Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo gives each reader a stamp with a red seal on Chinese edition of his book. Photo: Wang Zi

Chinese readers who enjoyed Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father may have hoped for a sequel. Now one, of sorts, has appeared in the Chinese edition of Nairobi to Shenzhen, the self-published 2009 "memoir" of Obama's half-brother, Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo.

US national Ndesandjo was in Beijing Friday to discuss the semi-fictionalized tale, subtitled "A Tale of Love in the East," and make clear who he was (or wasn't) romancing.

Ndesandjo barely mentioned his famous brother – deflecting one question about the 2012 election by saying that all Americans have a responsibility to vote, the closest he came to a discussion of the topic.

"I follow my own course, and let people talk… I love my brother. He's family, and I'm very proud of him," he said, preferring to discuss his two other passions: China and charity work.

Describing himself as "an old China hand", Ndesandjo gave each reader a Chinese copy a stamp with a red seal, engraved with his Chinese name, "Ma Ke. (马克)".

For the past nine years, his home has been Shenzhen, the immigration city and Special Economic Zone boom town. But, he said, it is not just a center filled with upstarts after money.

"Culture is not about a place, but about the people who build it. It is a joint expression of their personality and attitude," he argued.

Since moving to China in 2002, Ndesandjo has worked as a business consultant and partner in a small chain of restaurants called Cabin BBQ.

The 45-year-old entrepreneur had a troubled childhood with a violent, alcoholic father, Barack Obama Sr, whom he shared with President Obama. Though he died of a motorcycle accident in 1982, the smart but overbearing intellectual shaped both Obama and Ndesandjo's life, one with regrets, the other with trauma.

His work with orphans in Shenzhen, whom he gives free music lessons, is a way to reconcile himself with the flawed nature of parenthood and identity ("those kids don't care about my name, my kin, or nationality," he observed)

He recalled on his visit to a local welfare center, an orphan grabbed his hand and didn't let go.

"The baby didn't see me as black or white, foreign or Chinese, he just wanted me. Then I realized that I was capable of giving, rather than receiving."

Obama's parents divorced when he was only two years old. As he grew up, he often wondered how his life would have differed. Ndesandjo, by contrast, struggled to exorcise bad memories he kept to himself for years.

"He was a brilliant man but he was a social failure," his mother Ruth Nidesand, Obama Sr's third wife, often said of her late husband.

Ndesandjo's bitter memories came out in the book, where his father was embellished in an invented diary, intertwined with the story of David, a disillusioned business consultant who comes to China to start afresh. He confronts these early experiences while falling for a beautiful Chinese woman.

"I recalled so hard what my father was like, and all I could remember was his faults. He was a man without virtue in my eye, and that was not possible, so I adopted a technique, and made up his diary," said Ndesandjo, adding he is writing an autobiography with more detail into this relationship.

Book tag: Nairobi to Shenzhen, by Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo, translated by Han Huiqiang, 456 pp, People's Literature Publishing House, 33 yuan ($5.1)

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