The art of hitting the right accent
Beijing-based, American-raised comedian Mike Sui loves both the English and Chinese languages, regardless of how they are spoken
In 2012, a nine-minute video of a 26-year-old American from Wisconsin mimicking Chinese, French, Russian, Japanese, African-Americans and Caucasians speaking English and Putonghua turned him into an overnight internet celebrity in China.
The video has been viewed about 10 million times across various websites. The actor and producer of the video, Mike Sui, 29, has a Chinese father and American mother and grew up in both China and the US, making him completely familiar with both languages and cultures. Sui switches effortlessly between Mandarin and English, in a variety of accents, during the conversation.
This year, Sui released his second video, which also featured accents but mostly dealt with dialects. Despite the video being another success, Sui said he got the uneasy feeling that people were making false assumptions about what he was trying to do. He opened up - not entirely seriously - to the Sunday Morning Post about his career plans, changes in his life after releasing the videos, his opinions on the "zero creativity in the Chinese short-video market' and the shallowness of the mainland's celebrity circle, and life in general as a laowai (expat) in Beijng.
I made two videos with my buddy [the mainland singer] Wang Xiaokun, and then his fans were, like, "since you guys are friends, I'll be your fan too". But what I really wanted to know was if people actually liked who I was. Secondly, the ying yu ge (English bro) guy put out a video where he did nine different English accents, and I was like "shish, whatever. I can destroy him". So when I watched his video, I was like: "dude, good skills, but you misread the market. You're a Chinese person in China, and not that many people - only those people who watch mei ju (American dramas) hear some of these accents, so you are just doing what the rest of the world is doing".