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It was Mandarin lessons, lunch and ping pong when Xuemei Li’s students met their Chinese speaking pen pals for the first time.
Natalie Taylor admits she was feeling nervous when she first walked into the Jenks Center to meet one-on-one with a new friend, but it didn’t take long before the pair were chatting like old friends – in Mandarin.
“I was really intimidated walking in,” said the Winchester High School senior. “Chinese is very hard to learn, but this worked out pretty well.”
Taylor was one of a baker’s dozen of teens who visited the Jenks Center, along with their Mandarin teacher Xuemei Li. The students had been taking part in a pen pal program that matched them with a Mandarin speaking senior at the Jenks Center.
Li said she was worried the students would be shy or not know what to ask their senior counterparts so she prepared some questions for them. She needn’t have worried. The conversation flowed, loud and fast and fairly fluid.
“I am so happy and proud of this,” said Jenks Executive Director Phillip Beltz. “I think it’s wonderful. I really do … it totally surpasses my expectations.”
Li, too, said she was really proud of the kids particularly since for most, it was the first time they had a chance to chat in Mandarin with a native speaker.
Taylor said she found it very helpful to speak with her pen pal, Jiaohui Xu, who came with a gift of homemade steamed buns to share with Taylor. Taylor said she’d been studying Chinese for six years, but feels she really only began to understand it about three years ago.
“I did it mostly because my parents told me I had to take Spanish or Chinese,” she said. “It’s worked out pretty well.”
It worked out well for Xu, too, who is working to learn English and could practice that with Taylor.
Junior Sarah Fromm said she was nervous to try her Chinese out on a native speaker.
“I don’t really speak that much Mandarin,” she said. “I hear it all the time, but I never really worked up the nerve to speak it.”
She relaxed into it, however, with her pen pal Yu Cheng calling it a good experience.
Like Fromm, Alannah Lee has been around Mandarin speakers, as a volunteer at the Winchester School of Chinese Culture, but was wary of speaking in public. She called the meet up a good time.
Lee said her parents encouraged her to take Chinese because despite their heritage, neither speaks the language and they wanted her to be bilingual.
The pen pal project was initiated by WHS senior Tommy Kowalcuk. He said was volunteering at the Jenks, and Beltz knew he’d been studying Mandarin and suggested he do something with that.
Beltz said the Jenks had such a large population of Mandarin speakers, he was able to secure a three-year grant through the Cummings Foundation. With the grant, they hired Michelle Zhang, who helped organize the event, as an ambassador, a kind of bridge between cultures.
Li said the students and seniors exchanged about four letters between them before meeting in person.
Kowalcuk’s pen pal gave him good marks for his conversation skills, calling them “very nice.”
Like many of the students in Li’s class, Kowalcuk said he started studying Chinese years ago at the urging of his parents.
“I pushed back for so many years,” he said, with a grin. “But once I hit high school, I decided to use it for my benefit.”
But conversational Chinese wasn’t the only lesson students got that afternoon. Following lunch there were a few rounds of some highly competitive ping pong playing.
While Mae Chen coached the kids on how to hold the paddle, May Li taunted them, but all in fun.
“We’re seniors, but we play to win,” she said, before firing off a serve that blew by her opponent, WHS student Carl Stredicke, in a blur.
Li said despite some communication obstacles, she was impressed with her students.
“They figured out how to communicate,” she said. “It’s great.”
Chris Stevens is an award-winning journalist who has spent 25 years chasing, editing and photographing stories on the North Shore. She is the co-founder and managing editor of Gotta Know Medford.
