Martin thought we needed laowai unity.
He was pushing sixty, an overweight ex-pat with red veins on his nose who announced to me the first time I met him that the Chinese “are more civilized than you.”
“They look at you like you’re a barbarian,” Martin said, “which you are. You totally are.”
This is actually how Martin viewed all foreigners, himself most of all.
We needed laowai unity because the foreign affairs office was xenophobic. They were against us. He based this on a story he told every single new teacher about how they tried to scam him out of money. And when he wasn’t telling us this story, he was giving us others. About the millions he’d made in the UK, about how he invented a form of engineering, about all the beautiful women he’d slept with, about how the professors at a prestigious local university conspired to have him fired because his lectures were too intelligent for them.
Stories that centered around one theme: he was a god among ants who chose to come to China because he objectively decided that China is sooo much better, sooo much nicer than the dreadful, awful West.
Step one to laowai unity was a group dinner. We were three young guys, one young girl, and two older men. We sat around the table, more or less shooting the bull, and when I brought up teaching freshman English, Martin had something to add to it.
“The first time I taught freshman English…” A grin stretched his lips wide. “…all the girls asked if they could come back and fuck me.”
We never had another dinner together.
