09/10.19 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE 65
JO
HN
A
LL
EN
C
HA
U/
FA
CE
BO
OK
sunlight till today and my nice tan I had
acquired started to fade, as well as my thickly
callused feet. The benefit of that is that I was
essentially in quarantine. I met last night
with the fishermen who are all believers and
who agreed to drop me off. The meeting
went well—I trust them. The drop-zone was
pointed out on the map as being a cove on the
SW of the island and I depart in three or so
hours. The plan is to link up with the crew and
depart tonight, arriving at the shore around- From there we make progressive con-
tact with fish as gifts over the next few days,
then send me off. Depending on the dark-
ness, I might land briefly and bury and cache
a pelican case for later. We might even send
the kayak laden with gifts towards shore.
Soli Deo Gloria!
John Chau was the son of an unlikely
couple, Patrick Chau and Lynda Adams-
Chau. Patrick is a Chinese American
success story. Born in Guangzhou in 1952,
he had been training to be an artist when,
in 1968, amid the turmoil of Mao’s Cultural
Revolution, he was forced onto a communal
farm and made to work ten hours a day, seven
days a week, for six years. In 1974, Patrick’s
father secured his son’s passage to Hong
Kong. Two years later, Patrick emigrated to
the United States, working odd jobs in Los
Angeles and learning English from the radio
before being accepted to study chemistry at
the University of Southern California.
In 1983, Patrick won an Army scholarship
to attend medical school at Oral Roberts
University, an evangelical college in Tulsa,
Oklahoma. Patrick applied himself to his
new religion as assiduously as his studies,
reading the Bible, learning how to construct
religious arguments, and declaring himself
a Christian. Though never quite comfort-
able with ORU’s evangelism, he found thatat its medical school “no one
cared about your religion as
long as you do your work.” In
Tulsa he met Lynda Adams,
an ORU professor who taught
social work, at a Christmas
party. The couple married in
1985, and Lynda gave birth to
Brian in 1986. Patrick gradu-
ated from med school at 35
in 1988. Marilyn was born in
early 1989 around the time
that the family moved to Ala-
bama for Patrick to begin his
psychiatric residency. In 1991,
Patrick deployed to the Gulf
War as an army reservist. Soon
after he returned, Lynda gave
birth to John.
While Lynda was devout,
Patrick’s faith had more practical founda-
tions. He retained an attachment to Confu-
cianism, but Christianity had given him an
education, a profession, and a family, and he
was happy for it to guide his wife and chil-
dren. When Patrick opened a psychiatry
practice in Vancouver, Washington, Lynda
became an organizer for the Christian fel-
lowship Chi Alpha at Washington State Uni-
versity’s local campus, and their three chil-
dren attended a private school, Vancouver
Christian. Patrick saw no conflict between
faith and science, and he enjoyed debating
religious doctrine the same as he would a
medical text. Brian and Marilyn inherited
their father’s pragmatic conformism and,
in near identical careers, studied premed at
ORU, then medicine at Loma Linda Univer-
sity, a school founded by Seventh-day Ad-
ventists in Southern California. They both
became disability specialists focusing on
veterans.
John took after his father’s more wistful
side. Patrick still painted, filling the family
home with idyllic landscapes: a single cabin
in the mountains with smoke pluming from
its chimney, or a lone figure in a canoe pad-
dling through the wilderness. Years later, John
wrote about a picture of a three-masted ship
on a stormy sea that his father completed the
year he was born. “When I was a kid, I used to
gaze constantly at this,” he said. “After read-
ing The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the first
thing I did was to put my hand on the painting
to see if I could enter into the world of Narnia.
... I think this painting helped spark adven-
ture in my young soul.”
On weekends, Patrick and Lynda took
their children camping and hiking in the hills
and woods around Vancouver. In a memo-
rial essay that he distributed to friends after
John’s death, Patrick said that when his son
was younger, he was obsessed with BB-gunwar games, forming his own team when he
entered high school. But as John grew older,
he was increasingly drawn to the sense of the
divine that he felt when surrounded by un-
trammeled wilderness. “Why do I hike?” he
wrote years later. “To see but a brief glimpse
of the Glory of the Creator.”
Patrick remembers John first mentioning
living on a desert island at the age of ten. It was
2002, John had read Robinson Crusoe, and the
family was on vacation in Hawaii when John
announced that one day he wanted to live in
a place exactly like that, swinging through
the trees, jumping into the water, and spear-
ing jellyfish. Patrick had laughed. But the
notion of island life stuck with John, and over
the years Patrick watched his son refine and
reinforce his ambition.
In 2008, as a junior in high school, John
traveled to Mexico on a school mission to
help build an orphanage. He enjoyed meet-
ing new people, and the experience made
him wonder what the ultimate version of
such a trip might be. On his return to Van-
couver, John began a search for the most re-
mote tribes on earth, which soon turned up
a string of islands in the Indian Ocean. John
read how for thousands of years, the tribes
on the Andamans and Nicobars had cut
themselves off from the world. As far back
as the second century A.D., the Egyptian
geographer Ptolemy wrote about “an island
of Cannibals” in the archipelago. In the 13th
century, Marco Polo called the islanders “no
better than wild beasts ... heads like dogs
and teeth and eyes likewise ... a most cruel
generation [who] eat everybody that they
can catch, if not of their own race.”
After establishing a settlement on the
Andamans in the mid-19th century, the
British identified five separate “Negrito”
tribes and, on the more southern Nicobars,
two “Mongoloid” groups from Asia. Inevi-
tably, the colonialists devastated the tribes’
numbers along with their solitude. By the
1930s, one Andamanese tribe, the Jangil,
was extinct. Three others—the Great An-
damanese, the Onge, and the Jarawa—had
suffered a population collapse from several
thousand to a few hundred. The only people
to survive untouched were the hundred or
so souls thought to be living on North Sen-
tinel, the name that Britain gave the small
square island, just five miles long and four
miles across, that marked the northern sea
approach to its new administrative capital,
Port Blair. That a people had managed to
live alone in the wilderness for so long was a
marvel to John. Patrick described how when
John “finally found the last frontier of unex-
plored land and people untouched by Chris-
tianity, he was excited, as if the place and the
people were specifically left for him.”Chau in
Washington’s
North Cascades
in 2017