The half-brother of U.S. President Barack Obama makes a rare appearance in southern China, his home for the past seven years, to launch a novel he says draws on his painful childhood under an abusive father.

Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo, who had the same now deceased father as the U.S. president, is promoting his fictional book "Nairobi to Shenzhen."

[Mark Obama, Barack Obama’s Half Brother]:
"My mother used to say my father, he's a brilliant man but a social failure. I remember times in my house when I would hear screams and I would hear my mother's pain. And when I was a child, I could not actually protect her."

It's Ndesandjo's first major public appearance, coming just weeks before the U.S. president travels to China for the first time.