[Note: This is the school featured in the New Yorker article that was published last week.]

Yu Ming Charter School was founded in 2011 in Oakland, California and was the first Mandarin immersion charter in the state.

The tuition-free public charter school is open to all residents of California and serves students from Kindergarten through 8th grade. It is ranked #7 Elementary School and #2 Elementary Charter School in California by U.S. News and was a 2019 National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence and a 2020 California Distinguished School.

Last year Yu Ming leapt from three Kindergarten classes to six, and continued to field six classes for the 2022-2023 school year. In a release, the school said “These additional classes allow Yu Ming to serve more Alameda County families, and most importantly, provide access to more historically underserved families than ever before–a crucial cornerstone of our commitment to offer a transformative public education.”

This year the school also created a Dean of Student Culture, a new position created to help address the social-emotional needs that came out of the COVID pandemic, especially with the school’s youngest students.

Chief Academic Officer Celia Pascual explained in the release, “When our students came back in person full-time last fall, we quickly noticed that this group of young learners needed more support with social skills. Pre-COVID, those skills would have been learned in preschool, playdates, or simply by interacting freely with other children and adults.”

After 11 years, the school now has graduates who come back to work in its summer program when it offers a two-week Summer Boost program that provides extra support in English and Mandarin for students. New to the program this year was a team of nine volunteer alumni.

“I miss Yu Ming and I like working with children,” said Lynnsy ‘20. Alumni from Yu Ming’s four cohorts, 2019 through 2022, volunteered. “I used to have trouble and now I’m really good at English so I like helping other students,” said Ket ’19.

The school collaborates with other Mandarin immersion programs across the country to share expertise and develop innovative practices.

Each spring Yu Ming’s 7th graders participate in a two-week study tour to China. In addition to cultural and historical study around China, students spend five days with an innovative bilingual school in Ningbo, China. Using their Chinese skills in an immersive way, students develop a deeper understanding and connection with Chinese culture.

During their time in China, students:

• Participate in Chinese middle school classes
  
• Experience dorm life
  
• Collaborate with Chinese 7th graders in a design-and-build challenge
  
• Stay with host families to experience Chinese home life.
  
• Engage in community service for a local village school

The school has three campuses:

Main Campus (Lower School): 1086 Alcatraz Avenue | Oakland, CA 94608
MLK Jr. Campus (Upper school): 675 41st St | Oakland, CA 94609
Carolyn Campus: Kindergarten – 2nd grade, 16244 Carolyn St | San Leandro, CA 94578

Why Oakland Parents Are Flocking to a Chinese-Immersion School

The success of Yu Ming Charter School shows how our usual ways of thinking about diversity and equity in American schools are becoming outmoded.

The New Yorker

By Jay Caspian Kang

October 18, 2022

It’s a long and fascinating article that will resonate with many Mandarin immersion parents. Kang touches on something that I wrote about in my book, A Parent’s Guide to Mandarin Immersion, which I glossed as “No one puts their child in Mandarin immersion by mistake.” Read his piece and see if you agree.

Yu Ming, then, presents a different form of élite academic education. Unlike test-in magnet schools like Stuyvesant or Bronx Science in New York City, Yu Ming does not screen its students, except to insure that a certain percentage of them come from low-income backgrounds. The school is free and open to everyone in the state of California, with preference given to local students. All you have to do for your kid to receive the best education in the Bay Area is put them in a classroom where their teachers will not speak English for most of the school day. But the people who are willing to do that and push for their child to go to a charter school will always be a self-selecting group, regardless of their class or ethnic background.

Please read more here.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Three decades ago, finding opportunities to learn Cantonese in San Francisco wasn’t hard. But today in the city that’s drawn Cantonese speakers from South China for over 150 years, there’s fear that political and social upheaval are diminishing a language that is a cultural touchstone.

The Chinese government’s push for wider use of Mandarin— already the national language, spoken by 1 billion people — along with the country’s changing migration patterns have contributed to an undeniable shift away from Cantonese. It’s a change that has reverberated from East to West.

From the United States to the United Kingdom and beyond, there’s worry among native and second-generation Cantonese speakers about preserving the language, spoken by some 85 million people worldwide. They fear their children can’t communicate with elderly relatives. Or worse, the Cantonese language and culture won’t survive another generation.

Please see more here.

San Diego News, Sept. 16, 2022

Students in the Mandarin language programs at PBMS had a taste of the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival on Sept. 7 and 8 as they prepared and then feasted upon their own mooncakes. A rich pastry typically filled with sweet beans, egg yolk, or custard, mooncakes are traditionally eaten throughout the autumn festival, which is based on the legend of Chang’e, the Moon goddess in Chinese mythology. PBMS Mandarin language teacher Yan Yan and parent volunteers provided the baking supplies and instruction (delivered in Mandarin, of course) to groups of students enrolled in either the Mandarin immersion program or the introduction to Mandarin language classes. Cultural activities such as this one incorporate Mandarin reading, writing, and speaking skills and also (literally) add flavor to classroom learning. Yan hopes making mooncakes becomes an annual tradition at the school.

