The cradle will rock

Chinese nanny state takes root in US

The BBC: An increasing number of families in the United States is looking to employ Chinese nannies - not so much for their child-rearing abilities, but more for their language skills.

Parents always want to give their children a good head start in life to prepare them for the future.

It seems that families in the United States with a lot of disposable income believe that helping their children master the intricacies of Mandarin at an early age is one way to do that.

Companies who place nannies or au pairs with families in New York have experienced a rush of requests for native Chinese-speakers.

That is the trend right now, according to JaNiece Rush of Lifestyle Resources.

"Just in the last couple of years, we've received an influx of calls where families are hoping that we can find them Chinese-speaking - especially Mandarin-speaking - nannies and housekeepers, so that their children will pick up Chinese," she says. ...

Rush explains that they are in such high demand they can command a salary of around $20,000 more than the average nanny would earn.

One Chinese woman even managed to secure a salary of $70,000-a-year after two families tried to outbid each other to get her

Wow--quite a ways from the days of yellow peril!

It's an interesting article--not incidentally because it's the BBC's take on America, so there's an undercurrent of anthropology to the piece.

I think the relationship between Americans and their nannies is a weird one. In a lot of cases people entrust their kids to caregivers who they see and treat as socially and racially beneath them--it's almost like they're breeding class consciousness and snobbery in their kids.

I mean, how weird is it for a 6-year-old to know there's an adult, usually darker-skinned, who exists solely to watch out for them, and do their bidding? It instills in them a sense of egoism and entitlement that probably never goes away.

It can be counterbalanced, of course, by love--when your kids spend more time with their nannies than you, and when it's the nanny who's there for everything, good and bad, it's natural for a bond to grow between them.

It may not be rooted in equality but for a lot of kids their nannies must seem more their parents, better or worse, than their biological forebearers.

I'm curious to see what happens when you have parents bringing in nannies and encouraging them to bring their kids into a world that, linguistically and culturally, the parental generation has little understanding of.

I think it's great for Americans to learn more about China, regardless of the avenue. Everyone really ought to read John Derbyshire's Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream for that reason. The guy's a jingoistic transplanted Brit of the worse sort in some ways, but he understands the Chinese, and it's an understanding of the best and worst of that country that very few Americans currently have.

From the point of view of a caucasian parent, what happens when the nanny starts raising their kids on the same stories and fables from five thousand years of China's history that schoolkids in Communist China grow up on?

How does the worldview of a kid born and raised in America alter when exposed he or she is exposed to Buddhism from the cradle?

Will future generations of Caucasian Americans have a soft spot for China, and understand better the deep-rooted Chinese fear of instability, and its twin fear of inferiority that now exposes itself as the most virulent nationalism?

A generation of the scions of America's most prominent families, influenced from a young age by inscrutable Asiatics... sounds like something only Hollywood could dream up.

Photo of Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) and his mother (Angela Landsbury) from John Frankenheimer's 1962 The Manchurian Candidate, via Morphizm.