The Legend of John Ingram
It’s been seven years since John Ingram disappeared.
My last sight of John, he was being led away by two Wuhan policemen. He’d spent the night at my apartment — I think he understood what was going to happen — and I woke up to a note beside my face. I ignored the note and went into the kitchen to get some coffee. Unlike other foreigners, I hadn’t become resigned to Nescafe’s Instant Shit, and I started up my coffee maker and I looked out the window and there he was.
He never looked back. The policemen led him through the gate and out of my life.
The official university line was that John Ingram had been deported for sexually assaulting a student, an act which drove her to jump from the top of the Number 3 Teaching Building. Down nine stories she went, and in her dying breaths she cursed the “foreign asshole” who made her do this.
I knew John. We weren’t classmates, but we came from the same college, University of Tennessee Class of 2008. We entered college in the 2003 world, that of a nation already starting to slide off the edge. We left college in the 2008 world, that of a nation halfway there. If you’d asked me after my valedictorian speech in 2003 if my post-college plans included teaching English to Chinese college students, I would’ve laughed. I was valedictorian of Boyd-Buchanan Christian School. No one suggested I’d do anything other than go into a respectable field like law or medicine or business.
And that’s what I did, sort of. I tried all three, settling on business when I realized that it didn’t take much effort to pass these classes. The students were more interested in drinking a beer than reading a textbook, and as for the professors…well, they like their cushy middle-class jobs almost as much as they hate their dumbass students.
They lied to me. My parents, teachers, they lied to me. They lied to themselves too. When I left Thompson-Boling Arena with a $40,000 piece of paper in my hand, jobs weren’t waiting for me. Life wasn’t waiting for me, life as I’d lived it, life as I’d been promised, and that summer, as I waited tables at the Copper Cellar, I began to think about going abroad.
My minor was French, so maybe it isn’t so weird that I thought about going abroad. And it’s even less weird that my first choice was France. The problem is that pretty much every French major was trying to go to France, and in a department that small, the professors play favorites very quickly. If you have a penchant for talking a lot and making lame jokes about anything French, then your path is clear. Mine wasn’t so clear.
It was the email that got me thinking about China. Free apartment! With jobs harder and harder to come by, imagine what a year or more of teaching in China will do for your resume! Imagine! Imagine! Imagine!
Imagine: me, a foreign girl in a land of wonder. The Middle Kingdom. A totalitarian Communist hell? The rising dragon of economic prosperity? 2008. The year of the Olympics. The year before expat life in China began to suck. China was no Thailand. It was no Japan either. As befits its name, it was in a world all its own.
I responded to the email. The man sending it, his name was Keith.
Keith had done “account managing” in the northeast. Some of his classmates worked at the University of Tennessee, hell, they worked at universities all over the world and were graciously allowing him to recruit new teachers.
Before I went, I asked him some questions.
How’s the work?
Easy. Chinese students were very obedient, unlike American students.
How are the accommodations?
Free. Two bedroom apartment with a fully equipped kitchen and a Western toilet. No squatters for you.
How is Wuhan?
Chinese. By which I mean, really Chinese. The real China. It’s a real Chinese city. Foreigners are a less common sight on the streets here.
Sounds exotic. Definitely more interesting than waiting tables at the Copper Cellar.
I exchanged emails with him and we eventually confirmed a solid arrival date: October, 2008. I packed what I didn’t need with my parents, packed what I needed in two big suitcases, and in October I found myself standing in Wuhan’s airport, 12,000 miles away and fourteen hours into the future.
The person Wuhan Computer Institute sent to meet me was a dark-skinned Chinese man whose English name was Antonio. He didn’t say much and what he did say was broken, and quiet, as if he were afraid to say anything. Through mumbling and hand gestures, I took that I was to follow him outside.
Two things hit me about Wuhan at once: the cold and the noise. It was so fucking noisy. I don’t think you understand just how noisy it was, and this was just at the airport. Going into the city proper, on a weekday…motors, yells, hammers, horns
Horns.
Horns.
Horns.
The language of China’s traffic mess. Horns. You honk your fucking horn at anything near you or not near you. You let your presence be known, and in a city of ten million (in a country of billions) that’s sometimes hard to do, so you have to honk LOUD. And OFTEN. And sometimes even that doesn’t work, so you have to keep doing it, keep laying on that horn until it breaks.
