October 13, 2005
By NANCY CHURNIN / The Dallas Morning News

Sydney Hu and her brother, Ethan, can find tiny Taiwan on a globe in a flash. But Sydney, 4, has no inkling where Texas is, and Ethan, 5, has to spin the globe around a few times. "It's on top of Mexico," he says, playing at his Plano home. "There it is!"

Their mother, Nora Su, 36, smiles and shakes her head. Her family straddles two worlds. She and her husband were born and raised in Taiwan. Her children were born and will be raised in the U.S.

Like many families, they face the classic American melting pot dilemma: How can they assimilate without losing their traditions and values? Ms. Su and her husband, Jerry Hu, came to the United States so he could pursue master's and doctorate degrees. Upon his graduation in 1995, the couple moved to Dallas, where Mr. Hu took a job with Texas Instruments, developing transistors for Silicon wafers.

In 2001, Texas Instruments assigned Mr. Hu to a project in Taiwan. The family packed its bags and lived overseas until the project was completed in 2003.

They then moved to Plano where they became part of the growing Chinese population, which increased from 4.3 percent in 2000 to 5.8 percent this year, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates. The percentage of the Chinese population for the entire U.S. remained at .9 percent for those same years, according to the bureau.

"We see that a lot of the Chinese kids born here, when they grow to a certain age, they lose touch with their Chinese culture," says Mr. Hu, 39.

Mr. Hu and his wife proudly became U.S. citizens in June. Now they are trying to preserve their heritage while embracing American culture.

"We want our kids to adapt to the new environment," says Mr. Hu. "But we want them to be exposed to the Chinese language, too."

That means the family speaks Mandarin at home and the children attend Chinese language school on Sundays. The children and their parents learn about American culture through the public school system.

But the children don't attend just any ordinary preschool and kindergarten. Plano's Harrington Elementary offers the only public Chinese bilingual program in Texas. Three pre-K classes and two kindergarten classes at Harrington are available to any Chinese Plano ISD student who has limited English-speaking abilities. Sydney attends Harrington's pre-K class and Ethan the kindergarten one.

The program also offers parents the opportunity to meet other families facing the push and the pull of the old and the new.

Designed and taught by Hong Kong native Donna Lam, the Harrington program is culturally sensitive.

"I understand how they feel because I went through that," Ms. Lam says. She grew up speaking Cantonese, Mandarin and English and has taught her own children to be multilingual.

"I have many parents each year come and tell me they sent their children to an English-speaking preschool and the children cried because they couldn't express themselves in English and they got very frustrated," she says.

The classroom is a microcosm of the delicate balance between two worlds. A Chinese wok sits atop the standard play kitchen set in a corner of Sydney's classroom. An Asian doll sits in a little crib.

The class celebrated the Moon Festival with moon cakes in mid-September. At the same time, the children look forward to celebrating Thanksgiving in November. And they enjoy reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and the pledge to the Texas flag.

Like little cultural ambassadors, they learn these lessons and teach them to their mother.

"The pledge to the flag -- that's totally new to me," Ms. Su says. "I still don't know all the words because they can't say it clearly."

Their home offers another look at the fusion of two cultures. The children's bookcase sports Chinese books interspersed with English ones. Artwork from Taiwan alternates with Ethan's soccer trophy and the pictures of Disney princesses on Sydney's wall.

After Sydney returns home from school, she's tummy down on the carpet, poring over a Chinese/English version of Dr. Seuss' I Can Read With My Eyes Shut (with her eyes very much open).

As for Ethan, he says his favorite American holiday is Labor Day.

Labor Day? Why Labor Day?

"No school," he says with a grin. For him, that means no public school and no Chinese school and, on this most recent Labor Day weekend, three parties to attend. He and his sister run across the game room toward each other like wildly orbiting electrons, doing a belly slam to celebrate.