Kindergarten students join in a chant led by their teacher, Bee Lo, to memorize Chinese phonetics. The class is part of the Mandarin Language and Culture Center and is held at Saratoga High School.
Photograph by Paul Myers
Teaching Character
Students in Chinese school study language using three different systems: pinyin, traditional Chinese characters and simplified Chinese
By Gloria I. Wang
Photographs by Paul Myers
Raghav Bhardwaj was 6 months old when his father moved their family from the East Bay to a village in southeastern China. As a result, Raghav was raised speaking English, his parents' native tongue of Hindi and his nanny's Hainan dialect of Mandarin Chinese.
"For him, [Chinese] was his language. And that's how we wanted it," says Tanuja Bali, Raghav's mother.
Raghav surprised the locals by acting as a translator between his parents and the Chinese. "They couldn't believe it was this Indian kid speaking fluent Mandarin," Bali says.
Five years later, the family moved once again--from their village near the city of Shenzhen to Hong Kong, where Raghav attended Hong Kong International School and began learning how to read and write Chinese. This past August his family returned to California.
Bali and her husband wanted Raghav, now 8, to retain the Chinese language, and he did too. But because the family lives in Atherton, an area with a small Asian community, Bali couldn't locate a Chinese school that fit her son's needs.
After an exhaustive seven-month search, Bali heard about Saratoga Community Chinese School through a friend of a friend. Bali and Raghav checked out the school, which meets in the language arts building of West Valley College, for the first time in March. Raghav sat in on a level 3 bilingual class, which is for non-native Mandarin speakers, and went over flash cards with Principal Yumei Chen Chu.
"Did you like it?" Bali asked Raghav afterward.
"Yes," replied the normally reticent boy.
"Did you like the teacher?" Bali asked.
"Yes!" Raghav said enthusiastically.
"I'm so glad I got to go to the school. I'm putting my kid in there," Bali says later. "I was so impressed with the teachers, especially [Chu]."
Parents can't seem to say enough about Chu--affectionately known as Chen Lao Shi, or "Teacher Chen"--who founded the school in 1994 with a partner. Unlike most other Chinese schools in the area, Saratoga Community offers classes for both those who already speak Chinese fluently, emphasizing reading and writing, and for native English speakers who wish to learn Mandarin.
Photograph by Paul Myers
Kyle Yuen (center) reads from a textbook along with classmates Erin Campbell (far left), Emma Morris (left) and Stephanie Aronson (right) in the beginner's bilingual class at the Saratoga Community Chinese School, held at West Valley College.
Saratoga resident Joy Han says her 9-year-old son, Jeffrey, had gone to several different Chinese schools before settling into Chu's classes. Jeffrey, an Argonaut Elementary School student who is enrolled in a level 4 bilingual class, says although the tests are difficult, classes are educational and fun.
"I really like it and the teachers are all nice," Jeffrey says.
His mother says the staff tries to make Chinese education interesting for the students by incorporating lessons on art and history, holding competitions, playing games and telling stories. The curriculum, Joy Han says, is similar to that of American schools, and that's what's kept Jeffrey going for the past two years.
Saratoga High School freshman Dustin Lei, whose father is Cantonese and mother is Vietnamese, started attending the classes when the school first began and now is a level 8 bilingual student. Lei says he likes the classes' small sizes--the average attendance is 10 students--and that the teachers emphasize practical, useful lessons, such as mannerisms and values of the Chinese culture.
Although Lei's family speaks English at home, going to Chinese school has helped him tremendously. "If I go to China, I can probably understand and talk to some people," Lei says.
"The philosophy is to make the kids happy to go to school," Chu says. "I tell my teachers, 'The number one thing is to make your kids happy.'"
When the school was founded in 1994, classes were held at Foothill Elementary School. Even then, the school's aim was to differ from other Chinese schools by teaching bilingual classes using three language systems: pinyin, Chinese words spelled phonetically using English letters; traditional Chinese characters; and simplified Chinese--a system used in mainland China these days, in which traditional words are written with fewer strokes of the pen. Saratoga Community also recently started an hour-long adult conversation class, which consists mostly of the parents.
Chu and staff began writing their own textbooks, which have a progressive emphasis on listening, speaking, reading and writing. Unlike other schools, Saratoga Community focuses on character recognition of practical words, instead of forcing students to write rows of vocabulary words that aren't often used in everyday life.
