Photography by Jennifer Silverberg
Lydia Krob spent her fourth year of life blissfully happy at St. Michael’s preschool, a quick drive from her parents’ gracious University City home.
Then they pulled her out and sold their house and moved to the city, all on the off-chance that she’d be accepted into a new kindergarten taught entirely in Chinese.
Lydia’s mother, Heather True, is a cell biologist on the faculty of Washington University. Sitting on the graduate admissions committee, she’s watched the caliber of the applicants from China rise steadily. Her husband is a mechanical engineer, and he’s been flying to China for work projects. They wanted their kids to have the experience of a diverse public school in the city—but one that offered real academic advantages. And St. Louis Language Immersion Schools, a charter school in the city that opened French and Spanish immersion schools to the public, free of charge, in 2009, was now adding a Chinese school.
So they moved. And they hit the early application deadline. And they crossed their fingers. If SLLIS received 10 percent more applicants than its enrollment ceiling, every applicant’s name would go into a lottery. Lydia could wind up miles from the school she’d loved, and they would have uprooted themselves for no reason.
Lydia got in.
And for the first two weeks, she sobbed every day.
She sobbed so hard, in fact, that Lydia Hsiu-Ling Chen, head of school, called True and said soothingly, “I saw your daughter’s tears. Trust me. It will all be over in six weeks.”
True agreed politely, unconvinced. She’d been warned what to expect, but seeing her daughter’s face every morning—when she’d been thriving at her preschool—made this feel like a very bad decision. Little Lydia was coming home so exhausted, they moved her bedtime up an hour. Getting dunked in a new language when you’re 5 and shy and away from home and surrounded by strangers and expected to learn and follow odd new rules and talk in a whole new way and write little line pictures for words…is exhausting.
Chen’s own heart broke every morning, watching parents and children separate like a soldier and his girlfriend at the railroad station. But she kept reminding the parents and her teachers about “the magic six weeks.” She closed the school to visitors for that period: no anxious parents watching through the glass window in the door; no education wonks touring; no disturbance. “We need that time for the kids to really get in tune with the routine, so it makes sense to them,” she explained.
Sure enough, in week 7, True saw her shy little girl’s mind start to change. Soon she was running to school every morning. At home, she’d toss off Chinese phrases, thrilled to have mastered something her parents didn’t know. She carefully taught them the different tones, pointing out with a giggle that the word for “Mom,” with the wrong tone, meant “donkey.” At the after-school program, where she could choose from dance, chess, music, gardening, and other lighthearted classes taught in English, she’d chosen a baking class and was demanding to know the Chinese word for teaspoon.
Chen watched the magical transformation—not only for Lydia but for the other kindergarteners and first-graders as well—and gave the rapid, energetic nod that meant all was going according to plan. She’d laid out what she calls “the vision,” along with every rule, every policy and every phase of the International Baccalaureate curriculum, long before the school opened.
“After six weeks, we throw a party,” she told the teachers, throwing her arms open. “Muffins with Mom, donuts with Dad. We open up the school; we have visitors every day.”
In week 8, True came to observe and left stunned: “I had no idea they were already recognizing Chinese characters!” As she watched the potluck mix of students from every race, class, and background, something else dawned on her: The oft-researched disparities (kids from lower socioeconomic levels knowing far fewer vocabulary words by age 5, for example) were leveled here. Nobody knew Chinese—except the handful of ABC students, American-born Chinese, and even they weren’t fluent. So nobody started out feeling behind.
At first, the school’s tight discipline had startled True. Kids sitting arrow-straight, walking with their hands behind their backs…surely this was a little intense? Lydia had to learn protocol for how to walk, sit, address the teacher, treat other children. But now, watching the smooth transitions between recess and lunch and the quiet orderly classrooms where students were already speaking spontaneously in Chinese, she thought, “I understand why they can make so much progress now—it’s because they don’t have the kids getting out of line.”
