 And we are live. Welcome everybody to another episode of China, Hawaii and you. I am your host, Andrew Zimmerman. And we've been talking a lot today about, or at least over the course of this program, to a lot of different people regarding Chinese. Learning Chinese is something that, as everybody knows, it's fascinated me. But this is actually the first time that I've gotten to talk to a professional Chinese teacher. And that makes me really happy. So we wanted to tell everybody about our guest, Cindy Ning. I'm going to try to introduce her, and then I'm going to let her go over anything that I missed. Cindy is the associate director of the StarTalk program at UH Manoa, which is an intensive Mandarin learning program. The goal of it is to make people completely proficient in anything that they might want to do. So whether that's just tourism or business or maybe even going on to higher education. So we'd like to welcome Cindy. And did I miss anything in your introduction there? Can I tweak it a little? Sure, no problem. I tried my best. That's fine. I'm the associate director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. And one of our projects this year is the StarTalk. It's the year-round StarTalk program. It's the first time that the National Security Agency is trying a year-round StarTalk. They're usually just summer programs. But this is a year-round program. And I am the principal investigator of that program. But everything else? OK, well, I've been very sorry. I must have mixed that up in my head. I'm very sorry about that. But that's very exciting. I didn't know the NSA was getting into this. I mean, you don't have to really think part about why. But it's definitely very exciting to me that these kinds of programs, intensive programs, exist within the United States. Because up until maybe 20 or 30 years ago, the only way that you could get into an intensive program without going to China itself was being in the military. Well, the StarTalk program aims to start much earlier. So actually, ideally, a professional say that earlier you can start the better. And in part of our conversation we were having before this program came on, is that Hawaii finally has an immersion, a Chinese immersion program at Marino School. And that begins at kindergarten. I applied for a job there. And by the time the kids get to like third grade, and I think they're up to fourth grade now, they sound like little native speakers. It's wonderful. So the earlier you can start, the better. And the StarTalk program actually begins in high school. So if the summer programs we dip down to as low as intermediate school, but this year-round program begins with juniors in high school. So before they would become involved with the military. And trying to become proficient is a huge undertaking. You need thousands of hours in training. So even a little bit is better than nothing. And then to get to proficient. So the different levels of proficiency to get to a level where you can handle your job or do negotiations, that would take a really long time. So we're aiming for this pipeline now. So we have an immersion program in, say, Marino School. We have StarTalk programs that try to get more students interested and get teachers better at teaching and develop better materials. And Hawaii is really lucky because we also have a flagship program at the University of Hawaii in the Chinese department. And the flagship program is the one that tries to take people who are already at quite high level and push them to a professional level so that they can use Chinese in their careers once they graduate. So we have a pipeline going. You know, that's really, really exciting. That's one of the things that I want to talk to you about. And we will get into, because there's a really big jump that you could make between having a conversation like what you had, what we had just before the show, right, where we were speaking Chinese for about 10 minutes without a problem. But there is still such a big gap when it comes to, are you professionally useful? Right, you know, when you're in a professional setting, even missing a word or two is sometimes lethal to your understanding of what maybe a client's requirements are, or even just making a good impression. And it seems to me that that kind of gap is, it seems almost what it certainly seemed at the time when I was first learning, completely unreachable and impossible. Do you ever get students that are just kind of fallen to despair about like, oh, no, I'm never going to get through this? I guess. Most of the time, students aren't quite as ambitious as you are. I mean, you know, we have lots of students who are taking foreign language for maybe because it's a requirement at college. Maybe they think when I travel, I would like to be able to use some of it. So what's required for traveling is much less challenging than trying to be proficient in a career. So most of our students, I think, aim for that travel level, intermediate. In the proficiency ratings, it's called intermediate, where you can actually use the language to manage daily needs. So you can order something to eat. You can figure out how to get from point A to point B. You can rent a hotel room. You can go shopping. That's all travel