The school, which moved to West Valley College after one semester and still meets there every Sunday afternoon, now has approximately 170 students, more than three times the number it started out with. Some families come from as far away as Santa Cruz County and Fremont. Each student pays a tuition of $300 for the two semesters in a school year. There are 14 classes total, with teachers carefully selected after a semester-long trial period. A former software engineer and Saratogan, Chu herself teaches a beginning bilingual class from noon to 2 p.m. and then an upper-level bilingual class between 2 and 4 p.m.
Los Gatos resident Bill Wilson found the Saratoga Community Chinese School by looking through a phone book three years ago. Wilson says the teachers there are able to pay individualized attention to the students. Every Sunday, Wilson takes his two youngest adopted children and sits in the back of his eldest daughter's level 3 bilingual class.
Wilson says he wants his 7-year-old daughter, from the Hunan province in China, to learn to speak her native tongue. "I want her to maintain her identity. I want her to be a Chinese-American, not an American," Wilson says.
Photograph by Paul Myers
Kindergarten students at Prospect Chinese School clap to Chinese phonetic sounds.
In the fall, his other daughter, a 4-year-old from the province of Guangdong, will start attending Chinese classes. So will his third child, a 4-year-old Caucasian boy. "It's a family affair," Wilson says of sending his children to Chinese school.
According to Chu, many of the students in the bilingual classes are the product of mixed-race families. Some are Eurasian--children of one Asian parent and one Caucasian parent--while others are Chinese children adopted by Caucasian families. Others are simply non-Asian children, like Raghav, whose parents want them to learn Chinese.
And many parents are like Wilson, Chu says, who attend classes with their kids. Most are there as chaperones or helpers, but some learn along with their children. One father enthusiastically joins in with identifying words written on the blackboard. That father, Chu relates with a smile, has greeted her at the beginning of every class for three years by calling her Da Lao Ban, or "Big Boss," and leaves by saying zai jian (goodbye) to each parent in the room.
Chu also teaches a more traditional class, at one of the two Chinese schools run out of Saratoga High School. That school, the Mandarin Language and Culture Center, has lessons geared toward those who already speak Chinese.
"Most of our children are second generation from Taiwan or China," says principal Jane Chen. That is, the parents emigrated from Taiwan or China, and the students are typically ABCs--American Born Chinese. Thus, the school's goals are twofold: language retention for ABCs, and cultural education for other races.
Saratoga High School junior Gene Lu was born in Taiwan and speaks Chinese at home. His parents wanted him to attend Chinese school because they were afraid he was losing the language. Similarly, American-born Joyce Lee, a Saratoga High senior, says her attendance is to retain her Mandarin-speaking skills.
Teachers also provide students with artifacts and written information for holidays such as Chinese New Year and the Moon Festival, encouraging parents and children to share about the culture through their schools.
The classes, which are held Saturday mornings, use Taiwanese phonetic characters--as opposed to pinyin--to teach students how to sound out words. As the classes become more advanced, teachers drop the use of phonetics and use solely Chinese characters for reading and writing. This year, the school has courses for pre-kindergartners through high school juniors, but in the fall will start offering a 12th-grade curriculum.
Besides language education, there are also cultural courses for adults. Those include Chinese calligraphy, Japanese flower arrangement and tai chi, a meditative, slow-moving form of exercise.
As a member of the Association of Northern California Chinese Schools, the school participates in regional social events and competitions, such as contests in calligraphy and phonetics.
Photograph by Paul Myers
Julie Nakatani (left) teaches her students the aesthetics of flower arrangements in an adult education course offered by the Mandarin Language and Culture Center.
The cultural center was founded in 1993 by the Mandarin Daily News, a Taiwanese children's newspaper. Originally, there was one campus--Miller Junior High School in West San Jose--with fewer than 200 students. Then in 1996, the center split its classes between Milpitas High School and Saratoga High School. Today, the combined enrollment is more than 1,000 students, with half of the Saratoga High School's kids Saratogans and the other half Cupertino residents.
Chen says the cultural center offered bilingual courses in the beginning. Insufficient enrollment, however, caused the center to refer all bilingual students to Saratoga Community Chinese School. Saratoga Community already had the advanced curriculum and materials to meet the needs of a wide range of students, Chen says.
