Student Profile / Xiaoye Ma '11
Hot Property

By Peter Enzminger ’08

Xiaoye Ma ’11 took a few unusual intermediary steps— across stages, through burning buildings, behind cameras and microphones—between receiving his high school diploma and moving into Wig dormitory.

For Ma, the time between high school and enrolling at Pomona was like that pedagogical math trick you learned in the fourth grade: the function box. Ma, the England-bound aspiring doctor, goes in; Ma, the television actor, with a recording contract and a plane ticket to Los Angeles comes out. What happened in the middle?

Ma, who goes by the nickname “M.D.,” graduated from the Hwa Chong Institution, a well-regarded Singapore high school, in December 2005. He had sung in the choir, performed in school plays, and excelled academically, earning admission to the biomedical engineering program at Imperial College, London.

His career as a celebrity began with higher education 10 months away and time to fill. A friend working at Singapore EAI Music and Publishing Ltd., an agency that trains and books events for its roster of pop-music performers, told Ma about auditions for its talent development program. Ma auditioned on a whim and promptly became one of 14 Chinese-Singaporean students with a two-year training program and recording contract.

Five months later, Ma gave his first live performance. He describes it as one of his most valuable experiences: “Because it was in Singapore, a lot of my friends and former classmates were in the audience,” says Ma. “When the crowd began calling my name, my boss grabbed the mic and said, ‘You’d better sing one.’” This first opportunity, however, was also a farewell appearance for Ma. He had recently decided to suspend his entertainment career in order to prepare for the upcoming fall term at Imperial College.

Then, another twist: A Chinese television producer casting a firefighter drama called Raging Flames remembered one of Ma’s high school performances and asked for an audition. “I still have no idea how he got my contact information,” says Ma. “The call came out of the blue.” He wound up with a significant role as a young man trying to escape his father’s shadow, a loner with something to prove. But he faced a choice: Imperial College or TV stardom and deferred admission. After consulting his parents, Ma jumped into faux-firefighting.

The television shoot lasted over three months, with 12-hour days, five days on, one day off. And before that process began, the cast spent a month living with firefighters in a Shanghai station. There they lived a regimented military lifestyle: 5:30 a.m. wakeups, followed by a 5-kilometer run, 200 pushups and 200 sit-ups. They repeated that workout in the afternoon, between specialized training sessions.

His character was vice captain of a fire engine, so his training focused on operating the vehicle, hoses, ladders and oxygen tanks. “It was exhausting,’’ says Ma. “I wanted to quit, but I felt a responsibility to finish the show.” And since the program chronicles an 11-man firefighting unit overcoming adversity, the rigorous schedule served as an extra layer of method acting preparation, down to sleep deprivation. Alarm bells for actual emergencies rang at all hours of day and night.

The shoot itself was not much easier. The script’s first emergency scene called for an explosion during a factory fire. At 2 a.m., after a long day of shooting, exhausted actors, technicians and crew members held their collective breath as the TNT detonated: a rolling fireball that Ma says licked at the cameramen.

It was during this time that Ma applied for a one-day leave to attend a Pomona College information session in Shanghai. The presentation struck a chord with him and confirmed his growing suspicions that the flexibility of a liberal arts education, not biomedical engineering, better matched his interests.

With shooting completed, Ma filed his application and took a job with a TV station working on a regional edition of Chinese Idol—backstage this time. He reestablished ties with his previous agency, and performed three more concerts. But he knew his entertainment days were numbered when he received a letter in the mail on April 1 last year— acceptance to Pomona. “I’m thankful my parents were always supportive of my endeavors, but the plan all along had been to get a college degree.”

At Pomona, Ma is best known as the freshman class president—he won the election the same week his Chinese firefighting program debuted on national TV, 6,000 miles away. And while he’s curious to see an episode, he gets more excited talking about his sponsor group and life on south campus. “Considering that I was in the U.K. for primary school, China for secondary school and Singapore for high school, I’m used to joining a new environment.”

Indeed—as any performer knows, it pays to rehearse.