Lydia’s little brother will come here too. “So they’ll be able to talk about stuff, and we won’t know what they’re saying!” True laughs. She figures she can resort to Google Translate if she really needs to. “We’re hoping this will give her advantages we can’t give her ourselves. There are just two things grown-ups always say they wish they knew: a musical instrument and another language.”
What makes the difference for language acquisition, Chen says, is the ability to listen, which is powerfully valued in Chinese culture. “It’s perfect for learning a foreign language—they have to listen to survive here,” she observes. “But the evidence shows up at home, too. Parents say, ‘My kids listen now, and they can pay attention to a task for much longer.”
Outside Chen’s office, there’s a quiet almost eerie in an American public school. “We have a fun practice,” she tells me. “Bubblefish. We pretend we are bubblefish.” She puffs out her cheeks and moves her mouth up and down. “We call it bubblemouth. When they are doing this, they won’t be able to make a lot of noise!”
We go to first grade. “They made—” Chen hesitates on the word—“teepees!” She envies her students their smooth, unaccented new language; she didn’t learn English until seventh grade, and despite a long career teaching from kindergarten to university level in Taiwan and the U.S., she still doesn’t speak English that’s as smooth and accent-free as their Chinese will be.
Yet “they are not here learning Chinese,” she emphasizes. “They are here living with Chinese language, learning everything.” To be specific: science, math, social/cultural, early writing, reading readiness, oral language, music, art, P.E., yoga, library. Not until the second half of second grade, when the new language has become second nature, will they take English. (That delay worries some parents, but SLLIS gives them a home program for reading in English. And the stats show that kids who immerse in a foreign language pick up the grammar, composition, and reading skills in their native language like they’re grabbing candy.)
A little boy stands up. The boy next to him whispers, “Zuo xia! [Sit down!]”
“Eyes on me,” the teacher says, in Chinese. “Eyes on you!” the kids repeat, in Chinese. She lets them giggle and whoop when “anyone wearing the color red” gets to come to the center of the circle. Then she asks one of the children to speak and puts her finger to her lips, and the noise turns off like a shut spigot, replaced by respectful silence.
Only one child wriggles, and he is sent to “the thinking chair”—which is just a few yards from the circle, so he can continue to listen and learn. They learn the months and days in Chinese; they review the words for weather, with the teacher waving cloud hands and slicing her hand down on the diagonal for hard rain.
“In the beginning, they could not line up,” Chen whispers. “They could not sit straight, and they had a hard time controlling their hands. Now look. They can sit for 30 minutes paying close attention.”
She glances at another boy. “This one, when he first came, he was always hitting people, so quick with his hands. He just could not follow instructions. And now he is so good! And so smart!”
She hurries away to do an errand. I stand in the empty hallway waiting for her to return, smiling at construction-paper forests and purple log cabins. When I turn around, an entire class of kindergarteners have come upstairs and lined up outside their classroom. Without a sound. And they’re not even doing bubblemouth.
We go to a kindergarten room, where they’re learning about climate. The teacher holds up a desert scene, and the kids practice the words for “snake” and “mountain.” One little boy whispers, between lessons, that there is also lao hu (tiger).
“No,” his friend answers in Chinese, “there is no tiger.”
To regain the kids’ attention, the teacher does a quick, rhythmic clapping pattern, and the kids clap back. “So we don’t need to yell,” Chen whispers. “We don’t need to get mad.”
Instead of waving their hands wildly and gasping “Oh! Oh! Me!” until they’re called on, students bend their hand up at the elbow, close to their body, support their elbow with their other hand, and wait.
All the SLLIS schools keep order and demand respect, but the Chinese school redoubles the emphasis; Chen says it’s a cultural value. “Respect in interpersonal relationships, respect for difference, respect for your parents, respect for your teacher—we have a Teacher Appreciation Day on September 28, Confucius’ birthday.
In those early weeks, when the bus rocked with rowdy 5- and 6-year-olds, she called their parents. “We want your child,” she would say. “They can have such a big picture here. But we need your help.”
