When she started college in 2000, Tang Guofang didn't chose a popular major such as computer science or business administration that would have given her an edge in China's increasingly competitive job market. Instead, she enrolled in a newly launched course that attracted only a handful of students and puzzled her parents: Teaching Mandarin as a Second Language.
Equally vexing to them was her decision to take a job teaching Mandarin in Thailand after graduation. But for the native of Guilin, now 27 years old, working abroad for two years or more made perfect sense. 'I knew that if I stayed in China, my path in life would have been set out for me, whereas if I lived abroad, I would develop a different understanding of the world,' says Ms. Tang, who now teaches 8-year-olds at an international school near Bangkok.
Meet a new breed of Chinese migrant worker: young, educated and hungry for new experiences and international travel. Although the West has been churning out globe-trotting English instructors for decades, thousands of young Chinese are now discovering that teaching Mandarin is an increasingly feasible way of funding foreign adventures. They're returning to China transformed by their experiences, and with a fresh, international outlook. 'I wanted to go out of the country and have a look around the rest of the world,' says Liu Shiming, a slight 31-year-old who taught in Bulgaria's capital, Sofia, for a year in 2005 and 2006. 'For us Chinese, international travel has become easier, but it's still not that easy. So I thought teaching would be a good way to get to see the world.'
A few years ago, Ms. Liu and her fellow instructors might have struggled to find students. Now, they're being welcomed with open arms as more people world-wide rush to learn China's official language amid the country's expanding influence. Only about 25,000 students in American public schools were studying Mandarin in 2000. Since then, public school systems in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Houston have stepped up Mandarin instruction, doubling that number, according to estimates by the Asia Society, a New York nonprofit organization aimed at boosting U.S.-Asia ties.
Six-year Bangkok resident Jackie Thompson, 41, from Australia, has both of her children, Georgina, 11, and Sam, 7, take Mandarin classes. 'We're looking at 15 years down the line, when Georgina has graduated from university,' she says. 'If you have three people interviewing for a job -- one speaks Spanish, one speaks French and one speaks Mandarin -- we're quite sure that it's the Mandarin speaker who's going to get the job.'
Mandarin fever runs especially high in Asia, where countries are directly feeling China's economic, political and, increasingly, cultural clout. Thailand and South Korea are planning to introduce Mandarin classes in schools, and Thai officials have said they hope a third of all high school students will be enrolled in Chinese language classes within five years. In Bangkok, private Chinese language centers have mushroomed, while an increasing number of international schools are boasting about their trilingual curricula in Thai, Mandarin and English. Mandarin schools are even opening in Indonesia, where the language was banned for more than three decades as an anti-Communist move by former dictator Suharto.
