mandarin speaking baby sitters in demand

[VV o n g B a]

wonder if this happened w/ japanese in the 80s...

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In demand in America: Chinese au pairs

In a motel conference room last week in Connecticut, 167 young women from 22 countries received a tutorial in catering to the needs of the affluent American child.
(Lesson 1: Turn off the television set.)
Many of the women were German. But two drew particular attention, Kunyi Li, 23, and Man Zhang, 24, among the first au pairs from China.
Their services are in great demand, in part because so many Americans have adopted baby girls from China. Driving the need more aggressively is the desire among ambitious parents to ensure their children's worldliness, as such parents assume that China's expanding influence will make Mandarin the sophisticates' language decades hence.
"Our clientele is middle and upper middle class," said William Gertz, chairman of the American Institute for Foreign Study, which oversees Au Pair in America. "They see something really happening, and they don't want to be left behind."
The last two years have seen an astonishing increase in the number of American parents wishing to employ Mandarin-speaking nannies, difficult to find in the United States and even harder to obtain from China.
Au Pair in America, the 20-year-old agency that sponsored the two young women in Connecticut, had received no requests for Chinese au pairs until 2004, said Ruth Ferry, the program director.
Since then, it has had 1,400.
The agency said it expected to bring 200 more au pairs to this country before the end of 2007, and other companies in the business are beginning to recruit in China, all taking advantage of relaxed standards for cultural-exchange visas for Chinese.

http://iht.com/articles/2006/09/05/news/aupairs.php

[SunWuKong]

i think there's an old thread somewhere about this same thing.

[enigma740]

That's an interesting development. Guess I should have paid more attention in my mandarin class.

[Napoleon Chynamite]

I remember my mandarin baby sitter when I was like 5 or 6. Scared the shit out of me, she was extremely loud and always yelling...although I think that's just the way she was and not because she was mean or anything. She had like two much older sons that used to pick on me too. Whoever said that canto speakers are louder than mando speakers just doesn't really know what they're talking about and going along with common misconception, lol.

[Yeahman]

My grandmother babysat a black kid once. He became fluent in Korean. Quite amazing.

[Faithless]

Originally Posted by SunWuKong

i think there's an old thread somewhere about this same thing.

Was it this one.

Had an interesting conversation with a friend about his sister-inlaw the other evening.

The sister inlaw comes from rich Singapore money. She came to this country with her own nanny, whose job it was to wait on this sister inlaw hand-and-foot.

After years of this, helping with kids, etc., something happened to the nanny and she had to leave the country. It was around the time of this family's second child.

My friend's mom decided to help with taking care of the second child for a bit. But when the gma felt she did enough, she left it up to her son/daughter-inlaw to take care of their kids.

The daughter-inlaw, supposedly, couldn't cope. Nobody was fucking pampering her, I guess.

My friend says that this has caused their family a long running feud.

Is it "heard of" to bring one's nanny to the states to "serve" that person in the states as well?