Being Dashan

TV personality Mark Rowswell, a household name in China since the '80s, will present his stand-up act at the upcoming Meet in Beijing Arts Festival. Chen Nan reports.

Mark Rowswell became famous in China at age 23.

Among the country's early expats, he came to China in the late '80s as an exchange student from Canada to learn Chinese at Peking University. He then appeared on Chinese television, playing in a skit the role of a peasant, named Xu Dashan, who returns home late and begs his wife to open the door.

The performance, aired on China Central Television during the Spring Festival holiday in 1988, was viewed by millions. Since then, Rowswell, who was welcomed by Chinese audiences for his fluency in Mandarin and on-screen presence, has become a household name in the country. Chinese TV viewers call him "Dashan".

In the past 20 years, Rowswell has acted in many Chinese television series and appeared as a cultural ambassador at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and the 2010 Shanghai Expo, among other major events. Now, he is moving toward a new direction - stand-up comedy.

After nearly three years of preparation, he will present his first such act at Beijing's Tianqiao Performing Arts Center on Sunday. The show is also one of the highlights of the Meet in Beijing Arts Festival, one of China's largest annual cultural events, which begins later this month and runs through May.

Rowswell's move also comes from learning xiangsheng, or crosstalk, a traditional Chinese comic art form. He learned it from established Chinese performer Jiang Kun.

He has also picked up other traditional Chinese folk art forms, such as kuaiban, a form of storytelling accompanied by the performer making sounds with a set of small bamboo clappers.

"One of the fundamental differences between stand-up comedy and xiangsheng is that xiangsheng is a whole package with a beginning, a developing section and the end. Stand-up comedy is unstructured. It's loose and just goes from joke to joke," Rowswell tells China Daily.

"What I do is sort of halfway in between. It's basically a 60-minute autobiographical show and I tell my story of being a foreign student in Beijing, meeting Jiang Kun, starting to learn xiangsheng and becoming a celebrity."

Born and raised in Ottawa, he graduated with a degree in Chinese studies from the University of Toronto. In 1988, he received a full scholarship to learn Chinese in Beijing. At the time, he wanted to do business, educational or cultural programs. Becoming a performer was totally by accident, he says.

Two years ago, he looked back at his life and asked himself: "What's my legacy?"

In 2013, when he had already been on Chinese television for 25 years and wanted to do something new, he noticed that young audiences in Beijing and Shanghai were beginning to enjoy modern Chinese stand-up comedy.

His Irish-American comedian friend Des Bishop invited him to perform at one such show at Renmin University in Beijing.

"I hadn't done comedy (for long) and my voice was shaking," he recalls.

Later that year, he started performing at small venues with Chinese stand-up comedians Xi Jiangyue, Tony Chou and Jeff Shi, who are also expected to be guest performers at his upcoming show.

"This is not something you do inside a TV studio. You have to talk to live audiences rather than talking to cameras. You have real reaction," Rowswell says.

"Of all the things I have done in my career, this is by far the most difficult. It's much easier to host a big event when a prime minister visits. It's hard to do an original composition, hold the attention of audiences for an hour and make them laugh," he adds.

He believes that stand-up comedy has a market in China because young people are not satisfied with what they see on television.

He hopes to develop a new performance every two years and take the show on tour before putting it online.

With his family living in Toronto, Rowswell frequently travels between China and Canada. Married to a Chinese woman, the father of two teenage children says that unlike young performers, who are looking for every opportunity to make a breakthrough, he is just focusing on one thing.

"This is the last stage of my career. I am writing the end of my story, not the beginning."

He is proud of his shows from the '80s.

"But nobody wants to watch them in 2016. That era has passed. I want to do something that's more current, something that I can look back in 10 years and say ... that was a good show I did (in 2016)."

Contact the writer at chennan@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily USA 04/22/2016 page15)