Mandarin Mashup June 29, 2012
- R0052313 How I Learned To Speak Cancer To My Kids - Huffington Post (blog)
3022 | good mozz studio has added a photo to the pool:
20120629／有一點閒的好日子
清幽吧
跟自己的對話變的漫長
我也，我也
I almost believe I can do anything now, haha
The biggest thing my boys have ever wanted to know about my breast cancer is whether it will kill me or not. They are elementary schoolers -- living in a world built on sturdy facts and long division: will Mommy live? Or will Mommy die? I haven't always known how to answer them.
My first surgery was in a Beijing hospital, and everyone in that operating room spoke Mandarin. I didn't speak anything. I was the silent patient -- the foreign woman whose Chinese was only good enough for ordering dumplings and taking high-speed cab rides to the fruit market across town.
I had a hard time speaking cancer to my boys. I couldn't figure out how to explain the disease and still reassure them that I'd be their person until I was old and gray. I needed to learn a new grammar, one the boys would understand, because something told me that until I found a way to talk to my kids about cancer, the disease might divide us.
Then I met a yoga teacher in Beijing named Mimi, who made it possible for me to touch my toes again and to imitate the pose of a cobra. She said she was running a class in a small village three hours from the capital, up in the Chinese mountains. Five days of yoga.
Ask a room of breast cancer patients what lingers for them after treatment and most of them will say something about tight muscles -- a band of them that stretches across their pectoral, under their arm and down the side of their rib cage. They may also talk about feeling apart from the people they love -- which are most often their kids. I had the tight muscle problem, and also the sensation of wordlessness with my boys -- I couldn't find the right descriptors for the mystery that was my cancer.
The first morning of yoga camp I stood on my head in the small, dirt-floored house in the village. The yoga was something I could deal with. The yoga didn't demand talking. The yoga I loved. But what happened after the yoga was something called a talking circle. What this circle looked like was twelve people seated on a rug, all staring at a round black stone. The idea was for each of us to stand, grab the stone and explain why we'd come to the mountains in the first place.
Oh God, I said to myself when I saw the stone. Talking? In circles? In the mountains? But one by one people stood, took the stone and sat back down. There was an oil painter there from Singapore beginning to get over the sudden death of her boyfriend. And there was an English teacher. And a Chinese mother of three. A doctor and a photographer. Finally, there were only two of us who hadn't spoken.
I stood up. I'd come for the yoga not the talking. But I took the stone and turned to the group and surprised myself. I said, "I'm here in the mountains because I have cancer and I can't talk about it with my kids." My skin grew tingly then, and my disease felt like that stone in my hand -- something that needed to be put down.
Everyone in the circle smiled at me, and when it was over, I walked up the hill past the donkeys, to my room in the wooden house above the cornfields, and I went to bed. Each night I talked a little more in the circle and I grew comfortable saying the words: mother and cancer.
When the five days in the mountains were up, I went home to Beijing. On my first morning back, my 8-year-old, Thorne, found me in my bedroom. I was wearing a tank top, about to pull a sweatshirt over my head. "Mom," he said quietly. "Mom, you've got to put sunscreen on there." He pointed at my armpit--the place where the radiated skin was peeling was the worst. "You just have to."
"Ok," I said calmly, as if I'd never thought of that. As if sunscreen would solve the entire problem. "Good idea. Sunscreen. I'll do it."
That's when the 6-year-old, Aidan, came in and said, "Did you know that there are one hundred women in the world who get breast cancer who can't fix it?"
"Sort of," I said, hoping to steer the conversation towards a soft landing.
"Yup," Aidan assured me. "One hundred. And that may sound like a lot but it's not really when you think of how many hundreds of people there are in the world." So here's the thing about children and cancer -- my children anyway. They muse on it. They make their own connections. They don't shy away from the scary stuff. I steered the boys down the hallway toward the front door.
"Let's go, guys," I called out to them and smiled. "Let's go to school."
To Improve Kids' Chinese, Parents Head to Asia - Wall Street Journal
By SARAH TILTON AND JOANNE LEE-YOUNG
Some American families are packing up and moving to China or other parts of Asia to give their kids an immersive experience and a leg up in Mandarin. WSJ's Andy Jordan reports on two families who thought Mandarin lessons in America just weren't enough.
Michael Roemer had never lived abroad before he took a one-year leave of absence from his job as an attorney, rented out his family's Orinda, Calif., house, and moved to Chengdu, a city in western China, in 2010 with his wife and two children.
Mr. Roemer's goal: to give his kids, Erin and Conor, an up-close look at China and an edge in what is fast becoming a must-learn language. "Speaking Mandarin is important," says the 57-year-old Mr. Roemer.
The Roemers are among a growing group of Westerners going to great lengths to give their kids a leg up in Mandarin. With China's rising global influence, these parents want their children to be able to communicate fluently with the country's 1.3 billion people. The phenomenon is similar to what happened in the '80s, when Japan's economy boomed and there was a rush to learn Japanese.
