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The wording of the title is misleading because he wasn't a comedian in Canada. I wouldn't really consider him a "Canadian comedian" so much as a "Chinese comedi
by kyllo 14y ago
The wording of the title is misleading because he wasn't a comedian in Canada. I wouldn't really consider him a "Canadian comedian" so much as a "Chinese comedian from Canada." The entirety of his career as an entertainer has been in China, in the Mandarin language. His Mandarin is truly beyond native-speaker level.
But yes, as a white guy in China it is kind of annoying to have to listen to Chinese people bring up Dashan every time you open your mouth. In China, he is the original token-Mandarin-speaking-white-guy character. And I get the impression that he got there not just by studying Chinese really hard (way before it was cool), but also by agreeing to do whatever he was asked to, and never complaining about it.
See, as a non-Asian person in China, strangers will come up and ask to take their photo with you constantly. They will even approach you on the street, at school/work, or even while you're eating dinner in a restaurant, and proposition you with all types of casting calls for bizarre modeling and performance jobs where they just need a white person, any white person. Most of us politely decline--because it's creepy--but he seems like the guy that always said yes and hammed it up for the camera.
- bashou 14y agoWhere have you gone? I don't think here people treat foreigners as another species.
- mads 14y agoI live in China and I am being treated very well. Obviously I am not Chinese, so people are just curious about who I am and where I come from. The staring is still what annoys me most, but getting used to it - I love when people come up and try to talk to me in broken English and I will answer them in broken Mandarin.. Did have the photo experience two times - oddly enough it was in Hong Kong. I think they must have been Chinese mainlanders on a tourist trip.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- kyllo 14y agoI lived in Chengdu, Sichuan from 2004-2005 as an exchange student. Have taken 4-5 trips to various parts of China since then. Foreigners are of course becoming less of a novelty in China than they once were. It's definitely getting better. But seeing a tall white man speaking fluent Mandarin still commonly evokes Dashan comparisons. It isn't really offensive, it just gets mildly annoying by the 1,000th time you hear it. The random casting calls were much more offensive. Not sure if they still do this--in the bigger cities like Shanghai and Beijing they probably don't have to anymore--but when I was in China, the demand for white faces in marketing media greatly outstripped the supply, so it was very common to be approached and begged to participate in some type of photo shoot or stage act for perhaps 1,000 kuai. So, any white guy could feel like Dashan for a day if he were so inclined.
- gruseom 14y agoThe wording of the title is correct – it would be entirely nonstandard to describe him as a "Chinese comedian". But also he strikes me as distinctly Canadian in ways that go beyond having been born here (I'm Canadian). The point that he makes about adaptability to other cultures is salient. And the Darshan character's eager-beaver obligingness is a comedic exaggeration of Canadian "niceness". It's interesting that none of the people who express annoyance about Darshan in this thread show any recognition of the distinction between the performer and his character – something Rowswell wrote about at length. Perhaps he is intrinsically annoying and his critics are on to something inauthentic in his act, but to a blank slate observer such as myself it seems as likely that his offense is to have over-accommodated the Chinese perspective instead of sticking with certain Western prejudices. In any case he is an extraordinarily fascinating case study in the grey area between two cultures.