For Huntsman, Mandarin Proves a Draw HENNIKER, N.H. - Untold numbers of New Hampshire voters have tried to get a few words with the Republican presidential candidates barnstorming their state. But it's likely that Jon M. Huntsman Jr. is the only one with whom some have conversed in Chinese. At his campaign stops, people young and old have approached Mr. Huntsman with a chipper "Ni hao" (hello) or "Ni hao ma" (how are you). Some have waded through the gauntlet of television cameras to tell Mr. Huntsman, the former ambassador to China, about their trip to Beijing, their dining experiences in Hong Kong or their son's college semester in Shanghai. After a town hall event in Keene on Sunday night, Cindi Croft of Newport waited patiently in a long line to introduce her daughter Katelyn, 16, to Mr. Huntsman. Katelyn studied Mandarin in Beijing last year, Mrs. Croft said, and had hoped to meet the Huntsmans - and perhaps even play the harp for them - while she was there. But Mr. Huntsman left China before she had a chance. When the Crofts finally reached the front of the line, Katelyn spoke briefly in Chinese to Mr. Huntsman, who said her tones were "fei chang hao" or "very good." "I thought that was really cool," she said afterward. On Monday morning, as Mr. Huntsman shook hands at a bakery in Henniker, a woman buttonholed his wife, Mary Kaye, to talk about China. Her daughter had done research in Hong Kong, she told Mrs. Huntsman, and she wondered: How was it for you living there? "It was great except for those horribly polluted days when you put your child out to get on a bus and they start coughing," Mrs. Huntsman replied. Mr. Huntsman, who learned Mandarin as a Mormon in Taiwan in the 1980s, has sprinkled Chinese phrases around the campaign trail for months, including in Saturday's debate. When former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts said he would not let China "kill American jobs any longer," Mr. Huntsman quipped in Mandarin, "He doesn't understand the situation." Mr. Huntsman also frequently talks about the young daughter he adopted from China, whom he says was abandoned at a vegetable market when she was 2-months-old. Another adopted daughter was left as a newborn on a roadside in India, according to the Huntsmans. Gail Witham, a Huntsman supporter from Hampstead, went so far as to try out her own limited Mandarin on a crowd awaiting the candidate at a coffee house there on Sunday. She had learned how to say exactly two words - go away - on a business trip to China, she said. "And that's exactly what I think is going to happen with a lot of the candidates we've seen out there over the last few months," Ms. Witham said.