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When 22-year-old Australian car-crash victim Ben McMahon, woke up from a week-long coma, the only language he could speak was fluent Mandarin, a Chinese dialect. So fluent, in fact, that he is now a popular TV star in China, NY Daily News reports!
Ben was in a terrible car crash in Melbourne that left him battling for his life. While his survival seemed like a miracle, nobody was prepared for the bizarre twist that occurred when he finally regained consciousness a week later – his brain simply decided to switch from English to Mandarin.
When he woke up, he just started speaking Chinese. According to the Asian nurse who was attending to Ben at the time, his first words upon waking up were: "Excuse me nurse, I feel really sore here." He apparently said the whole thing in Mandarin. Then, he asked for a piece of paper and a pen and wrote on it in Mandarin script: "I love my mum, I love my dad, I will recover."
Although he had learned Mandarin at school and traveled to Beijing before the accident, he had never really mastered the language. "I wasn't consciously thinking I was speaking Mandarin, it was what just came out and it was what was most natural to me," he said. It actually took a couple of days before he remembered to speak English.
He has conducted Chinese tours of his hometown Melbourne, and he's now hosting a Mandarin TV programme called 'Au My Ga' that explains Australian culture to Chinese expats.