Antonio showed me to my apartment. As advertised, it had a Western toilet and a fully equipped kitchen, but I was too tired to enjoy what would come to be luxuries. That first day was for sleeping.
The second for exploring.
We had an outside stairwell and as I was coming down, a voice jumped from the side and grabbed me.
“You’re the new teacher then?”
He was a fat man with a British accent and purple veins on his nose. He smiled a smile that showed off missing teeth yet was genuine, friendly and inviting. I nodded. He extended his hand.
“I’m Elizabeth,” I said.
He nodded, eyes darting around. Eventually he said, “I’m Jack.”
Jack was the first foreign teacher I met there. From England, he gave several versions of his past. The one he repeated most involved life as an international adjudicator, a man who’d helped draft the constitutions for newly democratic Eastern European countries after the fall of the Soviet Union. A man of some esteem, he’d come to China and was going to die here. He had a girlfriend. He was sixty. She was twenty. Or twenty-two. Sometimes as old as twenty-four. Whatever the age, he was going to die here and she had instructions on what to do with his ashes.
The day I met Jack was the day I met John Ingram.
Keith had mentioned other teachers in his emails. This big group of young American teachers also came from the University of Tennessee. A few were fluent in Chinese. The group must have dwindled by the time I arrived because me and John were all UT had to offer.
I like to think I had two introductions to China. The first was Jack. He introduced me to the path you don’t want to go down. And John…he introduced me to Wuhan better than Jack, better than Keith, better than our international office, who never gave anyone a proper orientation to the country. John did that. I won’t say he held my hand and taught me the ways of the Middle Kingdom or anything like that. No, it was more like…
We were heading to the backstreet for lunch that day. I thought the noise was bad before but oh boy, I’d yet to reach my limit. We stepped onto the backstreet and there were so many people, so many loud lunchtime voices and the van, yeah, a fucking van was laying on its horn, cutting a sonorous path through the students and it just didn’t stop and I remember turning to John and saying “Oh my God. This is China. This is really China.” and my next remark was about how noisy it was.
“Get used to it,” he said.
John had gotten used to it, though his time was up and he didn’t know it. None of us did. Gradually I began to hear rumors of what happened before. There had been other teachers — Matt, Tom — whose careers Keith was said to have sabotaged and Keith himself was a strange guy, unbelievably stranger than Jack. He had the most awkward way of introducing himself to people. Whenever he saw me, he kept telling me I looked nice in a two-piece bikini. Whereas Jack was harmless weird and looked that way, Keith just looked harmless weird, while beneath it lurked a wounded animal, looking to lash out at anything passing by because it could never get to the ones who’d hurt it in the first place.
What this armchair psychobabble means in terms of John is that Keith was after him, perhaps from the first email. Women didn’t seem to give him much cause for concern. Young men were a different story. Keith said he’d come here to enjoy what China had to offer, and he didn’t understand these young Americans who drank and insulted China and made America look bad.
I used to think it was the columns that spelled doom for John. I don’t believe that anymore. Now, sitting here high above the clouds, I think John was fucked no matter what he did. Like Matt, like Tom and whoever else, only this time the fates conspired, whispered together and decided to give John a special kind of fucking.
In the form of Jeff.
I never met Jeff but I saw the picture, and I read the emails. ‘Wuhan Hot Model Search’, the subject went and what followed was chopped and tossed word salad, seasoned with crazy and thrown into a blender. Much of what I found out about Jeff I found out later, after John disappeared and my time in the Middle Kingdom was growing short. I’ll do my best to summarize it here, but before I do that, you need to understand something: it’s true. I know it’s going to sound crazy. I know you’re wonder how a man like this could get a job teaching college English. I know you’re going to wonder why someone didn’t notice and put a stop to it sooner. The only answer I have to these questions is the same answer I came with the day I left: it’s ESL in China. The answer to the questions you don’t want to ask.
At the beginning of the 2008–2009 school year, Jeff relapsed into drug use. From then on, he became convinced that God had sent him on a divine mission to become Emperor of China. Over the coming months, as his behavior became increasingly erratic, Jeff drew up plans for his coronation, created websites, and near the end he cut open both sides of his mouth, giving himself a Glasgow smile like The Joker from The Dark Knight, posting pictures of on his MSN space, his Myspace, on Facebook and on his blog. He believed it was part of the divine change he needed to become the Emperor of China.
