Bay Area Mama

If it’s not blatantly obvious, I love food. I also love celebrating with my family. So we have a little New Year’s Eve tradition in our family. We have Chinese Hot Pot, for our New Year’s Eve dinner. Perhaps you’ve never heard about Chinese Hot Pot. Perhaps you have heard, but have never partaken. Perhaps, [...]

The San Francisco Chronicle profiles an African-American teenager, Tyler Thompson, who has a talent for singing Peking Opera – no easy feat, even for native Chinese speakers. He first learned Chinese in a class at Lincoln Elementary School in Oakland’s Chinatown and now studies at Oakland’s Purple Silk Music Education. He says in the article: [...]

A new community organization has started up in the Bay Area for African-American parents of young Mandarin learners. From their About Us page: Parents of African American Students Studying Chinese (PAASSC) is a coalition of collaborative parents, students, schools and communities throughout the Bay Area that are committed to providing ways to enhance the educational [...]

Throughout the rest of July, the Little Monkey and Mouse online Chinese bookstore is holding an open showroom with activities and crafts. From their announcement: Address: 926 Ralston Avenue, Belmont CA 94002 Dates: Saturday 7/16/2011, Wednesday 7/20/2011, Saturday 7/30/2011 Time: 9:30a.m. – 3:30p.m. Join us for light refreshment, art & craft activities and storytime! Also, [...]

Next week marks the Lunar New Year and the most important of the traditional Chinese holidays. Outside of Asia, the Bay Area is the most festive place to celebrate and welcome the Year of the Rabbit, and there are enough activities to keep you and your little ones busy almost all month long. – In [...]

For the past week, the whole world has been talking about Amy Chua and her approach to child-rearing in what she calls a traditional Chinese way. An op-ed she wrote in the Wall Street Journal was an excerpt from her new book, out this week, called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which is now [...]

Despite the popularity of Mandarin classes in schools around the country these days, finding engaging materials for kids who are learning Chinese can be a challenge anywhere, even here in the Bay Area. But recently a number of new, local resources have cropped up offering a much broader selection of Chinese books for my little [...]

I’ve written before about Speaking in Tongues, the excellent documentary that follows four children in language immersion classrooms in San Francisco. The film does an amazing job of countering arguments against bilingualism by showing moving portraits of four families who made the unconventional choice to educate their children in either Chinese or Spanish. I highly [...]

Keeping up with reading and other subjects in the lazy, free summer months can be a challenge for all parents. But when your child is in a language immersion school, and you don’t speak the target language at home, it can be doubly difficult (unless, of course, your child is enrolled in one of the [...]

Today is Duan Wu Jie (端午节), or Dragon Boat Festival, my favorite of the major Chinese holidays. It commemorates the beautiful, if not cheerful, story of the great poet Qu Yuan, who threw himself in the Mi Luo river in protest against the government. In order to try to save his body from being eaten [...]