Learning Chinese in Vancouver

Demand for Chinese language classes and conversation clubs is at an all-time high

Flamingo House Chinese restaurant on Cambie Street is empty except for a few scattered customers slurping noodles and sipping tea. But a small room in the back is buzzing. Thirty people from the Vancouver Mandarin Chinese club-mostly men ranging from their early 20s to mid 60s-are crowded around two tables, picking at plates of egg rolls and lotus root, giving their Mandarin speaking skills a workout.The club started six years ago “with just a handful who got together to practise Chinese,” says Gerrie Ying, who has acted as club organizer since 2011. “Within two or three years we had 500 people.” Ying says that growth can be attributed partly to the group signing on with Meetup.com, a website that connects people with similar interests; now, with membership hovering around 1,300, VMCC has become one of the most active language clubs in Vancouver, and Ying, who teaches Mandarin at the Confucius Institute at BCIT, says they’re signing up an average of 50 new members each month.People join for a variety of reasons, she says, but mostly the club supports professionals who work for Chinese companies or who want to conduct business in China. They meet six to eight times a month, with anywhere from 20 to 50 people gathering downtown at the Confucius Institute, or at Oakridge or Metrotown malls, or in Richmond at Lansdowne mall, to practise common expressions and idioms, and to tackle hot topics in politics and pop culture.At the Flamingo House, Ying ushers over Aaron Posehn, a fastidiously groomed young man who’s been studying the language for 15 years-ever since he came across a book of Chinese characters as a kid. “I told my parents that I wanted to go to Chinese school-like, extra-curricular school-and they, of course, wondered why,” he says. “But they were supportive.” Two trips to China and classes in Asian Area Studies at UBC have helped Posehn reach a high level of fluency, but he still doesn’t use his skills around Vancouver as much as he could-it’s a hassle to strike up a conversation with a stranger, he says, and his day job as a program assistant at UBC’s Sauder School of Business doesn’t offer a lot of opportunity to practise. (Though UBC has increased Mandarin language courses by 20 percent over last year.) Recently, Posehn started his own group to keep his Cantonese speaking skills sharp. For Stephen Melvin it all comes down to the language of love. Melvin, who is retired, was entering China to visit his girlfriend and had trouble with the visa he’d been issued. “Without knowing what was going on, the customs officials picked me up by both arms and hauled me into a back room,” he says. “It was pretty scary not knowing what was going on, or how to communicate, so I decided I’d better learn.”