level proficiency. And most people aim for that. And lots of people manage to get there for that. And I think that's the level at which you and I were conversing just before the show started. You seem very comfortable with the language. It comes easily. Your pronunciation is quite good. To go to the next level, it's true. You may be already at the next level, I don't know. But to go to the next level, the next level up is you can narrate and describe. So if somebody were to say, oh, I slipped and I fell and I have to go to the hospital now, and somebody says so exactly what happened, you can tell a story. So you can tell stories in past tense, present tense, future tense. That's the next level up. And at that level, you can handle most professional things. So in your career, you would get rather good in a certain arena, talking in a certain arena. The next level beyond that takes a lifetime. Because if you're trying to become more like a native speaker in all arenas, so you can talk about science, you can talk about sports, you can talk about politics and belief systems, you can try to convince somebody that they're wrong and you're right. That just takes a lot more training, dedication, ambition, all of that. So for the people who have said that, that is their goal. Their goal is to try to reach that level. I've never met anybody that said, I can't do it. Because if you have that kind of dedication, determination to begin with, you get there. Yeah, no, I definitely can relate to the struggles of not really knowing how much longer it's going to go. And I think coming to peace with the journey, and like you said, accepting that it's going to be a lifetime and there's always going to be the odd word here and there as you don't know. That's a really important thing if you're trying to reach the heights of it. But I remember when I first got to Shanghai, I was very timid and really fumbling over my own words when it came to even just getting a boba, right? And I was very proud of myself when I memorized the words, Jin Junil Na, like bubble tea. And all of that culminated when I statistically remember on my very last conversation in Chinese within China, he was in a taxi on the way to the airport. And the guy, he looks over to the back of it and he says, I say, and are you American? Yes. And I was like, OK, all right, we've got this conversation so far. We can handle whatever's going on. He's going to ask me some basic cultural questions. He's going to maybe talk about our food or what I liked about Shanghai. But no, what he said was, what do you think of Biden pulling all of the American soldiers out of Afghanistan? And my very first thought that I was thinking, I was like, this was not in the textbook. OK. Yeah. But I gave my best shot at it, and it was actually a really interesting conversation. I remember meeting a surprising number of really big historic history aficionados. Like, you would think that they had PhDs and they were taxi drivers just because it paid more. Man, the economy of this place is something that I'll never understand. But hopefully that does give you some impression of how far my Chinese did end up knowing. And I was shooting for graduate school at the time, but some circumstances had to change, and I ended up back here. So I would like to go back and hopefully use a little bit more, maybe professionally. But if it's not professionally, I don't mind. I have plenty of fun talking in cantinas and restaurants and just the odd Chinese person on a hike. It's a useful skill that I'm going to keep around for probably the rest of my life. So that was some very interesting talk story. But I do want to get a little bit through StarTalk. The very first thing that I want to do, though, and this is maybe a little bit off topic, but I think it's very relevant, is the loss of the Confucius Institute. And I wanted to talk to you about how you feel that impacted the status of learning Chinese within the university context. Because almost all Confucius Institutes across the United States are gone. The one at my university that sponsored my trip to Nanjing in 2017, which was the first time that I really got interested in this, they're now gone. Like I said, I think the Department of Defense is getting pretty thorough to make sure that they're all out. But I wanted to ask you, how did that impact UH Manoa's status of learning Chinese? Because I'd understand that people were quite shabuda. Like they didn't really want to let it go. Of course not. It was a little bit unexpected. It was not that there was no warning, because we knew that the situation, the tension between the US and China had been growing. And of course, the suspicion was that, since these institutes were funded by the Chinese government, even though it was by the Chinese Ministry of Education primarily, that somehow they were spy institutions. And we've always dealt at the University of Hawaii, we've always dealt with it by saying, everything we have is completely open. You're welcome to come to anything we do, any event, any classes we teach, any exhibitions we hold, it's all open to the public. So you can see for yourself if there's anything untoward. In what we're doing. So we ran for 13 years. And what I find was so ironic about that