Children performing at a Mandarin-medium Chinese school in Vancouver.
我是海外的中國人，我愛中國，我也愛本地的國家。
“I am overseas Chinese. I love China. I also love this country [in which I live].”
The above is the only passage I remember from my days as a student at a Taiwanese-run weekend language school in the San Gabriel Valley ethnoburbs. Throughout my childhood I thought it was strange that we had to repeat that sentence over and over. I was born in the US. My parents were born in Vietnam. My grandparents were born in Vietnam. None of us had ever set foot in the Republic of China; our last territorial link to China was probably in the Qing Dynasty! But that didn’t matter.
The sentence comes from a textbook dating back to the 1980s that was sold (or perhaps donated) by the Republic of China government to Chinese weekend language schools all over the world. The martial law era in which Taiwan was dominated by the pro-reunification Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (國民黨) lasted until the late 80s.
The party’s message is evident even in this elementary school text for ethnic Chinese children overseas. Chinese nationality, as the Kuomintang understood it, was immutable, even with foreign residence or citizenship. Once Chinese, always Chinese—and clearly you want to side with the Nationalists.
——
Flash forward a decade or so, to last night. I had come back to the San Gabriel Valley to spend lunar new year with my family and to scope out a potential field site for my master’s thesis research on Chinese schools. I talked to some friends to see if they had any idea where I should start. One of them told me, “I can’t believe you’re going back to Chinese school!”
I have to admit that it is a bit strange to go back. Growing up, I hated Chinese school, as did all of the other Chinese American kids I knew. Who wants to go to school on Saturday to learn a language that everyone made fun of? Now, as an adult, I’m going back with an eye for things that had escaped my notice as a child.
Things have changed dramatically in the last 15 years. China is now a hot topic. Mainland China has emerged as a world power, and its immigrants, tourists, and investors are changing the face of cities the world over. To ameliorate its negative image in the West, the Mainland is trying to exert “soft power” through its Confucius Institutes for language learning and other cultural products and services.
Nowhere in the West is the Mainland’s rising cultural influence felt more strongly than in ethnic Chinese communities. For example, the language of interaction is slowly changing. In Los Angeles’ Chinatown and the western part of the San Gabriel Valley ethnoburbs, we see more signs in the Mainland’s simplified characters where traditional characters were once ubiquitous. Cantonese was until recently the primary lingua franca, spoken by Mainlanders from Guangdong province as well as ethnic Chinese from all over Southeast Asia. Now, one hears Mandarin with much more regularity, as immigrants and tourists from non-Cantonese-speaking parts of the Mainland arrive in large numbers.
Chinese schools have certainly adapted to the times. Not only are there more Mainlanders in the communities that the schools serve, but the promise of Mainland capital and the specter of Mainland cultural dominance are changing the way things operate. I expect to find that Cantonese-medium schools are disappearing, as parents move their children to Mandarin schools to prepare them to interact with Mandarin-speaking Mainlanders. I also have a hunch that even schools run by Taiwanese are switching to simplified characters, or at the very least are including simplified variants in their curriculum. In my last few years of Chinese school, for example, the curriculum changed to include both traditional and simplified characters, and both Taiwanese bopomofo pronunciation symbols and Mainland pīnyīn romanization.
In Argentina, I observed a Chinese school that still used Taiwanese government-issue textbooks. The Mainland government likely issues a similar set of books, reflecting their own culture and ideological agenda. Chinese schools, I argue, are the battlegrounds on which Mainland and Taiwanese overseas Chinese affairs agencies fight for the hearts and minds of diasporic communities, starting with the children.
In the 2010s, Chinese school textbooks might not be imbued with ideology as they were in the 80s and 90s. They might even be as apolitical as possible, knowing that their content could come under the scrutiny of Western governments sniffing out traces of indoctrination and overt foreign influence. Even so, I suspect that cultural pride continues to be a central pillar of the curriculum. What do these schools tell children about being Chinese? In the current political climate, a message like “I am overseas Chinese. I love China,” is bound to take on a very different meaning than it did when I went to Chinese school.
Creative Commons photo credit: Felex.
This is very interesting. I would love to see whether Taiwanese-owned Chinese schools will start adopting a Mainland Chinese, simplified-mandarin curriculum. Especially since there is a pretty vocal Taiwanese community in Arcadia/Pasadena that is really anti-KMT and pro-independence, who are kind of politically involved (via the Taiwanese American Citizens League).
