From the New York Times, a fascinating story about a neighborhood in Queens where people have decided to learn Mandarin. The reason? To get along with the Chinese community.
Last year I did a piece on the growing popularity of Mandarin. TIME reporters talked to students in London, Phnom Penh and Kentucky, among other places. The chief reason for studying the language was the hope that it would offer some economic benefit in a world where China is playing a bigger and bigger role. Some folks were interested in getting to know a different culture. But getting to know your neighbors? That’s a nice twist.
It reminds me of an apartment building in Oakland, California, where I lived for a short while in 2001. One of my neighbors, an 8-year-old girl named Aminah, made it her business to learn to say “hello” in all the residents’ native tongues. She was up to a dozen or so phrases when I moved in. I tried to teach her the words in Mandarin–“ni hao”–but she already knew them.