Jul 18, 2011 “Far East Immersion” Education for White Kids.
Newsweek covers this post-TigerMom phenomenon.
Happy Rogers, age 8, stands among her classmates in the schoolyard at dismissal time, immune, it seems, to the cacophonous din. Her parents and baby sister are waiting outside, but still she lingers, engrossed in conversation. A poised and precocious blonde, Hilton Augusta Parker Rogers, nicknamed Happy, would be at home in the schoolyard of any affluent American suburb or big-city private school. But here, at the elite, bilingual Nanyang Primary School in Singapore, Happy is in the minority, her Dakota Fanning hair shimmering in a sea of darker heads. This is what her parents have traveled halfway around the world for. While her American peers are feasting on the idiocies fed to them by junk TV and summer movies, Happy is navigating her friendships and doing her homework entirely in Mandarin.
Fluency in Chinese, she says—in English—through mouthfuls of spaghetti bolognese at a Singapore restaurant, ‘is going to make me better and smarter.’
Growing up in SoCal I found it treacherous for upper middle class white and Asian kids to be electing Spanish in required high school foreign language, because the parents making that decision for us went by the mantra “you need it in the workplace.” (e.g. You need it it YOUR workplace.) Looking back, I suffered my own version of essentialism, studying French to one day get myself a french lover and live the perverse bourgeois dream. These days it’s amazing if we can learn half of one native tongue, much less a second, so I’m less judgemental.
And yet, this particular example of a white American child family Tiger Mom’s coattails under specious auspices would bother me so much less if I didn’t have an involuntary knee-jerk eye-spasm grimacing reaction to the fact that this child’s name is composed entirely of last names. We may not know if Chinese is the language of genius, but I know that a name of last names is at least as perverse in its aspirations as a little Asian kid wanting to marry Alain Delon.