Furthermore (and this might be an alternative hypothesis to why Taiwanese-owned Chinese schools are adopting a Mainland Chinese curriculum), during the time when you and I were in elementary school the Taiwanese (KMT-dominated) government was the sole provider of textbooks and educational materials to all schools in Taiwan and a lot of language schools abroad. However, once A-Bien (阿扁) became president, him and his fellow DPPs passed a law that essentially privatized the textbook industry, and every school can choose whatever kind of textbook they want. It created (and is still creating) some drastic problems in Taiwan (i.e. quality of students vary widely on which school they went to). And maybe this, in some way, has some impact on language schools here in the US?
Maybe back in the day, the Taiwanese government had some kind of loose monopoly on language educational materials (especially since China was unconcerned about people abroad at the time), and now with China more interested in cultural outreach, and the millions (exaggeration) of different textbooks coming from publishing firms in Taiwan, it really is up to the presidents (and the communities) of each school to decide what kind of curriculum to adopt? And maybe some presidents (and communities) just like the Chinese curriculum better because its more complete. I heard from my grandma, who was a KMT-supporting elementary school teacher in Taiwan, and my family friend, who volunteers at a Chinese language school in Fountain Valley, that there are a lot of crap textbooks coming out of Taiwan these days so maybe it really isn’t about China’s dominance in the political economy, and more just about the quality of books?
I don’t really buy into this alternative hypothesis I provided (especially since it is not rooted in the larger literature, although maybe it has something to do with individual agency?), but it would be interesting to see you prove it wrong hahaha!
Thanks Kevin, for being this blog’s most prolific commenter!
I had no idea that there was a pro-independence community here; I must look into it. I had assumed that most Taiwanese Americans were pro-KMT waishengren.
I also didn’t know that the TW government no longer had a monopoly on textbook publishing. When I talked to the teachers at the school in Argentina, they said that they used the same books used in Taiwan for that grade level (leading me to think that there was a standardized curriculum with standardized textbooks) but if there’s a certain amount of textbook choice even within Taiwan I do wonder how they chose those books.
I hear there’s a lot of pressure from the Chinese schools association to standardize the curriculum and make it Mandarin/simplified only. Maybe it’s not really the choice of the principals.
What a great topic-managable (I hope), yet interesting. Do the schools ever use books written in the US? My son studied Mandarin at high school and his textbooks were written and published in Australia. But I don’t know what books are used in Australia’s Chinese community schools. Perhaps due to cost, ones from China are favoured. I have studied Mandarin on and off for many years as an adult. My teachers mostly used books from China which were linguistically of high standard.
I’m not sure if community-run schools use books written in the US, but there is a movement to write textbooks that cater to the needs of heritage learners. As far as I know, these books and programs are mostly implemented at the higher education level, since the US public education system is very antagonistic to bilingual programs and other language programs seen to target immigrant populations.
In the US students learn foreign languages like Spanish at school, yes? Australia has a woeful and declining commitment to the study of foreign languages at school.Periodically politicians and others make a fuss about it, but I think the problem is almost intractable. Relatively few students in NSW take a foreign language as a subject for the Higher School Certificate, our highest school level qualification. In my son’s grade, only 4 students will study Mandarin for the HSC. When my nephew did the HSC he was one of 6 to study German.
Australians are aware of the great importance of China to us economically so many schools would be interested to offer Mandarin as a subject if appropriately trained teachers were available and they could be confident that students from a non-Chinese speaking background would not be disadvantaged compared to those from Chinese speaking families. In Sydney there is now an oversupply of newly trained teachers, mostly native speakers from China but no-one seems to have worked out how to ensure that those without the benefit of coming from a Chinese speaking background can compete on a level playing field with those that do.
Due to the significance of China to us economically, I don’t think there would be community opposition to Mandarin being taught in more schools. But the key is that tuition should be available to all, not just those of Chinese background.
Teaching Chinese to heritage learners and teaching Chinese to non-heritage learners are two very different issues. Unfortunately foreign language education of any sort in US schools is generally of very poor quality, except in the most privileged of schools.
Hi Calvin. A friend forwarded your blog URL to me today.
I taught English at Tsinghua University and maintain loose connections with many students from those days. They are finishing grad school, establishing careers, and having babies in several corners of the globe. Your perspective helps me understand them a little better, so I’m subscribing to your posts.
Blessings and Cheer your way.
Thanks!
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