Support Jay Chen and other members of the Hacienda Heights School Board
Last November, I spoke at a small OCA-GLA conference for youth on a panel alongside Jay Chen, a member of the school board from Hacienda Heights.
You may remember Jay Chen, one of very few second-generation Taiwanese American politicians, from this commercial he recorded for the Mandarin-speaking Californian community urging people to vote no on Proposition 8.
For non-Mandarin speakers, in the video, Chen tells Chinese American and Taiwanese American parents that he feels "it is his responsibility as an educator to inform them that contrary to lies being spread by the Yes on Prop 8 camp, marriage equality will not result in homosexuality being taught in schools." He goes onto say that Prop 8 is about discrimination, and that historically, when it came to marriage laws, Asian Americans were discriminated in California. "Californians should not enshrine discrimination in our Constitution."
This was a particularly important step in counter programming during the Prop 8 campaign, because the Yes on Prop 8 camp specifically targeted Chinese-speaking, older, church-going voters with a homophobic campaign--knowing full well that the No on Prop 8 campaign (which woefully under-targeted communities of color and suffered for it) would not be able to reach this monolingual population.
Jay Chen is more famous for appearing on the Daily Show...
The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook
...where he was interviewed about a controversy brewing in Hacienda Heights. (Los Angeles Times reports: Chinese government's funding of Southland school's language program fuels controversy.)
In January 2010, the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District board adopted a new Chinese language and culture class at Cedarlane Middle School, the pretentiously named Confucius Institute. Just like foreign language programs sponsored by France, Germany, Portugal, Colombia, Italy and Japan, the Confucius Institute (snerk)is sponsored by China.
Anyway, since this program was approved, Chen and his fellow school board members have come under attack for brainwashing their someone else's (overly impressionable) children to be fluent in a language spoken by over 1/6th of the world's population. (Many of the program's harshest critics do not have kids in the district, some do not even live in Hacienda Heights.)
Chen has repeatedly advocated about the importance of having a Mandarin language program in his district (which, by the way, has one of the biggest populations of Asian Americans in the country.) The majority of kids enrolled in this middle school program are Latino.
Chinese is already the most widely spoken first language in the world and this year China overtook Japan as the world's second largest economy. It is only a matter of time before China overtakes the United States as producer and consumer in chief.
If the United States wants to secure its foothold in the world that China is rapidly remaking, we will have to begin committing at least a fraction of the energy to studying China as she has committed to studying us; in 2009 nearly 100,000 Chinese graduate and undergraduates filled U.S. campuses, and that number is growing each year. The failure of Internet behemoths such as Google and Yahoo in the world's largest Internet market indicate that China will not be a passive consumer of U.S. product, but will be a producer, innovator, and strong competitor; we ignore the language and culture of the society at our own economic peril.
Last week, Chen was served with a recall petition by people who are trying to get him removed off of the school board.
The petition claims as partial grounds for removal that Chen "believes that the United States will be subservient to China and manipulates students to serve China's government."
(Even though Chen is not Chinese, but Taiwanese--oh, and an American!? Why would a Taiwanese American want anyone to be "subservient to China"?)
This is just so sad. These kids are getting an opportunity I never had--the chance to study Mandarin in school. (Learning Spanish in high school was great, but a lot of these kids are already fluent in English and Spanish, so Mandarin is their third language.) I wish there had been a language program like this in my middle school (and in Ken's, too!)
If you want to support Jay Chen and the rest of the school board, click here to sign the petition: Reject the Recall of Hacienda La Puente School Board and Support Foreign Language Acquisition
You may remember Jay Chen, one of very few second-generation Taiwanese American politicians, from this commercial he recorded for the Mandarin-speaking Californian community urging people to vote no on Proposition 8.
For non-Mandarin speakers, in the video, Chen tells Chinese American and Taiwanese American parents that he feels "it is his responsibility as an educator to inform them that contrary to lies being spread by the Yes on Prop 8 camp, marriage equality will not result in homosexuality being taught in schools." He goes onto say that Prop 8 is about discrimination, and that historically, when it came to marriage laws, Asian Americans were discriminated in California. "Californians should not enshrine discrimination in our Constitution."
This was a particularly important step in counter programming during the Prop 8 campaign, because the Yes on Prop 8 camp specifically targeted Chinese-speaking, older, church-going voters with a homophobic campaign--knowing full well that the No on Prop 8 campaign (which woefully under-targeted communities of color and suffered for it) would not be able to reach this monolingual population.
Jay Chen is more famous for appearing on the Daily Show...
The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook
...where he was interviewed about a controversy brewing in Hacienda Heights. (Los Angeles Times reports: Chinese government's funding of Southland school's language program fuels controversy.)
In January 2010, the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District board adopted a new Chinese language and culture class at Cedarlane Middle School, the pretentiously named Confucius Institute. Just like foreign language programs sponsored by France, Germany, Portugal, Colombia, Italy and Japan, the Confucius Institute (snerk)is sponsored by China.
Anyway, since this program was approved, Chen and his fellow school board members have come under attack for brainwashing their someone else's (overly impressionable) children to be fluent in a language spoken by over 1/6th of the world's population. (Many of the program's harshest critics do not have kids in the district, some do not even live in Hacienda Heights.)
Chen has repeatedly advocated about the importance of having a Mandarin language program in his district (which, by the way, has one of the biggest populations of Asian Americans in the country.) The majority of kids enrolled in this middle school program are Latino.
Chinese is already the most widely spoken first language in the world and this year China overtook Japan as the world's second largest economy. It is only a matter of time before China overtakes the United States as producer and consumer in chief.
If the United States wants to secure its foothold in the world that China is rapidly remaking, we will have to begin committing at least a fraction of the energy to studying China as she has committed to studying us; in 2009 nearly 100,000 Chinese graduate and undergraduates filled U.S. campuses, and that number is growing each year. The failure of Internet behemoths such as Google and Yahoo in the world's largest Internet market indicate that China will not be a passive consumer of U.S. product, but will be a producer, innovator, and strong competitor; we ignore the language and culture of the society at our own economic peril.
Last week, Chen was served with a recall petition by people who are trying to get him removed off of the school board.
The petition claims as partial grounds for removal that Chen "believes that the United States will be subservient to China and manipulates students to serve China's government."
(Even though Chen is not Chinese, but Taiwanese--oh, and an American!? Why would a Taiwanese American want anyone to be "subservient to China"?)
This is just so sad. These kids are getting an opportunity I never had--the chance to study Mandarin in school. (Learning Spanish in high school was great, but a lot of these kids are already fluent in English and Spanish, so Mandarin is their third language.) I wish there had been a language program like this in my middle school (and in Ken's, too!)
If you want to support Jay Chen and the rest of the school board, click here to sign the petition: Reject the Recall of Hacienda La Puente School Board and Support Foreign Language Acquisition