While redoing this site in mid-2011, I found this interesting bit from my 2007 website. I couldn’t really dump that bit, so I’ve decided to copy and stick this bit into the new site first, and then, on one of these visits to a Starbucks, expand and update this…

Note: What you’re reading is most likely outdated.

I was born late in the night one January evening in 1982. I clearly remember being born in Hepingli Hospital and then being transferred to my granny’s place in Hepingli (northern Beijing) — but the Official Mom and Dad Version was that I was brought to a house in Jinsong (eastern Beijing) instead. No matter whose side you’re on, you’ve got to recognize one thing: from the moment I was born, there were reports of a serious bookworm in the making, with mom and granny spying on me at age 1, only to find me reading a Beijing newspaper (in Chinese).

The newspapers were replaced with stamps at age 6, as I started a short-lived attempt at stamp collecting (given up in disgust when I found out I had missed a Penny Black — I should have picked that guy up!), and with textbooks by age 8, as I started schooling at the Inter-Community School, Zurich. I was the only kid from all of China (I clearly remembered that there was only a flag over mainland China — none for Hong Kong, Macao or Taiwan — in our school’s World Map).

In autumn 1991, a great thing happened: Mr D’Arcy from Ireland got me hooked on Macs through his great computer lessons. (By the way, the word “great”, as well as the word “grand”, are the only two words which really describe Mr D’Arcy well… he was that grand.) Although I got a start with MS-DOS back in 1989, its .bat files and Norton Commander unplugged me. Type To Learn on a non-Mac Apple computer was better, and the “better” trend continued into that stratospheric level called “best” when I met the Mac.

In that same year, a sure sign of a multilingual David Feng began to make itself felt. Having merely mastered Chinese at age 6 (my late grandma, bless her heart, failed a few characters short of 2,000), I next tackled the Anglican tongue and in 1991, Deutsch. The trend continued in 1994 with Français, and in 1996 with Italian. By 1998, I started tackling bumper stickers in Latin (you read that right). A Japanese Apple ad in 2000 got me excited in the Tongue of Tokyo, and being Class President in 2001 forced me through the Tongues of Taejon and Taegu (aka Korean).

All very well. Except for my Chinese started sliding downhill… at speeds to make the average avalanche merely stare in awe. Already back in 1991, I managed only with a few words of Chinese and even less written Chinese. (The only two characters I could make out simplified and traditional Chinese were “dong dan”, a shopping district in central Beijing.) No amount of hollering and yelling from Daddy could get me back into the Hutonghua of Beijing, it seemed; family insiders often tell of horrific intra-family wars, with Dad roaring in Chinese and me shrieking back at the unfortunate father in French.

A forced(-by-dad), voluntary (I accepted it) “abduction” (with Swissair Business Class treatment) from Zurich Airport back to Beijing Shunyi Airport on August 24, 2000 changed all of that. I started university at the University of International Business and Economics on September 11, 2000. The mission: an international finance diploma in four years.

The lessons were a real mix. We had some really nice lessons where I got to let my speaking skills be known (especially the Culture and Trade lessons — my prezo on Starbucks started a debate by a Korean about why he thinks Starbucks shouldn’t be in the Forbidden City). We had some really nice lessons where I got to be the teacher (I’ll never forget the David Feng Noise Pollution on October 31, 2003 — our English teacher was off and I got to take over a class of Koreans, Vietnamese, Mongolians, Americans, Indonesians, Japanese, and so on and so forth — and how I made life miserable for the unfortunate few). But mostly — honestly — the lessons sucked. A typical UIBE teacher position would see L’Insegnante stick her right arm over the mouse, her mouth aligned on-par with the microphone, and her eyes staring at nobody in particular. 90 minutes of that stuff — can you believe that?

I couldn’t, and I refused to let those four years be wasted like that. So I had to get something started. Fortunately, there was hope: I got my hands on a PowerBook G4 Titanium in 2001 and an iBook G3 in 2002 and started the Beijing Macintosh User Group with 6 other people (from six other nations) on March 2, 2002. The rest, they say, is history.

Still, uni-wise, my talents went wasted for over three years. Then, my life kind of changed on December 5th, 2003. I got to co-host an English speaking competition. I gave it a go. It was great — everyone was entertained. I had an undaunting task of de-boring an audience of 600, and I did it really well. That was all that was needed to lurch me into the media world.

2004 would see me in front of the mic — even entertaining an audience of a thousand in Chinese as I co-hosted a fashion show. As fate would have it, I spent most of 2004 and 2005 in personal hiding (not that I had done anything wrong, but still). I spent late 2005 cooking up four great BeiMac meetings that saw the start of the Beijing iPod User Group. A 100+ meeting came in March 2006, and with that, came a couple couple dozen projects (nope, that’s not a typo) and stole the summer from me.

As things stand in June 2007, I’m inundated with new projects. The Mac, media and — get this — “other projects” (like a wiki and columns) form my Big Three, career-wise, and I might be looking at a doctorate in comparative international constitutional law to top things off. So for the next few years — I’m gonna be really busy.

Still, I think that’s no big deal. CompuServe once said it in its ads: “A busy Mac is a happy Mac.” I think that’s a great way to finish a quick autobio. Rest assured I’ll stay busy for a long time to come, and you’ll be seeing more of me in the Mac and media worlds.