Learning English, the Most Important Task for the Chinese Immigrants

It’s been three weeks since my last radio program. Still, listeners are leaving messages, asking me to continue the program online. After two weeks of pondering, I have decided to continue what I have been doing, but in a different form -- instead of audio in Chinese, I am going to write in English.

The selection of English is worth explaining. For most, if not all, of my listeners, Chinese is their primary language. Even for those who have been speaking English for decades, Chinese is still usable. However, that could not be said about English, as I have met so many Chinese immigrants who have been in the U.S. for decades and yet their English is still not serviceable.

It is an interesting phenomenon. If their three-year-old children could speak fluent English, why could they not learn the gambit? There has to be a reason for them to leave China, whatever it is. There must be. Why could they take the trouble to leave China, a country that they are familiar with, and come to the U.S., a country they are total strangers, but not learn the language?

From the statistics of my listeners, they appear to be a group of, what I would call, the enlightened few, as the majority could not be bothered with the fact that their children are discriminated against, by skin color, at the college entrance, or such simple things like advanced math education, which was held by private and semi-private effort in Beijing in 1970s and benefited me tremendously when I grew up, but could not exist in the 21st century America, where a significant number children have so much potential untapped by the education system that practices one-size-fits-all teaching method, which basically means, in plain English, that the entire education system is organized at the C student level.

I think that no task is more important for the Chinese immigrants than learning English, a task that their three-year-old children accomplished splendidly. However, in a more advanced level, the English education of the Chinese children, just like the math education, becomes problematic. Last summer, unable to find an appropriate book (or audio/video) to explain Shakespeare’s Hamlet to my children, I ate the bullet and spent the entire summer going through the play with them.

Over the radio, in each and every program, throughout the summer, I asked the Chinese parents to get their children to join in. In the end, in the coverage population of more than 500,000 Chinese Americans, exactly zero youngster from the coverage area participated. In the meantime, adding to my frustration and astonishment, many parents told me that K-12 math was too easy for them to be bothered, and their children’s English was automatically beyond worry, as they could speak fluently without accent. The only thing for them to worry about is extracurricular matters such as music.

So they bring their children to piano classes, which, for one thing, give many of their children nightmares. But that is not the topic for today.

For immigrants, the most important task is to learn English, because only with English aptitude, one can evaluate things such as the English education that our children are receiving, the unfulfilled math potentials of our children, in a time that, for our children, math is probably their magic wand into the ever shrinking middle class. Even today, math education, or STEM which is based on math, promote the earning from $50-70,000 to $70-90,000, and reduce the risk of unemployment from 8% to 3%.

Many argue that we should not forget our Chinese heritage. And a multicultural country is the best for us all. First, urging the Chinese in America to learn English does not conflict with any conservation goals. Second, besides that the colleges are using multiculturalism to implement its redistribution of government educational resources by skin color, rather than by merit, anyone thinking that they could have a good future in the U.S. without the ability of English and math are simply fooling themselves.

The big government is gobbling away the middle class at an exponentially increasing rate, precisely the phenomenon we have seen throughout the history time and again with all monopolistic powers. The frustrated young people are voting for the big government gobbling machine. That is the reality facing our children.

For that, I am going to write in English.

On this International Children’s Day, I write on children also.

June 1, 2016

Blog: http://pujielaw.blogspot.com/

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Past AM1300 program recordings in Chinese: http://www.youtube.com/user/pujiezheng