“Our teachers make a lot of phone calls,” she tells me. “We just don’t let a problem get away—we are very demanding! Children need clear guidance until the rules start to make sense to them. We have very firm boundaries: This is how we expect you to behave. And we are not afraid to tell the parents our expectations.
“I always tell the parents what kind of quality I see in their child,” she adds. “That is not courtesy; it is real. I am very specific. I tell them, ‘When he listens, this is what happens.’ I share the vision with them.”
She keeps in even closer touch with her students, talking to each one individually. “I tell them what learning can do for them, what kind of beautiful opportunities they are going to have.” One little boy arrived ready to punch or grab, but when he stood still long enough, she saw the light of intelligence in his eyes. So every morning she’d stop him, cradle his face in her hands, and say, “Show me the good part of you today! Make me proud of you!”
When another boy missed a few days of school, Chen greeted him with a hug and said, “We missed you!”
He looked up at her and said, “Really?”
So now she’s taken to emailing whenever a child’s home sick, just to say, “We miss you!”
Granted, the kids aren’t quite sure why they’re there. Belle, a first-grader, thinks she’s at SLLIS because her dad wants her to talk to the waiters at the Chinese restaurant. Jeremiah, 5, tells me that at daycare, “the boys used to bully me. I didn’t have no friends there.” He has plenty of friends here, especially Frederick, who comes over to chat during project time. Frederick’s not quite sure Jeremiah’s birthday is next Monday, though.
“No, I’m for real,” Jeremiah insists. So they both start singing Happy Birthday. In Chinese.
“I gotta go work, Jeremiah,” Frederick says afterward. He returns to his table.
“I haven’t told my mom Chinese,” Jeremiah tells me. “But I told my brother Chinese. When I got home after school yesterday, he counted in Chinese with me. He three.”
Jeremiah is 5. He wants to be an artist, a superhero, and a doctor.
“Everybody was really worried for the Chinese school to open,” says SLLIS founder and president Rhonda Broussard. “‘It’s Chinese! Chinese is hard!’” she mimics. “It’s hard for our adult minds. The kids are already reading it.”
The big difference she sees among the Chinese, Spanish, and French schools isn’t in language acquisition, it’s in what she calls “celebration culture.” The French school’s winter celebration involved violin and piano, cocoa and desserts. “It lasted one hour,” Broussard says, “and everybody was very polite.” The Spanish school’s La Posada was jam-packed—“Don’t tell the fire department”—with sit-down dinners in every classroom, music, and dance. “The adults were so excited about the piñata, we had to have an adult piñata too. And they’re already planning mariachi for the fifth-grade graduation!”
For the Chinese Lunar New Year celebration, huge emphasis fell on the kids’ accomplishments—choral and dance performances and a play about the Chinese Zodiac—but Chen added plenty of food and fireworks.
The other cultural difference Broussard notices is use of physical space: “The Chinese teachers came into their classrooms and moved half the furniture out,” she recalls. “They said, ‘There’s too much stuff in here!’”
Chinese culture shows up across the curriculum—and outside it. Before a field trip to Overland’s Chinatown supermarket, Chen talked about how people eat differently and warned the students that they would see chickens whole, and fish still alive, “with the head on, and the stinking, fishy, fishy smell. We buy the whole, fresh, live fish, and we will go home and take care of it ourselves.’
“We are very thrifty; we don’t waste,” she tells me. “So when we leave a classroom, we turn the lights out. We don’t let the water run. We try not to waste food—we ask them to spend the first five or 10 minutes of lunch concentrating on eating.”
Teacher Haoli Collings saw a little girl sitting glumly in front of a full plate. “If you don’t like the food, you could bring a lunch from home,” Collings told her.
“My father does not pack me food,” the child said. So Collings, mindful that 55 percent of their students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, sat down and said, “Let’s eat together. What don’t you like?”
The girl wrinkled her nose. “Cauliflower.”
