Which Obama is Fluent in Chinese?
Do you remember which Mandarin speaking Obama family member that we posted about previously? Just like us, President Obama and the First Lady are parents of an African American student that is studying Chinese.
Early last year, Sasha practiced her Mandarin language skills with President Hu Jintao during his visit to the White House. Little did we know that President Obama also has a step-brother that is fluent in Chinese and currently lives in China.
On the streets of Guangzhou and nearby Shenzhen, Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo is turning heads. Since holding a press conference for his semiautobiographical Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Novel of Love in the East on Nov. 4, Ndesandjo, a half brother of U.S. President Barack Obama, has appeared on television in Hong Kong, and his picture has been splashed on the front pages of China Daily, the South China Morning Post and other regional newspapers.
Ndesandjo had shunned the limelight until now. He is one of two children born to Barack Obama Sr. and his third wife, an American teacher named Ruth Nidesand, whom Obama Sr. met while the two were students at Harvard. Tall and slim like the President, Ndesandjo had avoided any association with the Obama name. For most of his life, he used only his stepfather’s Tanzanian surname, Ndesandjo, but he has now added Okoth, a word from the language of his father’s Kenyan tribe, the Luo, as well as his original surname, Obama.
His novel, written in diary form, is based on his experiences growing up with an abusive, alcoholic father and moving to China, where he fell in love with a Chinese woman and began working with orphans. President Obama’s name is mentioned just once, when Ndesandjo thanks several people, including “Barack,” in the foreword. With this book, Ndesandjo says he’s stepping into the public eye in order to raise awareness of domestic violence, promote volunteerism and share his tale of starting a new life in a new land. “I am an Obama, and a large part of my life was a repudiation of that,” Ndesandjo tells TIME. “To a certain extent, my brother … opened my eyes to things that I had left behind for a long time.” (Ndesandjo is still reticent about detailing his personal life beyond the fictionalized account, saying he may save that for a second book, a true autobiography.)
Ndesandjo’s life was hardly ordinary even before the world discovered his connection to the President of the United States. Educated at international schools in Nairobi, Ndesandjo, an American citizen, moved to the U.S. after high school, where he earned physics degrees from Stanford and Brown as well as an executive M.B.A. from Emory University. Soon after 9/11, he was laid off from his marketing job at telecommunications-equipment maker Nortel Networks in Atlanta. He decided to reinvent himself by moving to China, a country he had visited with classmates while at Emory. Since 2002, he has taught English and worked as a business consultant in Shenzhen, a 14 million–strong metropolis in southern China, just across the border from Hong Kong.
His self-published book was released just days before his brother’s visit to China. Ndesandjo says he plans to introduce his wife, a native of Henan province whom he married last year, to his brother before he leaves China on Wednesday. During the course of TIME’s interview in Guangzhou, Ndesandjo, who speaks fluent Mandarin and practices Chinese calligraphy, was overwhelmingly positive about his life in China and the Chinese people and culture. “I’m so happy my brother is coming to China because I’ve experienced the warmth and the graciousness of the Chinese people,” he says. “If we can continue seeing the mutual positive points in these two great cultures, I think it’ll be good for the world in general.”
