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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]First you amen need to stop in regards to no mandarin speaking administrators.  YY has a Mandarin speaking administrator. She happens to be biracial, as in Chinese and Black. But, that might not be Chinese enough fro some people on this thread. [/quote]

I'm the PP who was bullied relentlessly an immigrant kid, so thanks very much to those who've offered reassurances that this wouldn't happen to my child at YY.  I know that there's a Mandarin-speaking administrator (actually, I thought there were two, one white and one biracial).

As I've said, I've been on the fence about accepting a spot.  The impression I'm getting, and not just from perusing this thread, is that YY could be a psychological headache for my child and me.  It just doesn't sound like we're assimilated enough to fit in.  The term ABC is actually somewhat derogatory in Chinese-American circles - it implies that you're more white than Chinese, and I don't like to be referred to as such.  I'd really rather not have to prove how ethnic I am when I'm around the school, to  be put on the spot to explain or defend the negative aspects of a culture (oh yes, there are many!) I grew up with, or to seek off-the-record conversations with Cantonese-speaking teachers to find out what's really going on. It sounds like most of the parents don't so much as understand that Mandarin is just another dialect to the Chinese, the one that got the upper-hand politically half a century ago, but just another dialect.

Traditionally, the Chinese are herd animals.  You see them coming as tourists to DC now the way the Japanese did in an earlier generation, in packs off tour buses.  When non-Chinese argue that "YY is for everybody, that's why we love it!" what you're saying in a sense is that it isn't for most Chinese, because Chinese like their kids to learn Chinese with other Chinese.  That's why we've started sending our daughter to the lovely Rockville Cantonese school on Sun afternoons.

It's not that we're against having our children learn with others, not at all, we'd simply like to see the sort of ratios you get at the Spanish immersion schools, maybe 1/3 of the kids of Chinese heritage/bilingual and the rest not.  I'm not sure that we'd be happy with our child as one of only a dozen or so bilingual kids in the school, with the Americans generally thinking that she doesn't speak Chinese anyway because she doesn't know Mandarin yet.  YY sounds emotionally complicated for us, if you see what I'm saying (probably not).

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