Please read more here.

More on the district’s program.

Sept. 13, 2022 By Jillian Atelsek AP

In the spacious basement of her Urbana home, Li Zhou commanded rapt attention from the preschoolers sprawled on the carpet before her.

She read to them from a picture book about kindness. The book was written in English, but before turning each page, Zhou would speak to the children in Mandarin Chinese — describing drawings to them, asking them questions and cracking jokes.

Zhou runs A&D Stars, a Chinese immersion preschool program and day care for children 2 to 5 years old. It opened in 2015.

She’s also part of a group working to open a language immersion charter school in Frederick.

MeriSTEM Public Charter School would offer Spanish and Chinese language tracks and nurture bilingualism in young children, according to a nearly 200-page application submitted to the Frederick County Board of Education earlier this year.

Please read more here.

Pasadena’s Mandarin immersion program launched in 2010 at Eugene Field Elementary. By the In the 2019 -2020 school year, it served students from Kindergarten through fifth grade with 484 students enrolled.

The district also offers Spanish and French immersion. And because Pasadena has a significant Armenian community, it has recently added Armenian immersion.

 Pasadena Unified School District has more than 15,350 students in a 76-square mile area that includes Altadena, Pasadena, Sierra Madre and unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County. The district was formed in 1874. 

In 2015 the program advanced to a newly-constructed Sierra Madre Middle School. It contains a neighborhood school program as well as a Mandarin immersion strand.

In 2018 the program continued to Pasadena High School, the district’s largest comprehensive high school. The school is also home to a Math Academy where students from the district’s highly advanced middle school math program have the opportunity to pursue college-level mathematics courses.

In high school, one or two advanced courses in Mandarin are offered each year, including AP Chinese Language and Culture, Chinese Business & Cinema, and work-based learning opportunities. 

The first class of Mandarin immersion students graduated on June 3, 2022.

If your kids start bringing home drawings of lanterns, talking about the Goddess of the Moon or describing lotus seed cakes in class, then you know it’s time for the Mid-Autumn Festival.

For folks who didn’t grow up in families that celebrated what’s also known as the Moon Festival, here’s a little background.

The holiday is celebrated on the 15th day of the 8th month of the lunar calendar, on a full moon. Because it uses a lunar calendar, the date shifts somewhat but is always in the early autumn. This year it falls on September 15.

It’s a day for friends and family to gather, offer thanks for the fall harvest and express wishes for longevity and good fortune. Similar holidays are celebrated in Japan, Korea, Vietnam and across Southeast Asia.

Lanterns are carried and displayed as symbolic beacons to light people’s path to prosperity and good fortune. If you have kids in a Mandarin immersion elementary program, there’s a good chance they’ll be bringing home construction paper lanterns at some point.

They might also hear legends about the festival centering on the Goddess of the Moon, Chang’e 嫦娥 and her husband the archer Houyi 后羿 This unlucky pair are only allowed to see each other once every year on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month when the moon is full.

At its heart, though, the Mid-Autumn Festival is a harvest celebration. Just like at Thanksgiving, families try to be together for the holiday. If the family can’t all get together, they all look at the moon and think of those who are not together with them knowing they’re all looking at the same moon.

In China, people exchange lyrical text messages talking about how they wish they could be together. You can find some examples here.

There is plenty of symbolism for the holiday around the full moon. The moon is round, symbolic of the family coming together. It’s popular to eat a family meal together called tuán yuán fàn 团圆饭 or “reunion dinner.”

It’s also a time to eat moon cakes. In my family we call it “the festival of moon cakes.” These are dense treats about the size of a hockey puck (or Amazon Dot for the younger generation) and consist of a thin pastry coating over a disk of something sweet. They’re usually filled with sweet red bean paste or lotus seed paste. The latter is something like the Chinese equivalent of marzipan.

Inside that filling in many moon cakes is a single, hard-cooked, salted yolk from a duck egg. The saltiness of the yolk contrasts nicely with the sweetness of the filling, or at least it does for me. Some moon cakes feature two yolks, which seems like too much for me but your taste may vary.

Perhaps more importantly in a culture enamored of symbolism in food, the egg yolk is thought to look like the full, round moon. Moon cakes are cut into thin wedges and typically served with tea.

Moon cakes seem to be a love ’em or hate ’em kind of thing. Some Chinese people I know describe them as “China’s answer to the fruitcake, something people give you and you pass on as quick as you can so you don’t actually have to eat them.” Others (like me) actually like them.

Moon cakes have become an important present to give during the weeks around the Moon Festival. Go into any Asian supermarket and you’ll find the front of the store piled high with stacks of different types and price points, depending on the quality and how fancy the packaging is.

While sweet red bean paste and lotus seed paste are the most common, you’ll also find nut-filled, pineapple and melon (the melon ones are vile, I’m just warning you.) There are also smaller silver dollar-sized moon cakes that are more single serving.

And if you’d been wondering how moon cakes are made, here are some cool videos:

How mooncakes are made

Making traditional mooncakes

Mooncakes: What they are and how they’re made

Explaining the mooncake