whole situation was I think that the goal of the Confucius Institute and the goal of something like a Star Talk was exactly the same. It was to create more interest in learning Chinese. It was to create more knowledge about China. It was to improve the level of Chinese language instruction we were giving. So what particularly struck me was towards the end and the Confucius Institutes quite unlike what the news media was saying was not dictated. What we did was not controlled by China at all. So every Confucius Institute comes up with its own program. Every Confucius Institute decides what it wants to do and then it writes a proposal and sends that proposal into Confucius Institute headquarters and says, OK, this is what I want to do. Do you want to fund me? And very seldom they'll say there was a couple items that we had asked for that they said they weren't going to fund. Actually, I remember it was only because they said you're not applying to the right place. We fund activities. We don't fund material development. If you want to do material development, go to this other unit in our organization. So every Confucius Institute decided for itself how it wanted to proceed to improve Chinese language education. So for example, a difference between Hawaii and Idaho, say. Hawaii has some of the earliest, the oldest Chinese language schools in the nation. And Hawaii has maybe 100 Chinese language programs. There's Chinese language being taught after school on weekends in the DOE, in private schools, at the universities. There's Chinese language programs everywhere. So we decided very early on we didn't want to compete. We didn't want to compete with anybody that was already existing. So what we wanted to do was we want to supplement. We wanted to enhance. So that's very different from some other Confucius institutes where there was nobody teaching Chinese. And so the Confucius Institute was offering the first classes that had ever been in that state. And some of the US government concern about that situation was if the only Chinese that's being taught here is being taught by a PRC government funded group, what kind of assurance do we have that this is not propaganda? And what we've always argued, I think what all of the Confucius institutes have argued is we're at such an elementary level. You can't get to propaganda when they're talking about let's learn the numbers. Let's learn the colors. You can't get to that. And for a place like Hawaii, the University of Hawaii, the center of the Chinese studies, we have 49 faculty specialists. We're offering 150 classes in Chinese. What the Confucius Institute did was such we didn't affect the Center for Chinese Studies program at all. I think a lot of the faculty never even knew we existed. It was just one program in this huge enterprise. So from our point of view, the fear that this is propaganda and that our students are getting a skewered stream of information about China just didn't make any sense. At the elementary levels, all we're talking about is colors and dates and stuff like that. And then in our Confucius Institute, we never got to the higher levels. And if American students are interested in debating philosophy and political science, they go to the Center for Chinese Studies, which are the way the courses are taught by US citizens. So anyway, so from our point of view, the Confucius Institute was never a problem. And we always try to, if anybody said, we have doubts, we would say, well, come and visit us and look at whatever you want to look at. And we'll talk to you about whatever you want to talk about. Anyway, but it didn't work. The situation, the tension between the US and China is still so sad. It's so sad that there is so much tension between the two countries. And what is ironic is, so when the Confucius Institute closed, to be fair, the University of Hawaii tried very hard to soften the blow for, especially for the Chinese people who were working. Like we had three instructors from our partner institution, Beijing Foreign Studies University. And I'm trying to remember five, five TAs, five graduate students. So they tried very hard to make sure that these people were taken care of, that their next steps were in place and stuff like that. But for about a month every day, I had people in my office crying, like, what did we do wrong? What happened? I mean, we had been named a model Confucius Institute, and the Chinese government had just given us a million dollars to renovate our space to make it more worthwhile of being such a Confucius Institute. The University actually paid the money back to the Chinese government. So anyway, that was all very sad. But then almost right after the Confucius Institute closed down, StarTalk picked up. So the amount of money we're getting from the Confucius Institute was almost immediately replaced by StarTalk because they have the same goal. Both the Chinese government and the American government want more people to be more functional in Chinese. That's a really, really interesting story. And thank you very much for sharing. I wanted to say one thing about that and then we'll go into StarTalk bearing in mind. We do have eight minutes left in the show. So I remember when I went into Nanjing. This was a trip sponsored