Some high-powered parents want their children to learn Mandarin, going so far as to packing up the family and moving to China. Emily Nelson has details on Lunch Break. Photo: Joanne Lee-Young.
But this time, after-school classes aren't enough for some people. Families are enrolling their children in Mandarin-immersion programs that are springing up from California to Maine. They are hiring tutors, Skyping with teachers in Beijing and recruiting Chinese-speaking nannies. Some are stocking their playrooms with Disney videos in Mandarin—not to mention the iPhone apps aimed at making kids into Mandarin speakers.
Of learning Mandarin, Mr. Roemer says, "mastering that challenge gives [the kids] a great deal of confidence." Learning Chinese, he adds, is "good for the brain." Still, he says it was stressful watching his children struggle in a place where at first they didn't understand much of what was happening at school.
Now back in the U.S., the Roemer kids say they value that year in China learning Mandarin, even if they can't quite keep it up now. "It was cool living in a foreign country" for a year, though achieving command of Mandarin's tones remains difficult, says Erin, age 9. Her 11-year-old brother Conor says he likes being able to switch into a different language when he doesn't want other people—like his father—to understand. "Sometimes my dad doesn't know as much as we do, so if we're talking about his birthday present we can keep it from him," Conor says.
Jeff Baird and Millie Chu-Baird at Taipei's zoo, took their daughters on a trip to explore the idea of a year in Asia.
Recruiters say Mandarin gives candidates an edge in the job market. "When it comes to Mandarin speakers, we don't have them [in the U.S.], so does it give you a competitive advantage to have it? The answer is yes," says Michael Distefano, a Los Angeles-based senior vice president at executive recruiting firm Korn/Ferry International. Mr. Distefano's own son is studying Mandarin in high school, with an eye towards possibly working in Asia.
Jim Rogers, 69, and his wife, Paige Parker, 43, sold their New York City home and moved to Singapore in 2007, specifically so their children could grow up speaking Chinese. The couple now rent a house across from Singapore's Botanic Gardens. The address positioned them to get their 9-year-old daughter, Happy, into a top local school called Nanyang Primary, where core subjects are taught in Mandarin. Her sister, Bee, 4, attends Nanyang Kindergarten, where instruction is completely in Mandarin for two years.
Mr. Rogers, who started Quantum Fund with financier George Soros, doesn't know Mandarin and had never lived in Asia. But he says it's crucial for his kids to learn Chinese naturally from the start. "This is going to be the century of China, so we're preparing them," he says.
Mandarin is notoriously difficult to learn. The language is tonal, and fluency requires mastering thousands of characters. Mandarin competence takes 2,200 class hours, with half of that time spent in a country where it's spoken, according to the U.S. State Department's Foreign Service Institute, whereas Spanish can be learned in 600 to 750 class hours.
Educators say there's no one right way to learn Mandarin. Jeff Bissell, head of the Chinese American International School in San Francisco, says teaching is "evolving" as metrics and standards are established. He applauds efforts to get students to China to learn Mandarin, which he calls "a major strategic priority."
What happens after moving back from China is another matter. Jim Cashel and his wife, Anne Ching, a fourth-generation Chinese-American who never learned Mandarin growing up, moved from Sonoma, Calif., to Chengdu in 2009 with their two daughters. Their goal: to learn Chinese and experience China.
Since moving back to Sonoma in 2010, Ms. Ching and her older daughter regularly Skype with a teacher in Chengdu to maintain their Mandarin. But there's no real chance to practice Mandarin otherwise, acknowledges Ms. Ching. "My whole approach is I'm just going to keep working on it for the next decade," she says.
Among parents considering a move to Asia for a year is Jeff Baird, a hedge-fund manager who lives in Berkeley, Calif. In April, he took his wife and two daughters, ages 3 and 6, on a tour of Taipei and Singapore to see schools and research the idea.
His wife, Millie Chu-Baird, is Chinese-American but can't read or write Mandarin, having grown up in Columbus, Ind. "More than just instilling Mandarin into them, we would want it to be about giving them the joy of experiencing the language overseas," says Mr. Baird.
In Singapore, the Bairds visited Mr. Rogers, Ms. Parker and their daughters to discuss the best place to learn Mandarin. As the playdate progressed, Happy Rogers was asked to name the hardest thing about learning Mandarin. She replied, in Mandarin: "Oral tests. And composition. And comprehension. And Q and A."
Her mother, who doesn't speak Mandarin, stared at Happy uncomprehendingly. After a reporter translated Happy's answer, her mother said, "So basically, everything?"
"Yes," Happy nodded.
A version of this article appeared June 27, 2012, on page D3 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: To Improve Kids' Chinese, Parents Head to Asia.
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