The tuition charge of $290 a year is just enough to cover overhead costs and pay the hourly wages of the teachers, Chen says. Although rental costs of Saratoga High School--and any other facility in the area, for that matter--are not cheap, Chen says the Chinese school is made possible by the efforts of the educational community.
Chen appreciates the Saratoga High teachers for allowing Chinese school students, who sometimes move things around and displace furniture, to use their classrooms on a weekly basis. "It's like having someone come into your living room," Chen says, drawing from her own experience as a Spanish teacher.
"Everyone's coming together like this to support language education," Chen says.
The third Chinese school in Saratoga, Prospect Chinese School, also began meeting at Saratoga High in 1996. Unlike the other two, Prospect's emphasis is purely academic--students study Chinese, using Chinese phonetic symbols in the early stages--and the school does not participate in social events, competitions or activities. In fact, the founders broke away from existing Chinese schools because they felt those schools had too many things that distracted students from studying, says Principal Chu-Lin Chu.
According to Chu, that mindset is good for the students' learning but has detrimental social effects. When a Chinese school has more events and activities, it becomes more visible in the community and has more of a voice in local politics. Partly why there is such strong Asian representation in the city of Cupertino, Chu says, is because the Cupertino-based Silicon Valley Chinese School system is so involved in the community.
"The Chinese people there can speak for other Chinese people," Chu says. "The school is a great opportunity to form a strong group." Prospect, on the other hand, has contributed to a lesser Asian presence in Saratoga, despite the large percentage of Asians in the city's population, Chu says.
Another goal of those who run Prospect Chinese School is to keep classes small. In contrast to other Chinese schools, which average 30-plus kids per class, Prospect maintains no more than a 20-student-per-teacher ratio for its weekly Friday evening classes. Other schools have a "the-more-students-the-better" mentality because it leads to lower overheard costs, Chu says, but Prospect has found that it's too difficult for the teachers to work effectively with that many students.
An adult student practices his calligraphy in a Mandarin Language and Culture Center class.
Photograph by Paul Myers
Almost all of the 500 students are from Saratoga, Chu says, and are split into 28 classes, ranging from pre-kindergarten to high school. Like the other two Chinese schools, Prospect teachers are from the community and are paid on an hourly basis.
"In Saratoga, finding teachers..." Chu breaks off, shaking his head. The administration looks to stay-home parents or retirees to fill the position. Some teachers have full-time jobs, but Chinese school tends to be low on their list of priorities and the first to go when life gets too busy.
Shulin Chang, who is an administrator at the Chinese school and taught classes in the past, says it's not easy for the teachers, especially those who work with rebellious teenagers in the high school level.
At Prospect, Chang says, the teachers manage to stay flexible to accommodate the schedules of those busy high-schoolers. When one of Chang's two daughters, who attend classes at Saratoga High, needs to miss class because of a social or school-related event, "the teachers don't say 'no,' they just encourage you to do as much as you can," Chang says. "It's all about encouragement."
The school's policy is that you can't miss more than one-third of the total classes, and the teachers only ask that students still hand in homework when they can't make it to class.
Chang also likes the school's emphasis on ethics. Prospect, which was founded on Buddhist principles, has a monthly theme that is carried out in the lessons for students of all ages. Those lessons include respecting parents, treatment of others and doing good in the community, Chang says.
"Our vocabulary and writing use is very practical," says Saratoga High senior Kathy Saye. When she was younger, Chinese school emphasized history and poetry. These days, Saye learns idioms and words more for everyday language use.
Her classmate, Saratoga High junior Michelle Lin, agrees. Lin speaks Chinese at home with her parents and is able to talk to her grandparents and other relatives mostly because of her training in the language.
"I feel like if I don't go to Chinese school, I'm going to forget everything that I've learned," Lin says.
Saye has been involved in Chinese school for 13 years. Her parents had asked her several times if she wanted to quit, but she said "no." "It's only two hours of your life," Saye says. "I wanted to be able to finish and graduate."
Though she says she is still weak in reading and writing Chinese, the classes have enhanced Saye's speaking skills.
And that's something those attending Chinese school all have in common--both Chinese and non-Chinese students alike.
Saratoga Community Chinese School: 408.867.3943, sccs.dhs.org.
Mandarin Language and Culture Center: 408.441.9114, mandarinschool.org.
Prospect Chinese School: 408. 867.7936
Saratoga, California Since 1955
