Evolving from Ching-Chong to Mandarin AP Classes
By wchung | 22 Feb, 2025

The trend toward teaching Asian languages goes a long way toward offsetting the sense of cultural alienation we once suffered in school.

I don’t have to remind anyone about those unfortunate kids who spout mock Chinese gibberish as a way to display their racist ignorance. The irony, of course, is that they didn’t even speak English as well as we do, never mind an Asian language!

I was pleased to read that Mandarin Chinese has recently surpassed German as the third most popular foreign-language AP test among U.S. high school kids, after Spanish and French. From Yonkers, New York to Bloomfield Hills, Michigan to North Charleston, South Carolina, Mandarin classes are taking their rightful place in high school foreign language departments alongside Spanish and French.

In the better schools in California, Japanese and even Korean are offered as well, supplanting the German and Russian classes that used to be language department staples. San Francisco’s elite Lowell High offers Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Latin and Spanish. Fremont’s Mission San Jose High offers only Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and French. Even a relatively small school like Westlake High offers Chinese and Japanese, along with Spanish and French.

I’m especially impressed by the rate at which Mandarin instruction has grown, quadrupling in the decade between 1997 and 2008, according to a survey by the Center for Applied Linguistics. The actual numbers may be small yet, but the trend is unmistakeable. The fact that much of this growth results from efforts by the Chinese government to boost Chinese instruction by inviting U.S. teachers to visit China makes this trend no less significant. Ultimately, it’s a reflection of the bright future American educators, parents and the kids themselves see for China and for Asia in general.

One of the more immediate impacts this change will have is to minimize the disconnect Asian Americans kids often feel with the Euro-centric perspective that permeates the U.S. educational system. History classes invariably traced civilization from Mesopotamia to Egypt to Greece to Rome to England to the United States. If there was any mention of Asia or Asians, it was limited to a few paragraphs about the Mongol invasions, Marco Polo’s visit to China and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. If we were lucky, the text may have included a sidebar about the Chinese who laid the Union Pacific rail lines.

That doesn’t give Asian kids much to relate to. In fact, history classes were probably one of the more alienating aspects of my American cultural education. To a youthful Asian American mind, the mere fact that there are classrooms in a high school (or even middle-school) campus in which students are actually being taught Asian languages is an implicit reordering of the known universe. It tells them that our Asian heritage shares and melds into the same world with our American one.

What an amazing antidote to hearing ching-chong gibberish being spouted by the school’s rat pack!