The numbers of Americans learning Mandarin Chinese has declined dramatically, but one elementary school in Washington DC is seeing more demand for Chinese language education than ever.
STEVE INSKEEP, BYLINE: When you travel in China – as our team has been doing – you meet a fair number of people who know English. Millions of Chinese citizens have been educated in the United States. They include the top executives of companies, economists, government officials. The president’s daughter attended Harvard University. The flow in the other direction is much smaller, but there is some, even in this time of rising tensions between the world’s two largest economies. So what is it like for Americans who learn the language of a trading partner and rival? NPR’s Emily Feng visited an American elementary school that teaches it.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Anybody want breakfast?
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: It’s Monday morning at the Yu Ying Public Charter School in Washington, D.C.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: (Speaking Mandarin).
FENG: I hear Mandarin Chinese floating through the hallways of this 700-person school.
Do you want to speak in English or Chinese?
Lukas Wouhib is a 10-year-old student here, and he really wants to speak in Chinese.
(Speaking Mandarin)?
“Why do you like learning Chinese?” I ask him.
LUKAS WOUHIB: (Speaking Mandarin).
FENG: “I like learning Chinese very much because it’s hard,” Wouhib says.
LUKAS: (Speaking Mandarin).
FENG: And he says he and his brother speak in Mandarin with each other so their parents can’t understand them.
UNIDENTIFIED TEACHER: (Speaking Mandarin).
FENG: The whole idea here in Yu Ying’s classrooms is to immerse kids from the age of 3 in both English and Chinese. The school’s principal, Carlie Fisherow, says most students, including her own kids who attend the school, do not have Chinese ancestry. But…
CARLIE FISHEROW: They know the importance of being bilingual or multilingual in an increasingly interconnected global world.
FENG: Yu Ying was founded in 2008, right around the time U.S. interest in Chinese was peaking. Beijing was hosting its first-ever Olympics – the Summer Games – to great fanfare.
FISHEROW: There was a strong global push to increase the number of Asian languages that U.S. students were learning.
FENG: And the following year, then-President Barack Obama announced the 100,000 Strong initiative to get more American students traveling to China. In 2011, those numbers peaked at 15,000 students, but that’s all changed. Just a decade after, during the COVID pandemic, that number fell to just 200 American students. It’s now still less than a thousand every semester. Yu Ying stays away from discussing geopolitics, but sometimes, U.S.-China tensions creep in. Fisherow says this year, her daughter, who studies Mandarin, heard on the news that the U.S. Postal Service was considering banning inbound packages from China.
FISHEROW: And she screamed from the back of the car and was like, no packages from China? That’s where we get our curriculum. Are you kidding me? We get our books from China, and we get everything from China. And I was like, yep. She was like, that’s not right.
FENG: American universities like the University of Oregon and the University of Washington are reducing Mandarin classes. At Yu Ying, though, enrollment is increasing so much so they just built a second campus.
FRANCESCA LUCIA SOUSA: My Chinese name is Su Ke.
FENG: This is another student here named Francesca Lucia Sousa. – almost 11 years old.
FRANCESCA LUCIA: Su is for Sousa, and then Ke is for ke ai. And ke ai in Chinese means cute. So I’m Sousie Cute.
FENG: Language empowers her to connect to more people, she says, including Chinese people.
FRANCESCA LUCIA: Like, we come up to them. And then we’re just like, hey, we speak Chinese. Want to talk? And then they talk about – to talk to us about, like, where they’re from.
FENG: And for her, learning Mandarin Chinese is not about the U.S. versus China. It’s a tool for thinking creatively and traveling far and, for Sousa, dreaming big. She hopes to work as an interpreter at the United Nations one day.
Emily Feng, NPR News, Washington.
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