Mandarin Community Partnership: Crossing Language and Cultural Borders Right at Home

Yang has been incorporating ways for her students to connect with native speakers for years, including a previous exchange with a retirement community in Brighton. She first heard about Rainbow ADHC, a cultural and activity center with several branches catering to the elderly Chinese population, through conversations with Mandarin-speaking parents and grandparents of current Rivers students. This year, when Director of Equity and Inclusion Jenny Jun-lei Kravitz P’28 approached Yang with the idea of expanding AAPI and other cultural programming into communities beyond the walls of Rivers, Yang made the connection. The staff at Rainbow ADHC was eager to start a partnership, and Rivers hosted Mandarin-speaking senior citizens this February for the first exchange meeting. 

Even though Mandarin IV students are advanced speakers, students noticed a marked contrast between speaking for exercises in class and communicating confidently with native speakers. “It’s really rare in America to be put in a scenario where the only way to navigate is to use your Mandarin speaking skills,” comments Tyler Stokes ’27. 

Yang says she encourages students to turn on “survival mode” in these kinds of situations, directing them to use context clues and ask questions with Mandarin words they do know, rather than asking in English for a translation for a word they don’t know. Before the first visit, students also practiced vocabulary and grammatical constructions for addressing elders in conversation.  The forms of address the students learned are similar to the English words for “grandmother” and “grandfather” but are commonly used beyond the family as a way to show respect for any elder. 

Gabe Manasseh ’26 comments that even having studied Mandarin for four years at Rivers, “there’s still a lot of grammar and vocab to learn—and a lot to learn about how to integrate it into a conversation.” The challenge of having a conversation with a native speaker makes that room for more language acquisition clear, but the immersion is a great opportunity for growth.

During the senior citizens’ first visit to campus, in addition to participating in class discussion, Mandarin IV students who are also Red Key guides led a campus tour in Mandarin for the guests before sitting down to lunch together in Kraft Dining Hall.

Many of the Rainbow ADHC guests also returned to campus on March 30 for Rivers’ community Lunar New Year celebration, where they shared their talents with the wider Rivers community. Two of the senior citizens are skilled calligraphers and led a calligraphy station for attendees, and others performed two pieces on the the traditional Chinese string instrument èrhú (二胡). 

Yang comments that many of the Rainbow ADHC guests have expressed their gratitude for the campus visits and the respect the students demonstrated in their conversations, especially with the vocabulary the students used to address them. 

“They said to me after the visit ‘I haven’t heard strangers call me grandma or grandpa in this country,” said Yang. Yang explains that many who move to the U.S. assimilate to American customs for addressing people, such as defaulting to addressing people by their first names as opposed to familial endearments that are more common in some other cultures and languages. Yang says that the Rainbow ADHC guests have told her that being addressed as “grandmother” or “grandfather” in their native language by Rivers students was like a cultural reawakening for them.

The impact was felt on both sides of the exchange. Stokes communicates with his conversation partner, who is looking to improve his English conversation skills, on a regular basis. Stokes was exposed to Mandarin from a young age by living in Beijing and says he is motivated to continue learning the language and to someday use his Mandarin skills for global diplomacy.

“I think it’s important to have a global perspective, and being able to converse in the world’s most-spoken language is a great skill to have,” Stokes says. “It’s an increasingly important skill in a world where it seems that our superpowers are constantly in conflict. Being able to speak across borders and across oceans is very important.” 

Though the academic year is nearly at its close, Yang’s partnership with Rainbow ADHC is just getting started. Rainbow ADHC just opened a new center in Natick, and Yang has plans to possibly bring students to the center during longer class blocks, and to expand conversations with the senior citizens to other levels of Mandarin classes.

“The senior citizens take these visits very seriously, and they feel they are being valued,” says Yang. “They had such a great time and they want to come back.”