Because once you get rid of people's really outlandish notions that get in the way of their children's future success and present-day potential, then the very positive hard work can begin. There are a lot of challenges just in walking this path when it is defined and understood as its own course of action. But many parents have thrown in additional obstacles for their kids, obstacles that are entirely of their own making.
Chinese teachers, meanwhile, usually think that the misunderstanding is a more generalized difficulty of the differences between Chinese and American culture. While that may be true in some and even many instances. This gap cannot be entirely understood this way... because people really do say the craziest things.
Mandarin = Academic or Academic Excellence or "good school"
This notion runs the gamut of assumptions from parents believing that anyone who is signing up for the program must be the type to care about school and academics, thereby leading to their own kids to be amongst other families who care about school and academics at a basic level. "Caring" in this instance then translates to having good study habits and behavioral norms that make the classroom environment productive and advanced, i.e., the kids are all naturally smart and they can all move at a faster pace than a group of "average" kids. Here is a list of some of those myths:
- Signing up for Mandarin Immersion eliminates the troubled kids, the ones with behavioral problems.
- Signing up for Mandarin Immersion means getting something "elite"- special, rare and expensive.
- Signing up for Mandarin Immersion means your kid will be around Chinese kids who are all smart, well-behaved in a quiet way, and everybody tests well.
- Signing up for Mandarin Immersion means that your presumed gifted kid will get a challenge because he would otherwise be bored in a "regular" classroom. (And you don't have to worry about your kid doing well because the program automatically means "academic" and somebody told you your kid is gifted so he'll thrive no matter what.)
- Signing up for Mandarin Immersion means that your kid will automatically get a "good" or even "excellent" education.
And then there are the parents who have taken all this another step further. I've heard some parents say that they signed up for Mandarin Immersion so that they would not be with "slow" immigrant Chinese kids who don't know English, as well as some who have said they refuse to allow their children to be with Cantonese kids all together.
What's the reasoning? Some people say that they don't want their kids to be in a "slow" class. Others don't want their own kids to "feel bad" of "feel behind" when their kids are learning Mandarin. So they don't want their kids learning alongside "too many" or even any Chinese kids who would outdo and out-shine their own kids. They justify this from that social coddling perspective, that the American way of protecting (and sheltering) your child's emotional development is a good thing. The part about not being around Cantonese kids can come from Cantonese parents, themselves, who are so desperate for their kids not to get stuck in what they perceive as a Cantonese linguistic ghetto that they overly fetishize Mandarin.
To all this, I want to scream at these people -
"You are an idiot!! Do you realize that because there are so many of YOUR KIND, then MY kid is in a slow class because we are stuck with so many kids like yours who don't understand enough Mandarin to go at even a NORMAL pace of instruction???!!!"
Instead, I just shake my head and walk away in frustration and anger. Even my well-meaning friends who are not in MI programs for their own kids, to whom I can readily complain, they just shake their heads with that look of "Don't you know how lucky you are to be in one of those programs?"
Everyone has assumed that anything labeled "Mandarin" is intrinsically superior. Not only does this baffle me, but when I try to explain this to teachers, they think it's impossible. All I can say is, this is what people say in the English language. I am completely sure that I understood what was said. But the teachers are often not privy to these views because of the immersion model - that you don't speak to the teacher in English, or that you limit your interactions with the teacher in English so as to preserve the immersion bubble.
In many ways it has been true that the Mandarin-speaking Chinese who have ended up in the United States over the last 40 years have been from a better educated class of people. There are material reasons for this. They lie in the biased history of America's immigration laws. Just look up things like the Chinese Exclusion Acts and then the later Family Reunification Act. The main ways through which Mandarin-speaking Chinese have been able to come to America have been through scholarship (as sponsored students) or through sponsored work visas for highly skilled labor. This is part of why so many Americans have perceived the Chinese from Mandarin-speaking backgrounds as being more "academic."
But the difference in populations between Cantonese and Mandarin speaking Chinese in America comes from the fact that Mandarin-speaking people did not have as wide access to immigrate as did the Cantonese. This is historical. Then, when the 1965 Family Reunification Act was passed, this increased the ability of Mandarin-speaking people to bring their families over, which increased those numbers. But the same has been true for Cantonese. Since so many Cantonese already had such a strong foothold in America, then their numbers could grow even more quickly.
And to be exact, there are long term historical reasons within China for all these things, as well. Mandarin was the language of the court, the language of the elite, of the imperial bureaucracy. So sure, Mandarin or HanYu in China has also been the language of "the educated" and "the elite" for a long time, too.
I think there are two forces that are changing this dominance of spoken Cantonese in America.
- One is the sheer numbers of work visa sponsorships that technology companies are undertaking. These companies require a kind of workforce that largely rests within the Mandarin-speaking groups in Mainland and Taiwan. Moreover, recruiting these Mandarin-speaking individuals does not mean one thing. They might have learned Mandarin through school, but at home they come from Shanghainese, GuanXi, Hubei, Hakka, Fujian, Shandong, and other backgrounds. You can hear the increase through the accents and dialects that are showing up on the streets of America.
- The second force is the success of the Communist education efforts. More and more Cantonese, as well as Southerners across the board, are simply becoming increasingly proficient in Mandarin while growing up in China.
But it is still just a language, just a vehicle for whatever gets communicated. As I realized on my first trip to Beijing, when China was much poorer than today and most people were still wearing Mao uniforms, every street rogue (流氓) can speak Mandarin. This was an awakening for me, too. Because my experience with Mandarin had also been in a bubble with my own family and all their friends. This was a bubble of "the educated," or at least, better educated than a street ruffian. But it could be said that the Communists "democratized" Mandarin by making it the official language of the country beyond "the center," and educating the average person and especially those who have been chronically under-educated and disadvantaged in China. This has broken down Mandarin's elite status in China. Regional dialects are increasingly giving way to Mandarin/HanYu. All the natural things that come of this dynamic are occurring, including a breaking up (or breaking down, depending on your point of view) of former values and social relationships.
What matters, then? What you say still matters. The content of what you say, what you write, what you think, what you do. No one's thoughts and actions are automatically imbued with "excellence." That is still up to the individual and the court of public opinion to figure out.
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