In June 2006 I wrote a column for the Beijinger magazine called "In Defense of Dashan." (I recently retired the column, "Ich Bin Ein Beijinger," in October of 2011, after 10 years doing it). It's this column to which Mark Rowswell refers in his excellent answer, which shows that he's admirably self-aware. In my many years in China I've now met many people who know him personally and all speak very highly of him. So while I've vowed that I won't punch him in the face, I cannot say the same for people I meet who, for no good reason, speak disparagingly of him.

In Defense of Dashan

Why do so many foreigners seem to hate Mark Rowswell?
June 2006

For those of you who aren’t familiar with him, Mr. Rowswell is the tall Canuck known to – and loved by – countless millions of Chinese people as Dashan, a persona he adopted when he first began appearing on Chinese television in the late 1980s. Dashan speaks really, really good Mandarin. There’s no arguing with that. He’s clearly put in his time learning it, taming the most pernicious of Chinese tongue-twisters, even mastering the mysteries of xiangsheng, or crosstalk – a sort of Chinese stand-up comedy that (trust me on this) can actually be pretty goddamn funny.

Ask around about him in Anglophone expat circles in China, however, and you’ll soon discover that there’s this pervasive and deep-seated hatred of the guy. Write anything on an English-language China blog about poor Mark Rowswell and you’ll unleash a torrent of vitriol. He seems to be every expat’s favorite whipping boy.

But what’s not to like? He’s not bad looking for a Canadian, and okay, he looks kind of silly in the Chinese outfits he’s been known to wear in his frequent television appearances, but he’s skilled at what he does. I briefly dated a woman who was his girlfriend when they were both at Peking University – and I’ll thank you not to rib me about Dashan’s sloppy seconds. Anyway, she had only good things to say about him – that he studied really hard, had good personal hygiene and kept his Mao suits neatly pressed. I personally see nothing at all objectionable about the man: He’s got his shtick, he’s making a handsome living at it and he’s certainly not hurting anyone.

Sure, Caucasian men in China – even those who bear little resemblance to the guy – are frequently mistaken for him. I can see how that would be annoying. But is that cause to hate the man? Do unreasonably tall East Asian men with slightly Neanderthal features living in the American South hate Yao Ming because rednecks mistake them for the center for the Rockets?

Part of it’s just petty envy. Novice Chinese language-learners start off completely blown away by the guy. Then, as they get better, the jealousy sets in, and builds and builds as they diss him online, in bars, to anyone who’ll listen, until it reaches breaking point. Resentment gives way to grudging admiration, and that in turn grows into a sort of Dashan-worship. But still, however worshipful, some small part of them – some small part of me too, I’ll admit – wants to punch Dashan in the face. I don’t know whether people feel the same about Charlotte MacInnis, the young American actress who goes by the Chinese name Ai Hua (literally, “Love China”) and does some ads with Dashan. Ms. MacInnis moved to Nanjing in 1988, when she was seven, and came to Beijing in ‘95, so I’m less impressed with her vexingly flawless Chinese than I am with Dashan’s, and I feel far less of an urge to punch her in the face.

Doubtless, Dashan’s sheer ubiquity contributes to the hatred expats feel for him. He’s on buses and billboards, and it’s hard to flip through cable without catching sight of his earnest Canadian mug. For years he was a regular on the CCTV Spring Festival extravaganza. He hosts all sorts of TV shows. He stars in ads for World King, the “number one electronic study aid in China.” He teaches intermediate Chinese on CCTV 9. He’s on the web at www.dashan.com. Sure, some of what he does – the endorsements and all that – is cheesy. But he is, after all, a Chinese television star, so what do you want?

Dashan, alas, has become the embodiment of what one sinophone friend of mine calls the “talking dog phenomenon” – the regrettable tendency for Chinese people to find Mandarin-speaking foreigners intrinsically amusing. A great many Chinese, you see, believe Mandarin to be a particularly difficult language for foreigners to master, and while I’ll grant learning to write is a bitch, is speaking it really all that hard? No verb conjugation, no noun declension, not a whole lot of morphemes – sure, there’s the tones, but are they really that hard?

The whole thing would look odd in the mirror. Imagine an American TV show where East Asian immigrants showed off their mastery of English before condescending studio audiences, performing stand-up routines, pop songs, and lame little skits while dressed up as cowboys or pilgrims or Native Americans.

Fortunately, at least here in Beijing, Chinese people are less and less amused by the “talking dogs.” Friends of mine with good spoken Mandarin report a noticeable decline in the frequency and intensity of compliments from cabbies and the like. Me? I wouldn’t mind a compliment now and again: Cabbies usually end up praising me for my fluency in my native tongue, English. I speak pretty good Mandarin, but I’ll be the first to admit I don’t hold a candle to ol’ Dashan.

In the end, the visceral hatred of Dashan says more about expats that hate him than it does about Chinese people. Another friend put his finger on it: “People seem offended by the thought of a white person reduced to what they see as a ridiculous performing monkey for the Chinese,” he said to me. “Coming from a North American culture that has produced a nearly endless supply of pop-culture racist caricatures over the years,” he added, “that seems unfair.”