“OK,” Collings said, and reached over to spear a floret. “I will eat your cauliflower for you.” She chewed slowly, savoring. “Yummy!”
Rochelle Dixon’s daughter Angela Morgan loved SLLIS from the first day. “She came home and said, ‘Ni hao! [Hello!]’” Dixon says. “She’s got all this homework, at 6. So even though I didn’t want to learn Mandarin, I’m learning Mandarin! We went to a buffet on St. Charles Rock Road, and Angela heard the waitress talking and said, ‘Mommy! She speaks Mandarin!’ So they talked, and afterward the waitress said, ‘Your daughter’s been to Beijing?’
“‘No, ma’am, she goes to St. Louis Language Immersion School,” Dixon replied.
When Dixon comes to pick up Angela, she’s so reluctant to leave, Dixon teases, “They’re going to think I beat you!” So the only adjustment Dixon worried about was collaborating with the other parents. This was a brand-new school, a charter school without much money, and the parents wanted to help. But some had plenty of money—and Dixon didn’t want them to pull their kids out for private schools—and others had to wait for the next paycheck just to get groceries—and Dixon didn’t want them to stop coming to meetings because they couldn’t donate money.
Somehow the parents who care the most—a group with little in common except that caring—have found ways to work together. One dad’s in charge of collecting money from those who can afford to give, so the others don’t have to walk through a gauntlet of outstretched hands. In meetings across the street at Atomic Cowboy, the parents have schemed to get the teachers paper, help decorate classrooms with secular snowflakes for the holidays, donate a microwave so the teachers didn’t have to keep running down to the Spanish school to use theirs… Like their children, they are developing a profound respect for these teachers.
“There are kids straight from the ’hood, and they come to school, and they are in line,” Dixon says, laughing with delight. “I was shocked to see these Asian women take such control over the urban kids.”
Chen stands to do the turtle dance for me, singing, as she sways and crosses her arms in front of her, “I…I…I…never give up. Never give up. Steady…steady…steady… Never give up! Never give up!” They do the dance at every assembly; the tortoise is the school mascot, because “slow and steady wins the race.” She recites the characteristics of the tortoise: “calm, peaceful, patient, steady, self-controlled, successful.
“The last characteristic of the tortoise is long life,” she adds. “Not just some kind of charter school booming, then failing. This is a necessary journey.”
We talk about the challenges of a school body that runs the gamut from poverty to wealth. “Parents from the county have very high expectations,” she says. “I say, ‘Your children cannot live in an environment where you control the temperature. You cannot protect your kids for your lifetime. They need to learn how to love different people. I tell them, ‘Hold with me, trust me.’ I tell them the vision. I involve them.”
She loves wondering “what these kids will do for our country,” 20 years from now. “We emphasize patriotic education. They are American. I tell parents, ‘I have no interest to make your child Chinese.’
“I think the best part of being bilingual is, you have more empathy and sympathy,” she says. “I look behind things for the cultural difference. In America, you put your soup bowl on the table and use your soup spoon.” She mimes our polite soup-spooning. “But for the Chinese, that’s not polite. We take the soup in our hand and drink close to our mouth. Chinese people are very hard-working; we use our hands, we use our effort to do everything. If you put soup on the table, the parent says, ‘Don’t get lazy!’ But in America, it’s about acting elegant. I think it comes from the British—different size spoons and forks for different things. So when I see differences, I don’t jump into conclusion. I say, ‘What is my assumption here?’ Because there must be a reason.”
In time, SLLIS plans to add—either as separate elementary schools or as adjunct programs—Japanese, German, Russian, Farsi, and Arabic. But first, in Fall 2014, Broussard’s opening the International School, which will take the kids through middle and high school. The ratio will flip, with 80 percent of the instruction in English and 20 percent language immersion. And they’ll have a chance to graduate fluent in three languages. “The elementary schools are already amazing,” she says, “but what’s coming is going to absolutely change their lives forever.”
