Lao Pan's original name is William N. Brown. Born in the United States in 1956, Lao Pan is now a professor at the School of Management, Xiamen University. He was the first foreigner in Fujian Province that had been granted the Permanent Residency. A recipient of the Friendship Award of the Chinese Government and the Top Ten Outstanding Foreign Teachers Award, he was also one of the many foreign friends that Party Secretary Xi Jinping held in high esteem.

A City He Fell in Love at First Sight

Lao Pan's stories with China started from his admiration of this remote and enigmatic foreign land. In the 1970s, Lao Pan was only a lad in his 20s and he joined the US Air Force. During a special training mission in Taiwan, he first became interested in the mainland at the other side of the Taiwan Straight.

Lao Pan was attracted by the profound history and abundant culture of mainland China. To learn Chinese, he sold off his financial company in the US and moved to Xiamen with his wife and two children in 1988. To Lao Pan's surprise, he quickly realized that Xiamen University was one of the first Chinese universities that provided MBA courses after his arrival in Xiamen. Graduated from Walden University with a PhD degree of management, Lao Pan was soon invited to teach at the MBA Center of Xiamen University.

Nevertheless, things did not go well for Lao Pan and his family at the beginning. "Xiamen was not a liveable place in the 1980s. Local residents burned coal at the time and the air quality was not good. Water and electricity supply were sporadic at best and I had to bring candles with me on my way to the library in case of a possible blackout. In particular, it took me quite a while to get registered so that I would become eligible to buy a tricycle. In a nutshell, challenges for foreigners living in Xiamen at the time were enormous," Lao Pan said.

Lao Pan decided to stay even though the living conditions were nothing but challenging in Xiamen. He admitted that the amazing local people just made his decision much easier.

"Local residents had to use coupons to buy daily necessities under the planned economy system at the time. But things for foreigners could be even worse since they had no coupon, nor could they pay in cash," Lao Pan recalled. He went on to say, "many Chinese colleagues gave their coupons to me to help us out. They said they had enough coupons, which I later found was not the case."

"My Chinese colleagues always invited us to visit their places during holidays. They were not rich people, but they were very happy to share everything they had with us," Lao Pan said.

Lao Pan talks to local villagers in Shilin Yi Autonomous County, Yunnan Province, during a retracing of his trip to China in 2019.