Meeting you, I am very happy.

BOSTON - I’ve seen the light, and his name is Ma Dawei.

Ma Dawei is a fictional character with whom my Chinese classmates and I have become intimately familiar the past few months. Today I met him, and it was one of the most fascinating lectures I’ve ever attended.

A little background: I’ve been studying Mandarin for nearly a year now. The textbook my school uses for the first two years of study is the “New Practical Chinese Reader” Beijing Language & Culture University. The text consists of grammar lessons, reading passages, character maps and cultural notes, but the most important part is the dialogues. Here a set of six reoccurring characters who live in China interact in increasing sophisticated ways.

Overall the dialogues are pretty good, but there are some necessary concessions in order to introduce vocabulary and grammar at the right pace. An example, from the lesson we’re studying this week:


Lu Yuping: Where is the kitchen?
Wang Xiaoyun: The kitchen is to the north of the living room. The bedroom is to the east of the living room. There is a big balcony at the outside of bedroom.
Ding Libo: Mr. Reporter, you have already asked so many questions. You must also want to write an article to introduce Ma Dawei’s rented house.
Lu Yuping: Asking questions is a reporter’s professional habit.

Over the course of the year, these six people have almost become fellow classmates. I wanted to know what happened when Lin Na lost her bike, or why Wang Xiaoyun didn’t like the Chinese opera performance, and not just because it was homework.

Imagine my surprise when our teacher informed us two weeks ago that Ma Dawei – one of the main characters from the text - would be coming to our university. As a special bonus, the usually quite stingy-on-the-grades Chinese department would be offering a half-point on our final grade for attending. I was there.

Ma Dawei is really Brian Connors (a cartoon representation is at the top of this entry, which bears no resemble to the actual person), a slightly stocky Irish-American 28-year-old from Michigan. He’s not ugly or goofy or any of the stereotypes that sometimes are attached to foreigners in Asia, but he wouldn’t stand out in a crowd, either. He’s just an ordinary American dude, an ordinary American dude who speaks really, really good Chinese.

How good is Ma Dawei’s Chinese? Until three weeks ago, the entire Chinese department thought his voice was dubbed on our textbook’s audio and video cassette tapes (that’s a bit of misnomer, because all our materials are now online). When informed otherwise, my teachers promptly invited him for a pep talk.

“Chinese people often tell me that I speak better Mandarin than they do,” he said. “And most of the time, it’s true.”

Connors’ standard Mandarin accent is top-notch. In a three minute introduction, Connors managed to get the jaws of the vast majority of the Chinese department on the floor by speaking so quickly and fluently.

He gave tons of advice. I haven’t spent too much time in Mainland China – just two months – but it was just long enough to realize that what he was saying was absolutely true. Avoid hanging out with Americans while on your language program. Even if you’re speaking Chinese, talking with the locals will be much better. He also said to expect your relationships with Chinese people to be almost exclusively business-based at the beginning.

“Understand what you are both bringing to the table,” he said.

I dealt with this last point in Hong Kong. It felt like the locals who wanted to hang out with me only wanted to use me as a fountain of knowledge about the English language. Sometimes in order to make long lasting friendships, at the beginning they might have to be based on the tools and skills that each person brings to the table. For Connors, that was playing music with a local band (which brought in extra cash for having a white person frontman) and valuable conversation experience for him. I’m not sure what the comparable skill would be for me, but I’m certainly going to be thinking hard about it in the months to come.

Ma Dawei is a China success story. He completed the challenging John Hopkins in Nanjing program and is now enrolled at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He co-owns a café in Beijing with an attached English instruction program called Sculpting in Time. He plans to return to China after graduation and run the café full-time. It’s a long way from his upbringing.

“I’m just an ordinary dude from Michigan who likes Phish,” Connors said.

Was it worth it? I’m entirely sure from his talk. There were undercurrents, although mostly unspoken, that he wasn’t completely satisfied with his life in China. It seemed be a question of not if he would come back to America, but when.

As for the café, I hope to gather a little first-hand experience this June when I’m in Beijing. Connors set the bar pretty high in his description, so I am expecting the best.

One more thought from Mr. Connors was notable. “Living is China is incredibly strange experience,” he said. “Everyday there was a crazy event that I could have written a short story about.”

Considering my own planned future, I certainly hope that’s true.


(The title of this post is an overly literal translation from one of the New Practical Chinese Reader’s beginning lessons. I believe it was uttered by or to Ma Dawei, but I’m not really sure. The Chinese is： 认识您，我很高兴)