by the Confucius Institute. I was kind of shocked that we didn't have to pay anything for it except for the airfare. And I remember talking to some people beforehand. And you get the obvious talk about, like, ooh, you better watch out for the propaganda or ooh, you better not say something bad about Xi Jinping or kind of pull some kind of faux pas or something like that. But I will admit to you, and maybe this isn't a good thing to say, that I kind of was hoping for when I got to China to learn about, for lack of a better word, an alternate history. I kind of did want to say, I was looking forward to hearing teachers say on a white board, like, here's top 10 reasons why Tiananmen Square never happened or maybe like, or maybe not something quite that obvious, but maybe something around American imperialism or maybe some colored history around Taiwan. And I went in to the classes in Nanjing with my ears particularly perked up for that kind of stuff. And for three weeks, absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing. There was like cooking classes and like Tai Chi. And we went through the numbers and the colors and people put basic sentences together because everybody's level was like HSK1, roughly. I was a little bit higher, but not too much higher at the time, unfortunately. And I was kind of dumbstruck by the end of it. I was thinking, damn, I was promised so much propaganda. Where was it? But yeah, that stuff made me particularly sad. And I ended up actually writing a couple senators about my experiences and why I supported it. They probably thought that I was like a bot or maybe a fake Chinese person. I don't know, but whatever it's done is done. We have a little bit of time to talk about StarTalk now. Let me just follow up what you're coming with one observation. And that is why many, very often Chinese people say Americans don't understand us at all. In the situation where you were brought to China, China is all about harmony. It's not going to introduce any controversial topics. They don't want to have an argument with you. They are going to try to make you have as pleasant as an experience as possible. On the other, let me just give you a little anecdote from another era. Peking University is one of China's best. And they are an exchange partner of ours. And when President Bill Clinton went travel to China, he visited Peking University. And he wanted to have an opportunity to talk to the students. The students who were in the lecture hall with him were handpicked. And they were talked to ahead of time. And the Western media always says, oh, China is going to clamp down and control the flow information. No, they were talked to because they didn't want the students asking anything that would make Bill Clinton uncomfortable. So they were said, OK, you're not going to ask him anything about Monica Lewinsky. You're not going to ask him anything about the problems he's having with the US government. Just stay high. Stay on the level of how do our two countries get along better. So anyway, so the thing about harmony, China is looking for harmony. So it wouldn't have shoved any propaganda at you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's a very interesting story. Thank you very much. We are right about out of time. There's two questions that I have time for, OK? The very first one is what are the qualifications for applying as a teacher and as a student into the program? This is a viewer question. Start off program? No qualifications. We are not looking for elite. We are not looking for, you know, in fact, if you have had no other opportunities to learn Chinese before, we're interested in you. The current program, we already have 60 students enrolled. And so we're going to be whittling down as the program goes by. But if you're very interested, email me at CYNDY at hawaii.edu. And I'll be happy to talk to you about whether we could fit you in. Oh, yeah. And then what about the teachers? Do you think that like non-natives could ever make it as teachers? Definitely. There's a role for non-native teachers because you have an insight into the student learning process that native speakers do not. So I think that the ideal program has a mix of native and non-native. I agree with you completely. And then we have time for one last question, OK? One last question, which is, from 1 to 10, how would you rate my Chinese? Well, I haven't heard enough. All right. For the viewers, I said from 1 to 10, how would you rate my Chinese? Chinese is quite good. I'd say above five. But in order to see how much above five, I need more data. All right. Well, hopefully I'll be able to come down to the university and pay you a visit because I would very much be interested in continuing this conversation. It's something that I hope you can tell is something that I'm very, very deeply passionate about. So we would like to thank everybody for tuning in. Thank you very much for the viewer questions. I'm sorry we didn't have time to quite get to them all, but we had a really, really interesting conversation. And I also wanted to very much thank Cindy for coming in and sharing some of her experience and expertise in Chinese education. Thanks for the opportunity. Yes. Thank you very much, everybody. Mahalo. OK.