You are probably thinking, "Who is Da Shan?" Well, I will tell you a little about him. Da Shan is a Canadian that was born in Ottawa, Ontario that started learning Chinese at the University of Toronto. His English name is Mark Henry Rowswell. His first Chinese language teacher gave him the Chinese name Lu Shiwei. Anyway, his Chinese was so good that he then went to Peking University. Then he came to China to learn more Chinese. Eventually, he became fluent in Mandarin and did a commercial in Cantonese. He was made very famous in China by a famous comedian that took Mark Roswell on as a student. Then his cross-talk comedy acts with the really famous guy, commercials, TV broadcasting all made him super famous in China. So now you see him face and hear him talking in Mandarin all over the place. But now he is older so you do not see him as much. Everyone still knows about Da Shan in China, and his name means Big Mountain. In the 2008 Olympics, Da Shan walked in with the Canadian Olympic team, and that earned a big applause from the Chinese crowd. So, now that you know a little about Da Shan, I will tell you how I am better than him.
At the beginning of July, our family went to our small hometown called NanChong. There we went to church, but my sister and I got bored because we could not understand that much of the sermon so we went outside to walk around. I saw an older woman also walking around. She saw us and then began talking to us in Mardarin, but since I knew she could speak the SiChuan dialect of Chinese, I replied to her in that. She was very happy that I could speak SiChuan dialect, so we talked for a long time. In the middle of our conversation, an elder man also walked up to us and started listening into our conversation. I did not mind cause it is not every day that he would be able to see a foreigner talking almost fluently in SiChuan dialect. There was a short pause in the conversation and the elder man looked at me and said, "Your Chinese is better than Da Shan!" At that I felt very happy, since Da Shan is famous and I am just a foreigner that lives in China. My mom said he only said that cause I was speaking in SiChuan dialect and that was the older man's home language. But maybe I am better than Da Shan, who knows. :)
