To neighbors on the quiet, leafy street where he lives on Columbus’ Northeast Side, Peter McDonough, 37, appears typical enough. He mows his lawn, plays outside with his two young daughters and commutes regularly to his job at the Ohio Department of Agriculture.
Few would guess that McDonough, who is white, has an alter-ego as a YouTube sensation halfway around the world — in Nepal.
McDonough has recorded dozens of videos singing folk, pop and rap songs in fluent Nepali. His channel has amassed over 6 million views and more than 70,000 subscribers. He’s even been interviewed several times on Nepali national TV.
McDonough, who spent part of his childhood in the Himalayan foothills, said the online fame came as a surprise when he first began recording songs more than a decade ago.
“It's an unusual thing,” he said recently, sitting in a his living room with his wife, Anita Maharjan, a Nepali American installation artist and event decor business owner. "(When) people put things on YouTube … there's always some positive, but there's always a lot of … weird critique and … negative things pop up. But my experience with online feedback has been really positive."
A childhood in a remote village
McDonough lived in Nepal from age 7 to 12, spending most of those years in a village in Dadeldhura, a remote area in the country’s far west. His father, a missionary, administered a tuberculosis and leprosy hospital while his mother homeschooled McDonough and his three siblings.
McDonough made many Nepali friends with whom he would play marbles and other unique Nepali games, climb trees to pick fruit, swim and fish in the local creek. Some of his friends were the children of leprosy patients who settled around the hospital after being ostracized in their home villages.
“There was a very great communal feeling” in the village, he recalled.
During nighttime bus trips between the village and Kathmandu, the capital, McDonough would listen to Nepali folk and pop songs that the bus drivers blasted on cassettes. He learned to play the madal — a two-headed Nepali drum — and sang in church with his family.
The family moved to Holmes County in northeast Ohio when McDonough was 12, where he graduated from high school. Studies at Ohio State University eventually brought him to Columbus.
When McDonough was 20, he visited Nepal for the first time since moving away — a trip that rekindled his love for the country. He was learning guitar at the time and came across a modern Nepali folk-rock album that inspired him to try playing some of the old songs he’d learned as a kid.
Once he got better at guitar, he recorded himself using an old digital camera, then posted the videos on Facebook.
“Some friends were like, ‘That's cool. … We enjoyed it.’ … So I just kind of started doing it … trying to learn songs and playing them to record,” he said.
The 'guy who wore flip-flops on national TV'
The videos quickly went viral in Nepal. On a subsequent trip in 2013, people recognized McDonough on the street and at the Kathmandu airport. Nepali TV journalists began contacting him for interviews.
McDonough attributes his popularity to his peculiarity as a white guy who speaks fluent Nepali, as well as Nepali people’s general appreciativeness for foreigners who learn their language.
Maharjan, who met her husband a decade ago when she came to the U.S. for college, thinks his humility won over fans.
“People see he's very down to earth — he's (known as) the guy who wore flip flops on national TV,” she said. “People see his genuine love for Nepal and the humbleness that he has.”
A quick personal tangent is necessary here. Oddly enough, I, too, am a white guy named Peter who grew up in Nepal (my parents both worked in education in Kathmandu when I was a kid). When I took a job as the immigration reporter for The Columbus Dispatch two years ago, I began meeting Bhutanese and Nepali community members who told me about "the other Peter" in town who, like me, spoke Nepali. (Frankly, he set a high bar — some people expected me to be able to sing Nepali folk songs, too.)
When I saw McDonough's YouTube channel, I realized I had already seen his songs and interviews on Nepali TV. We met recently after a Nepali restaurateur, whose local establishment we both frequent, provided an introduction.
Some of McDonough's music videos are covers of classic Nepali folk songs, such as “Kehi mitho baat gara” ("Tell me something sweet") by Narayan Gopal, a national icon. It's widely rumored that Gopal wrote the love song for Nepal's Queen Aishwarya, whom the composer is said to have dated as a teenager, before she married into the royal family. Queen Aishwarya was murdered during the infamous Kathmandu Palace Massacre of 2001, when her son, the crown prince, gunned down his family members in a mass shooting.
Another video, a cover of "Phutki Jaaney Jovan" ("Fleeting youth") by the pop star Sajjan Raj Vaidya, features an old family video of McDonough as a kid in Nepal, interspersed with recent cellphone footage of Maharjan and their daughter Mala in their Columbus home.
One of McDonough's most popular videos, with over 340,000 views, is a decades-old patriotic tune called “Baneko chha paharale" by the lyricist Gopal Yonjan.
In it, he sings, "Baneko chha paharale yo chhati mero/ Bageko chha chhahara ragat ma mero/ Pakheroma janme/ Taakura ma khelne/ Ma jhukdai najhukne nepal ko chhoro."
It translates, roughly, as: "This chest of mine is made from the hills/ Waterfalls flow in my veins/ I was born in the mountains/ Played on the hilltops/ I am an unyielding son of Nepal."
Peter Gill covers immigration, New American communities and religion for the Dispatch in partnership with Report for America. You can support work like his with a tax-deductible donation to Report for America.
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