Meet and Greet with Youtube’s greatest Chinese Educational Language and Culture Stars: Dan, Carmen, and Ben

On November 23, 2013, I had an awesome opportunity to attend Dan and Carmen’s first meet and greet in Flushing, NY. Dan and Carmen are both Youtube stars of NTD’s (New Tang Dynasty’s) comedy channel, Off the Great Wall aka OTGW. Dan and Carmen, along with their cast mates, produce educational and comedic videos on a regular basis. For those who want to learn more Mandarin and Chinese culture in an entertaining way, and perhaps some Shanghainese from Dan or Cantonese from Carmen, I recommend the OTGW channel. The videos are in English and I believe Cantotomando and OTGW have similar philosophies on our approaches to spreading and teaching the Chinese language to our audience. I want you all to have fun too at Cantotomando, but I don’t want you to skip the basics or the foundations of what we learn.

The meet and greet was located inside the Flushing Mall (Culture Square, Rm M117). Due to the really complicated layout of the mall, I arrived almost a half an hour late because I had no idea of the exact location. Carmen did post a video tour of the directions, but I was still confused. The Flushing mall was a maze to navigate through. I did take some nice pictures of what I believe is a typical weekend at the Flushing Mall though.

When I arrived, Dan acknowledged my presence, which embarrassed me a bit because I showed up late. I hate to be that person who shows up late and all eyes are on me, but I’m also thrilled that I was acknowledged by a Youtube star. Honestly, I thought Carmen and Dan were located in the U.K. because of Carmen’s English accent. I had no idea the NTD station was headquartered in New York City and that I had such close access to such awesome stars. Wow, I started imagining about working for NTD one day.

Dan and Carmen were in the middle of the Q&A session where Dan did most of the talking. He was really interested in where we all came from and if we shared any similar experiences we had that Dan encountered while growing up. One question that impacted Dan was the fact that his Chinese name is his officially first name and his name caused a lot of confusion with the public.

One popular question I’m sure the public is curious about is whether Carmen and Dan are dating each other in real life. Carmen explains that while it is natural to think that a man and a woman who work together and have so much screen time together can be dating, in actuality, Carmen and Dan are just really good friends. Personally, I never thought of them as a couple, but I do understand why a fan would think that way.

In the middle of the Q&A session, a third Youtube star showed up: Ben from the Learn Chinese Youtube channel. Interestingly, Ben was born in Hong Kong, but moved to the U.K. afterwards. His obsession and interest in the Chinese language and culture is very strong and as Dan mentioned, perhaps stronger than any Chinese person with Chinese roots. Ben likes to study and translate ancient Chinese script. I do admit that I like the Chinese culture to some degree, but I don’t like it enough to start studying ancient Chinese script so I have to give Ben a lot of credit. While Ben speaks little Cantonese, his Mandarin skills are a lot stronger. He didn’t speak too much at the Q&A, but it’s always interesting to hear him talk about his life.

We were supposed to have our fourth Youtube star appear at the meet and greet, but for unknown reasons, she never showed up. She is NTD’s Mia from the Asian Beauty Secrets channel.

Dan’s younger sister was also proudly standing next to Dan during the whole event. She is so cute, vocal, and innocent. Dan and Carmen are really lucky to have such supportive family members.

Towards the end of the Q&A, two cute children walked up to Dan and Carmen and gave them both drawings that the siblings created themselves as gifts. That was a really touching moment how a Youtube channel can influence so many people around the world. I hope CantotoMando can also reach that goal one day. I’m not against creating a Youtube channel, but I simply do not have the resources to do it. Carmen and Dan have other jobs and film their videos usually at night or on the weekend so I suppose I have no excuse besides that I am not video editing savvy. My priority though, will always be to document the Chinese language and culture first on Cantotomando because this information will be accessible to all.

While I’m sure our Youtube stars can chat all day, they had to move events along in the interest of time. Carmen told us that we would all take a quiz about the videos in the OFTW channel. The top two people with the highest scores would win a free family tree poster. One of OFTW’s most popular videos is the video that involves Chinese terminology stating the relationships of a relative in relation to the speaker in a typical Chinese family tree. The Mandarin version of the video was so popular that a Cantonese version was created as well followed by posters for sale in both languages available at the Zazzle website.

Because of OTGW’s family tree video, I was inspired to create the ultimate family tree terminology, which I am still working on. For those who are interested, I started writing about the family relationships: here.

To find out what questions Carmen asked, check out the description section of their official Youtube video of the meet-and-greet.

I admit that while I do like the channel, I have not watched all their videos yet. I certainly would not know a lot of the answers to their trivia. Those who had the most correct answers kept their hand raised until they had their top two winners.

Almost running a half an hour overtime, Dan announced that they will be taking pictures with fans and selling family tree posters as well. Unfortunately, I could not stay any longer because I had to rush to another appointment. I think it was Carmen’s mother who sold the posters, but she wanted the buyers to practice their Mandarin as well so she purposely tried to speak Mandarin to me as I bought both a Mandarin and Cantonese poster. Embarrassingly, my Mandarin is still not up to par when it comes to conversation. I was able to order both posters, but I did understand what she said when she told me to check it over to see if they were the correct posters. I would post our conversation except that I don’t remember what I exactly said anymore.

After I left, Dan, Carmen, and Ben posed for pictures with the fans and the line extended across the room. Dan and Carmen signed posters and sadly, I did not get mine signed. I thought that I could get them signed the next time around, but then I heard surprising news on the OTGW channel. On December 4th, 2013, Carmen announced that she was moving on from OTGW to another project within NTD Television. Dan still remains as one of the main hosts along with the rest of the OTGW team. I am remaining hopeful that this is not goodbye though because I’m sure we will see more great things from the staff at NTD in the future. One thing is for certain: New York City is the place to be as it acts as a hub to learning about almost everything while being accessible to almost everything.