New year, old ways
Chinese school grows as parents keep traditions alive
Between reciting Chinese poetry and performing traditional dance routines, kids munched on
They were preparing a pageant to celebrate the Chinese New Year, 4075, the Year of the Pig, which starts Sunday.
Mothers helped their daughters slip out of Disney Princess backpacks and into white tutus. Teachers hustled children clutching paper fans and flowers on and off the stage at Massachusetts Bay Community College in Framingham.
Trying to keep the dress rehearsal for last weekend's performance on track, Century Chinese Language School director Lina Chen commandeered a microphone and issued rapid-fire instructions in Chinese, punctuated by a single word in English: "Listen!"
A decade ago, the school had four parent-volunteers and 28 students. Today, it has 40 teachers and enrolls 210 children, ranging from preschool to high school, in language and culture classes every Sunday afternoon on the Mass Bay Framingham campus.
The purpose is to help American-born, English-speaking children of Chinese immigrants bridge the gulf between their ancestry and modern US culture.
"As parents, we feel responsible to teach them about language and their culture," said Chen, who along with two other mothers, Xingxian Yan of Framingham and Dongling Xia of Northborough, founded the school in 1996.
Back then, Chen was weary of driving her 6-year-old son, James, from their Ashland home to a Chinese school in Newton. And every day, it seemed, she was hearing about a new Chinese-American family settling in the suburbs along Interstate 495.
"I felt there was a big need and thought, 'Why not start one here?' " she said.
The school is a major commitment for the students, with rigorous weekday academic and extracurricular schedules, and demanding for their parents, many of whom came to the United States as graduate students and work intense jobs in software, engineering, and management.
But the investment is worth it, if it means the children will grow up understanding their heritage, said Zhinan Xia of Wellesley. He speaks Chinese at home, but found his children needed formal instruction to be fluent enough to converse with their grandparents and family back in China.
At first it was a challenge to persuade his son, Harvey, now 13, to attend three hours of class on Sundays "while all his friends were playing video games," said Xia, who teaches a Chinese-language business course at Harvard University.
But Harvey became far more enthusiastic after a trip last summer to China, where he stayed with relatives in Fujian Province. He hopes to return for another summer, his father said.
A semester's tuition is $170, and students are graded regularly on their progress. All classes are taught in Mandarin, China's official dialect.
While many immigrant groups have established programs to train their first-generation American children about culture and language, Chinese immigrants tend to be particularly rigorous about keeping tradition alive, said Peter Kiang, director of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.
"Anywhere in the world where Chinese people have settled, which is just about everywhere in the world," Kiang said, "they have quickly set up schools and created opportunities for their children to learn the culture."
Cantonese-speaking immigrants first arrived in Boston in the late 1800s. In 1910, they established the state's oldest Chinese language school, the Kwong Kow Chinese School in Chinatown. Over the years, as Chinese-Americans moved into the suburbs, language schools sprang up all over the region, including Brookline, Cambridge, Lexington, Newton, Westborough, and more recently in the state's fastest-growing Chinese-American hubs, Malden and Quincy. Small but active groups of American parents who have adopted children from China also have helped fuel interest in suburban Chinese programs in the past decade.
European immigrants found it much easier to leave behind Old World ways when they arrived in the United States, Kiang said, but Chinese immigrants -- facing both language and racial divides -- were less quick to jump into the melting pot.
Between 1990 and 2004, the Chinese-American population in the state more than doubled, going from 54,000 to 111,000 residents, according to a UMass-Boston survey of US Census figures. Newton has the state's fifth-largest concentration of Chinese-Americans; Waltham and Framingham have the 10th and 11th largest, respectively.
Chinese immigrants settling in upscale suburbs are well positioned to support efforts to sustain their children's cultural identities. And a decade of globalization has helped make the training more relevant than ever: Proficiency in Chinese language has become an indisputable academic and workplace advantage.
Many suburban public school systems, including those in Dover and Sherborn, Needham, Newton, Shrewsbury, and Wellesley, have incorporated Chinese into their foreign language curriculum. Some even give it equal status with traditional European language instruction and offer Advanced Placement courses.
Century students are helping non-Chinese friends with their language classwork, said the school's principal, Lei Chen of Westborough, whose two children, 9-year-old Janet and 6-year-old Jonathan, enrolled at age 4.
It's a far cry from the days when all that Americans knew about Chinese culture was Americanized versions of its food. Teenagers now have easy access to popular Asian TV programs, cartoons, and video games, and can download videos of Chinese rap and pop music from YouTube. China's ascension as a world economic power has helped change how young people feel about their culture and language.
"Twenty years ago, Chinese-American kids would be pushed to go to Chinese school and unhappily submit to their parents to do something that was so different from what all their non-Chinese friends were doing with their time," Kiang said. "But now there is sense of identity that it's good to be Chinese, and that your language has economic and academic value, and you can see non-Chinese kids wanting to learn it."
Lina Chen's 16-year-old son, James, a junior at Ashland High, said as he gets older he sees the benefits of bilingualism.
"I didn't always like" going to the language school "when I was young, but now I can see the benefits and how it can be used," he said. Teenagers nearing the end of the Century school program, like James, are expected to help out by volunteering in the younger grades, or by tutoring Chinese senior citizens in English.
Organizers say they hope the school will continue to grow, perhaps someday buying its own building and becoming certified to offer courses for college credit.
"It's a big commitment," said Li Wu of Westborough, a volunteer fund-raiser for the school and mother of two students, Eric, 11, and Anna, 8. "But it's absolutely the right thing to do for our children's future."
The school's website is www.ccls-usa.org.
Erica Noonan can be reached at enoonan@globe.com. 