Published on February 4, 2016 on The Weekly Review.

Ben McMahon has a deep affinity to Chinese culture. That’s what he told the 24 women whose affections he was competing for on the special Australian episodes of Chinese dating show If you are the one,starting on SBS2 next week.

“It’s not like The Bachelor, it’s this speed-date show,” Ben explains.

“You walk out and it’s the biggest interrogation of your entire life. They bombard you with questions; everything from ‘How much do you make a year?’ to ‘What star sign are you?’.”

The hugely popular show attracts an audience of over 50 million people per episode, all addicted to the intense and often materialistic responses from the contestants – one notably saying that she’d rather be crying in the back of a BMW than laughing on the back of a bike.

Ben says he has been a fan of the show for years. He was approached to participate because of his unique background – and the unusual story behind his command of Mandarin.

After a major car accident in 2012, which put him in a coma for a week, Ben woke up to find that something had changed.

“The first words that came out of my mouth were in fluent Mandarin,” Ben says. “It was as if my internal monologue had become Chinese.”

The 24-year-old Melbourne university student studied Mandarin in high school, and even took a gap year to live and study in Beijing, but it wasn’t until after the accident that his Mandarin became fluent to the point he says he now mainly thinks in the language.

In the first few days after he woke, he wasn’t speaking any English, though he wasn’t aware of this at the time. One of his nurses was Chinese, and she would translate what he was saying to his doctors and his parents.

“I think at that stage my parents did say, ‘Oh my god we’re over the moon that he’s awake, but heck, we might need to learn Chinese to communicate with our son’,” Ben says.

Ben’s English quickly returned, and though the accident left him with cracked ribs and had a major concussion, he made a full recovery. But the connection to China and Chinese language stuck.

“After the accident, it was almost like fate. Everything just seemed to fall in line and all roads seemed to lead to China.”

He enrolled in university in Melbourne and took a Mandarin unit, which of course he aced, and found himself on his first Chinese TV show, Chinese Bridge World Mandarin Competition, representing Australia.

“That was really incredible. I knew at that stage how close I’d come to death, and just to be able to stand on stage with people from African nations, from Europe, from all these wonderful places in the world, and our common language wasn’t English, it was Chinese,” Ben says.

It was this experience that made him want to do more to bring cultures together. Ben started Mandarin-speaking walking tours in Melbourne, spent another year studying in China – this time in Shanghai – and started a video blog called RedRooBen, on both Youtube and the Chinese equivalent, Youku.

“I feel like through these videos, I can create a really interesting cultural and language bridge between, not only China and Australia, but China and the West,” he says.

“Even just talking about coffee in Melbourne, talking about my experience travelling around backpacking, all this kind of stuff for a lot of younger Chinese people is very foreign or it’s very new.”

Ben’s hilarious video teaching people how to do a Tim Tam slam is a good example of this, and it’s not the first time he’s used the humble chocolate-covered biscuit to cross cultures. He showed the contestants how to do it on If you are the one – using green tea rather than milk or Milo.

“It showed that I’m bridging the gap between cultures.”

Ben was chosen by Sydney contestant Feng Guo, and the pair won a trip to the Maldives. They’ve only seen each other once since the taping of the show, but she’s coming to Melbourne for a visit on Valentine’s Day, and then they jet off on their prize holiday.

“It’s like honeymoon after one date!” Ben laughs.

He doesn’t seem at all nervous about being in such close quarters with someone he barely knows, instead embracing the excitement of the unknown.

“When you go through a near-death experience, it definitely changes your perspective on life,” he says.