AMERICAN Robert Collins, who now works as a manager for English First at the Xiangmihu school in Shenzhen, has had many misadventures in China.

But his favorite story involves a 5-year-old student in the city who went home and asked his parents to immediately call U.S. President George W. Bush. The boy said his tall, dark and bearded foreign teacher was actually Osama bin Laden.

Collins¡¯ height and multiracial ethnicity has stunned many of his Chinese students but their initial surprise is only amplified when Collins opens his mouth and speaks perfect Chinese.

Standing 1.96 meters tall and endowed with natural basketball talents, Collins was the star athlete in his hometown in southern Illinois. Having made the all-state team in the basketball-crazed Midwest United States, Collins had every reason to be supremely confident about his future.

After a number of successful years as a player, Collins, who is fluent in Latin, French, Spanish and Portuguese and manages conversational Italian and German, decided to retire from basketball and pursue his Chinese studies.

Having arrived in Beijing in 2002, Collins persevered through the SARS scare while teaching English. He later moved to Guangzhou and has been living in Shenzhen since 2004. Based on his own, overly critical assessment, his Chinese is at an intermediate level. His co-workers, however, say that Collins speaks excellent Chinese and that he has a grasp of characters that is rarely seen in a foreigner, especially one who started studying Chinese so late in life.

During his time in China, Collins has developed a deep appreciation for the Chinese people and their love for their homeland. He hopes to see China continue to develop as a responsible and productive member of the international community. As for his personal goals, Collins hopes to eventually get a Ph.D. in linguistics and has already decided what he wants to write his thesis on. ¡°I want to write about a proto language that was the original language from which all other languages stemmed.¡±

Editor: Wing