Mono + MDBTools: Encoding Issue

Question

I'm working on a C# application that has to read an Access database (.mdb), on Linux. I'm using Mono to compile and run the application.

Suppose I have a test database that I create in Access 2013. It has one table: TestTable, with the default ID column and a testField1 column created with the 'Long Text' type. I insert three rows, with these values for the testField1 column: "foo", "bar", "baz". The database is saved as 'Access 2002-2003 Database (*.mdb)'.

The resulting database (named Test.mdb) is transferred to my Linux box. Just as a sanity check, I can run mdb-export on the database:

$ mdb-export Test.mdb TestTable
ID,testField1
1,"foo"
2,"bar"
3,"baz"

So far, so good. Now, suppose we have a C# program that reads the testField1 column of the table:

using System;
using System.Data.Odbc;

class Program {
    public static void Main(string[] args){
        try {
            OdbcConnection conn = new OdbcConnection("ODBC;Driver=MDBTools;DBQ=/path/to/Test.mdb");
            conn.Open();
            var command = conn.CreateCommand();
            command.CommandText = "SELECT testField1 FROM TestTable";
            var reader = command.ExecuteReader();
            while(reader.Read()){
                Console.WriteLine(reader.GetString(0));
            }
        } catch(Exception e){
            Console.WriteLine(e.Message);
            Console.WriteLine(e.StackTrace);
        }
    }
}

I would expect that running this program would print "foo", "bar", and "baz". However, compiling and running the program does not yield this output:

$ mcs mdb_odbc.cs -r:System.data.dll
$ mono mdb_odbc.exe
潦o


$ # this line added to show the empty lines

My guess is that this is an encoding issue, but I have no idea how to resolve it. Is there a way to fix my program or the environment that it runs in so that the contents of the database are printed correctly? I believe that it is an issue with either ODBC or MDBTools, because in a similar program, a string equality check against fields of a database fails.

I'm using Ubuntu 16.10. mono --version outputs Mono JIT compiler version 5.4.0.167 (tarball Wed Sep 27 18:38:59 EDT 2017) (I built it from source with this patch applied to fix another issue with ODBC). MDBTools, installed through Apt, is version 0.7.1-4build1, and the odbc-mdbtools package is the same version.

I know that the combination of tools and software I'm using is unusual, but unfortunately, I have to use C#, I probably have to use Mono, I have to use an Access database, and I have to use ODBC to access the database. If there's no other way around it, I suppose I could convert the database to another format (SQLite comes to mind).