I still remember 麥老師’s first class period of Chinese 101, where he proved to us that “If a billion people can learn Chinese, so can you.” Now, granted we were only saying “I want ice,” or “I want crackers,” but still the point stuck. I also followed Mark down a bit of the linguistc rabbit hole, taking both his writing systems and historical linguisitics courses, both of which textbooks sill occupy my bookshelf all these years later.
And with respect to those courses, it isn’t lost on me that Mark claims to be “retiring” to Hawaii: 麥老師，我很期待你與德*法蘭西將要寫的書!
And finally, my favorite Mark story: The time he was allegedly in Hong Kong for a conference and got into a taxi with a driver with neither English nor Mandarin proficiency, and Mark was able to construct approximate Cantonese pronunciation for where he wanted to go based off of modern Mandarin.
I wish you all the best in retirement!