How does this relate to John? Like I said, most of what I found out came to me bit by bit. People like to talk in China, but only to the right people. I made friends with some of my female students, a female teacher, and this, along with speculation and hearsay, has given me enough pieces to fill in the blanks.
In John’s case, he’d already landed in hot water with Keith. Keith was going to get rid of him anyway, I have no doubt, and it just so happened that Jeff provided him with a convenient excuse.
Jeff raped a student.
Zhong Li, English name April, she was friends with John too. She was spotted going to and coming from John’s apartment. People saw them together out in town. She had the reputation some girls there get, about being a bit friendly to foreign men. Certainly to John, and before she killed herself she left a message on her friend’s QQ (an instant messenger in China) condemning the “foreign asshole” and what he’d done to her. The words were there on the paper, just waiting for the right person to come along and make a story.
Keith did. It doesn’t have to be true so long as it makes sense, and here’s the sense Keith’s version of events made: John hates China and Chinese people (as evident from the excerpts of his columns Keith provided) so John rapes his friend, driving her to suicide. Score another humiliation for the foreign assholes.
What is truth? What is memory? Two very subjective things. People have what they want to believe and they have what’s true. What they want to believe always looks nicer.
I remember the morning he woke me up. I’d gone out with some study abroad students at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (Hua Ke, to the initiated) and from drinking under the umbrellas at O2, we’d gone to DF, a club that was Chinese during the day but sometime past midnight turned African, along with some of the skankiest looking girls I’ve ever seen. I drank a lot, met a guy, we came back to my apartment, and I woke up to John. He looked like he’d seen a dead body.
I put some clothes on and followed him up to his apartment. He’d spent the night elsewhere, and had come back this morning to find a message waiting for him on the stairwell landing wall: ‘FUCK YOU JON’. His apartment door was open. Inside everything was trashed. They put a dead mouse under his laptop lid. They broke all his dishes. Papers torn, paint splashed everywhere, his bed remained made, with something on the pillow. I was there. I saw John turn it over.
It was a picture of him and Michelle.
I don’t know her Chinese name. The people who dealt with us all adopted English names and the name she adopted was Michelle. Nice name. Better than Welfare and Sweetie, two students from one of my afternoon classes.
She worked as a student assistant in the International Office. The International Office dealt with all the foreign teachers. We had Lisa, our Foreign Affairs Officer, and she had a boss, Laura. Michelle was a graduate student, doing what subject I don’t know, and she loved John.
To help you understand, let’s look at April. April did not love John. She liked him. But she did not love him. She cared about him no more than she cared about all the other men in her life.
Michelle was not April. Pushing thirty, John was her first kiss, an event which confused if not outright terrified her. You have to understand, virginity was still valued back then and for a woman like Michelle, small-town, close to her family, in a life of studying, tests and more tests, dating anyone was nowhere on her radar, not to mention kissing. So when John kissed her, she didn’t know how to react. She was scared. This was something new for her. Not new for me or John or perhaps yourself. For her, uncharted waters, her only guide some foreigner who was only going to be here a year, if that.
John loved her too…in his own way. What do I mean by that? I asked John, more than once, if he was going to date her, and he always dodged the question. One time he said they worked together, as if that by itself were an answer and you know what? It kind of was an answer, just not to the question I was asking.
I think John was afraid. To get close to someone, when you’re supposed to leave that next summer…I think Michelle felt the same thing. Yet they loved each other. They went on a date. They were building a relationship.
I have files on a USB. It’s a little 8 GB thumbdrive I bought way back in 2006, to keep papers on. On it I have pictures I took of the vandalism, and MSN conversations. Two of them are John’s.
Night before the police took him away he spent the night in my apartment. We stayed up drinking wine and watching old Frasier episodes. He told me everything. After I watched him go, I opened my computer and he had left his MSN signed in. There were messages waiting from Michelle. I read them and copied them to the USB and I have not looked at them since but I can still tell you what they said. Michelle was worried about their future. Chinese students like to use emoticons and she was no exception. Ending her message was a smiley pouring twin waterfalls of tears.
That was the last time I saw Michelle too.
John’s disappearance changed things. First, Jeff and Keith. Keith said John raped April. I think it was Jeff. I have no direct evidence connecting the two, I just know it wasn’t John and if any foreign teacher were going to do that, who are you left with? It became hard to ask Jeff — he killed himself. Accounts varied on that, and best as I can tell he took it in his poisonous little head to go to the top of our apartments and take a nosedive. Six stories he fell, and that was the end of him.
