(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-02-29 16:07

　　Brendan O'Kane not only speaks Chinese like a native, but also writes a popular blog in Chinese. Guo Yingguang

Anyone who has been in Beijing for a while knows how the taxi drivers behave - they talk a lot about everything. Hence the other day, Brendan O'Kane, an Irish American who has been living in Beijing for the past four years, was not surprised that the cabbie started chatting even before he'd gotten comfortable in his seat.

For about 10 minutes, the driver tried to convince him that "foreigners can never really learn Chinese".

O'Kane was amused. Apparently, the taxi driver had assumed he was a Chinese. Dark brown haired, O'Kane is of medium height and has a slim figure. He admits that from time to time, people in China mistaken him as a Uygur.

"I am American," says the 24-year-old in articulated Mandarin, as clearly and fluently as one might expect from a native speaker.

The taxi driver was suspicious. For a while, he threw several glances back at his passenger.

"Of course, there will always be some exceptional few who might really make it. But that's only because they have some Chinese ancestry," continues the taxi driver, sure that he would at least this time strike a chord with his Chinese-like foreign passenger.

But he was wrong again.

Born to an Irish father and an American mother, O'Kane grew up in Philadelphia. He doesn't know of any trace of Chinese blood in his family tree, at least not within the last five generations.

Yet he can not only speak Chinese like a native, he reads Chinese classics, recites poems from the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907), reviews and translates Chinese modern literature.

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