Are there any American universities in China?

Why don't some American-born Chinese (ABCs) learn Chinese well, despite having highly educated parents?

• I've met many ABCs at top-tier universities with highly educated parents from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, yet they cannot speak Chinese very well, and in some cases cannot read Chinese characters. Why is this? I am a white American who has been studying Chinese for a few months now, and I feel like I already know more than many ABCs do, especially in reading and writing.  (I'm not boasting --- I actually do not have any talent for learning languages --- I'm just putting things in context.) Wouldn't having parents who speak a language natively be able to teach it to their children, especially at the age when it is easiest for people to pick up language?  I just find it unusual that these bright young ABCs who are otherwise motivated and successful majoring in fields like engineering, pre-med, and finance missed out on a wonderful opportunity to learn a useful skill.

• Answer:

  First to quote First, I should probably point out that Chinese was my (and many others') first language. My parents did in fact "teach their children, especially at the age when it is easiest for people to pick up language". Unfortunately, it's also very easy to lose a language. Yup, yup, and yup. I was born in the US, but lived in Taiwan as an infant. Learned to walk and talk in Taiwan. When my parents brought me back to the US, they spoke to me in Chinese at home. When I started preschool I was an ESL kid and until I was about 7, I thought primarily in Chinese (I'm 32 now). Mostly everything she said applies to me too, but you asked for personal thoughts, so here we go.... My parents tried to maintain an all-Chinese household. For a long time we kids were even scolded for speaking English at home, especially if we spoke it to my parents. Every Sunday from as early as I can remember, we dutifully went to Chinese school where we learned to read and write. This was so important to my parents that when we first moved from Madison to Milwaukee, they drove us back to Madison every Sunday, 1.5 hours each way, to attend Chinese school (and to buy Asian groceries at the one and only Asian market in southern WI) until they found a Chinese school near our new house. It was every intent of my parents that we learn the language and culture and carry it forward. It didn't work, because as everyone else has been saying, when learning a language environment is key. I grew up in suburban Wisconsin, in an area with very few Asian people and very few people who spoke any languages other than English. Admitting you spoke a second language, especially one as "exotic and weird" as Chinese, got reactions akin to growing a second head. These reactions were often followed by any number of ignorant questions like, "chingchangchong, what did I just say?" or "oh my gosh, how do you say my name in Chinese?" Imagine being a small child on an American school playground, getting teased, and the only smartass retorts you can think of are in Chinese (because when you get flustered you tend to default to your native language). Saying anything out loud will only guarantee more teasing. You want to disappear into the asphalt, so frustrated that you can't fight back in a way Americans respect. Imagine being in middle or high school, hearing countless adults, from your friends' parents to your mom's coworkers, confess quietly to you that they cannot understand your mother when she speaks English. You have no idea how you're supposed to react to this. Do they want your sympathy? An explanation of how you can understand her perfectly? Worse, imagine watching some of these people treat your mother as if she were stupid, despite her advanced education, simply because her English is ungrammatical and incorrectly pronounced. Imagine going shopping with your mom and not getting any help because the sales staff cannot understand what she is looking for. You could translate her broken English, but you are too busy feeling humiliated. You know it's not her fault and at least they were nice about it, but once again, you just want to disappear into the floor. You can't watch MadTV because you cannot help but feel that Ms. Swan was a character designed to make fun of you and your family. Your friends think she's hilarious. You want to die. Speaking Chinese was a thing that alienated me from my peers, marked me as an Other in the society I was growing up in. It was more than just the language, of course, but the end result was that my motivation to learn perfect English was very high. I actively rejected the idea that learning Chinese, being more Chinese than I already was, would help me in any way. Especially since we were rarely around people who didn't speak English, and so putting in active effort to practice Chinese just seemed like an exercise in ritual self-humiliation. We needed Chinese literally for a few minute-long conversations with older relatives in Taiwan a few times a year. The first time I remember being in an actual Chinese-speaking country, I was already 16. That was also the age when I was finally allowed to quit Chinese school. The methods used by the Chinese school were ineffective. Weekend Chinese school is typically staffed by volunteer parents who do not actually know how to teach. They only mimic the actions of teaching, which is to say they had us read Chinese books out loud and copy endless columns of Chinese characters. The texts were either thinly-veiled vocabulary dumps, starring the fictional boy 王大中 doing such exciting things as buying things at the supermarket, or about aspects of Chinese history, literature, or philosophy that we had no reference points for. It's like being a white American ten-year-old and only having access to these texts: dumbed-down biographies of European monarchs, dumbed-down Homer, dumbed-down Kant, or boring-ass fiction with preschool-appropriate themes. It's an extraordinary ten-year-old who wants to read stuff like that in their native language, much less a language they are trying to learn. Nowadays it's easy to order translated versions of popular books like Harry Potter or find Chinese resources posted for free online. Not so when I was a child. And now imagine being a typical overscheduled Asian kid, needing to fit your Chinese school homework in around dance lessons (and practice), music lessons (and practice), soccer practice (and games), and everything else. It typically waits until just before class on Sunday, when you copy characters as fast as you can without really thinking about what you're writing down. I was talking to my mom about this the other day and I was telling her that, in retrospect, they should have just skipped the boring and inaccessible Chinese materials, and taught grade-level subjects as an immersion class. It would have helped me acquire more practical vocabulary (like scientific or anatomical terms or the Chinese characters for key geographic locations in the world) and had more relevance than reading dumbed-down Confucian philosophy that I barely understood anyways. So you might say I squandered a wonderful opportunity I had in childhood but it sure didn't feel like it at the time. I suppose I squandered it less than the ABCs you're referring to because I do have passable conversational skills. Most importantly, I learned the tones and acquired my accent and grammar sense as a native speaker, which are the most difficult things to learn as an adult. I have enough that building to native level fluency wouldn't actually be that difficult for me. I'm a better learner now than I was as a child, more able to spot the patterns in the language that make reading and retention easier. I know more about Chinese/Taiwanese philosophy, history, and politics than I did as a child, which makes news and other things more comprehensible. Technology has made a lot of things easier as well. I have the Zhongwen Chinese Popup Dictionary browser extension that gives the definitions for Chinese characters I hover over, instead of having to painstakingly count strokes and look things up in the dictionary. Predictive text made me much more able to write in Chinese efficiently, because I can just enter in what I want to say using pinyin (since my oral skills are passable) and then check (with my dictionary browser extension) to see if the computer spat out the right characters. But most importantly, it is now much more relevant to my life than when I was a child. I now live in an area of the US where Chinese speakers are common. I have relatives from Taiwan on Facebook who post mainly in Chinese. I can afford to vacation in Taiwan about once a year to see relatives and give the Chinese skills a good workout. As a child, learning Chinese felt like an impossible, useless drag. Now it feels...natural. I'm more fluent now (in all aspects) than I was even 5 or 6 years ago, while putting in very little conscious effort to improve.