomes of him, I can’t see it being a good ending. It’s akin to the shoddy construction, crumbling apartment buildings in China. He’s got a faulty foundation. He’ll never be right.”

“The best team of psychiatrists in Austria couldn’t fix him.”

“He’s dead in a dumpster in Austria.”

“Nah, I say he went to Thailand, got killed by ladyboys or is in jail.”

“Maybe joined the ‘Pattaya Flyer Club.’”

“He is exactly the sort who’d die there.”

“I bet he died there in a previous life. Buddhists believe in reincarnation and shit…”

“In Thailand, they have spirit houses and pray and make daily offerings of fruits and juice to keep malevolent ghosts away.”

“So Melvin probably isn’t there…”

“Didn’t he say he was going to write a book about teaching English in China and go on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast to promote it?”

“Yeah, that’s gonna happen.”

“Maybe he’s building wells for the pygmies in the Congo.”

“That’d be by far the best outcome I could envision. Seriously.”

“Melvin and Joey Diaz on the same podcast.”

“Melvin and Joey Diaz building wells for the pygmies in the Congo.”

“Melvin on Bill Burr’s Podcast.”

“Melvin and Eddie Bravo.”

“Nah, David Goggins. Definitely David Goggins…”