Yan Yan
China
Name: Yan Yan (Mike)
Age: 37
Company: NextVPU (Shanghai) Co,.Ltd.
Position: Vice President
Education Background:
College: Washington and Lee University '09
MBA: China Europe International Business School '21
How I become a Ravens Fan:
I went to college in the States in 2005. Coming from China, I had no relatives or friends in the U.S. to help me transit into the society or culturally. Luckily, my college roommate Paul Stack is from Baltimore. He invited me to his family for all the holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. We would watch football all day at his house and he showed me around Baltimore city. I fell so warmly welcomed by him, his family, and the people of Baltimore. He was a die-hard Ravens fan and naturally so did I. I have been watching Ravens' games ever since 2005, and the picture of me wearing Ray Lewis jersey was taken at his home, and the jersey was the very first Christmas gift I received in my life.
My proudest moment with Ravens:
In 2012 I went back to the States for work reasons, and at the time I was organizing a big group tour of Chinese students to the U.S. to visit colleges and to participate in extracurricular activities. It was my own company that handled this tour, and I enlisted Paul's help to do some scouting work before the big group of 222 people arrived. He refused any form of payment from me, but he really worked very hard, driving me across five States for nearly two weeks. I ended up buying two tickets of the AFC championship game that year, and we went to Foxborough to support Ravens for the game versus NE. Although heartbreakingly, Billy Cundiff missed the crucial final kick, it was still one of the founded moments that I share with my best friend.
After I come back to China:
Since my career was mostly in China, I did not have that many chances to go to the States. But I kept watching Ravens' games for almost 20 years. I think it is worth mentioning that, I did my MBA in a business school in Shanghai called CEIBS. My classmates are a good mix of Chinese and foreign students (about 2-to-1 ratio), so I had a good ground of promoting football, especially to Chinese students. So in 2019 we started organizing football watching events as well as flag football games on campus and had quite a good turnout.