There are certain things you don’t talk about in China. The truth is one of them. You might know the truth. Good for you. You know the truth…and you shut the fuck up about it. Like I said earlier, I made friends with some of my students, and it didn’t end there. I ended up making friends with a Lili, a Chinese English teacher in Keith’s English program. She has an uncle who works for the Wuhan Police Department, and months after we’d become close, one night during movies she told me about Jeff’s apartment. A search turned up pages of scribbled nonsense, numerous knives, windows that were nailed shut, and a baggie of cocaine stuffed under his mattress.
One of the papers talked about his heir.
Jeff and John had that much in common at least: they liked to write. Whereas John was content to write about what happened, Jeff wrote about what he wanted to happen and he wanted an heir. He believed he was going to become the emperor of China. God had chosen him, after all, and how could God choose wrong? To continue his line, he needed an heir. He said this on the papers, and in the emails too.
Is it such a stretch to believe that Jeff took this idea from bizarre fantasy to sexual assault?
Keith is dead too.
Jeff killed him.
Keith, in the midst of framing John, must have inadvertently discovered what Jeff was doing. Maybe he knew Jeff assaulted April, I wouldn’t put it past him. Accounts vary on how Jeff did it — I’ve heard knife, I’ve heard gun, but how would Jeff get ahold of a gun in China?
But gunshot or knife, Keith, did not die right away. Pneumonia set in, carrying him off before he could gloat too much over what he did to John and Michelle.
Three teachers, gone like that. Yeah, you can bet things changed. Two dead. The third…
I told you it’s been seven years since John Ingram disappeared. I use the word ‘disappear’. If you’d asked me back then, as Wuhan’s winter extended from 2008 into a bitter 2009, I would’ve said ‘deported’, John was ‘deported’. That’s what I did say, actually, that’s what we all said.
Until I spoke to Lili’s uncle.
Her uncle was a rookie on the force and as befit his low rank he was assigned to help deal with foreign troublemakers. Wuhan didn’t have many foreign troublemakers back then and John was something of a guest at the police station, rather than a prisoner. He was well-behaved, and they saw no need for cuffs. Lili’s uncle offered him a cigarette, and at the bidding of his boss, he led John outside. But you see, it was cold outside, so Lili’s uncle went in to get John a cup of hot water. When he came out, John wasn’t there. John’s coat was.
It was draped over the wall, its tips swinging in a faint breeze.
After John disappeared, the school organized a trip to the Wuhan Music Conservatory, to see a Christmas performance. We all piled into the van, me beside Jack and his young girlfriend. As Jack mumbled something about getting fucked out of his summer pay, Lisa, stood up at the front and held up her hands. She spoke not just English but Chinese too like someone just getting a handle on how to talk.
“Is all person present?”
“You fucked me out of my summer pay,” Jack said.
“All person present? Please? Yes?”
“Where’s my fucking pay?”
That seemed to satisfy her because she took her seat and gave instructions to the driver.
Antonio was present. Michelle wasn’t.
I don’t know where she went or what happened to her in the years since I left. As for me, I worked the remainder of my contract, the black cloud of John’s disappearance lingering over everything. The school year ended in June. Jack left, exchanging Wuhan Computer Institute for a college further on the outskirts of Wuhan. I left too. I moved to Beijing, where I didn’t work on a contract but rather by the hour for a tutoring center. I rented an apartment in WuDaoKou, where I enjoyed the remaining moments of my carefree college years.
Time is a sneaky bastard. You mean to do something. You tell yourself you will, only to wake up one morning and find that seven years have passed. Every so often I’ll google John’s name, combine with China, Wuhan, Wuhan Computer Institute…only one thing comes up: his college newspaper columns.
In his first column he talks about his first impressions of China, and this line, the first line, says it all.
It is VERY loud here.
It was loud there — it was life. And here we are, the map shows us about four hours from landing.
Wuhan 2008. Wuhan today. China then, China now, me
John Ingram.
What’s changed? I remember what it was like. I remember sharing cigarettes with John Ingram after class. I remember going to KTV with my students. I remember a young man and a woman who smiled upon seeing him, a true smile, the guarded smile she showed to a select few. Most of all, I remember a changing city, an industrial never-never land where tomorrow was a bad rumor. I remember, John.
I remember.
THE END
December 2013, Norfolk, VA