Just as the Chinese characters appear projected on the electronic board, Tiago Durães jumps out of his chair as if he had suddenly sat on top of a recently sharpened pencil. Already standing and with his arm in the air, from the last row of tables on the left side of the classroom, the nine-year-old boy reads the characters aloud before any colleague does it first: “Ni háo má?”.
- That’s right, very good! - evaluates one of the two Mandarin teachers, Portuguese Mónica Amaral.
- Ni háo má? – says the other teacher, Camila, a 20-year-old Chinese, in charge of teaching the phonetics of Mandarin to the 4th grade class of the Primary School of Carquejido in São João da Madeira, in the north of the country.
“Ni háo má?” the class responds in chorus. Camilla insists, and the children repeat the cue. On the third repetition, the differences between teacher and students can barely be noticed. “I know what that means! It’s ‘How are you?’”, interrupts Francisco Lima, also in the last row, but on the right side of the room. Although not sharing the enthusiasm of his colleague Tiago, Francisco, leaned lazily over his desk with his hand holding his head, answers all the questions put by the teacher.
“And you know what ‘má’ means?” asks teacher Monica defiantly. “It’s the particle of interrogation“, Francisco answers hastily, already excited. ”And what is its role, Francisco?” the teacher asks. The kid, with a purple sweater that just because it’s worn by a boy nobody says is dark pink, answers confidently: “It’s to ask questions, whenever there’s a question you have to use ‘má’“. “If there is no ‘má’, it’s no longer a question!” Tiago adds, still standing on the left side of the room. The rest of the class listens to them with a mix of attention and patience, already used to the usual competition between the two boys on Tuesday mornings.
- And did you know that ‘háo’, besides meaning ‘good’, is also always used in feminine words? - teacher Monica recalls.
- Yes! - the class responds in chorus.
- So that means that everything that is feminine is good, how beautiful! - the teacher says, trying to tease the boys in the class.
- Quite the opposite, all that is feminine is awful! Bleeergh! - Francisco reacts, causing laughter in the classroom, where the desks are all shared by a boy and a girl.
Standing in the back of the room, Xana Bastos, the head teacher of this 4th grade class, that teaches every subject except for Mandarin and English, attends the class with her eyes half-closed. Occasionally, she looks at the exercise sheet in an attempt to follow the lesson. “I can’t understand any of this, God help me. They’re the ones who understand it all, look at them, they’re so smart”, she murmurs.
Meanwhile, in pairs, the students advance to the front of the board to read a dialogue. Apart from the Chinese characters, there is no sign of the Roman alphabet or a phonetic transcription. This doesn’t scare Francisco and Laura, the owner of blond curls worthy of a shampoo advertisement. In front of their colleagues, they calmly look at the sheet and begin to read from it:
Francisco - Ni háo. Wô jiaó Francisco. Nin ji jiaó shén má ming zi? [Hi. My name is Francisco. And what’s your name]?
Laura - Wô jiaó Laura. Ni háo má? [My name is Laura. How are you?]
Francisco - Wô hen háo, shié! [ I’m fine, thank you!]
They repeat it once again, exchanging cues. When the exercise ends, Francisco and Laura return to their seats with a sense of accomplishment.
Tiago, Francisco and Laura are part of the first students to take Mandarin classes in public primary schools in Portugal. Chinese characters became part of these São João da Madeira children’s notebooks in January 2013, the result of joint initiative of the city council, the clusters of schools in the municipality and the University of Aveiro. The initiative was first tested with 3rd grade students in the previous academic year. At that time, of a universe of 300 students, only 3 chose not to learn Mandarin. This year, after positive reviews from the Ministry of Education, which gave the green light for the project to advance, the classes were extended to the 4th grade and became mandatory.
The aim is to extend, year after year, the teaching of Mandarin up to the 12th grade, even if in an optional system. “That is the commitment of the city council”, says the São João da Madeira councilor of Education, Dilma Nantes. Even if that means the municipality, the only entity financing the project, has to pay higher rates than those already set aside for this academic year - about 36 thousand Euros, the equivalent of 60 Euros per student. “We look at this program as an investment, not an expense”, says the councilor.
It wasn’t by chance that the idea of making the teaching of Mandarin mandatory to children of primary education emerged in this city with just over 21.000 inhabitants, halfway between Aveiro and Oporto. Along with Felgueiras, a large part of the 71 million pairs of shoes that Portugal exports annually comes from São João da Madeira. Of this total, the majority of exports is still to EU countries, but it’s in the Chinese market that numbers are growing.
Just in the last three years, the value of the export of shoes to China has tripled and it is estimated that the deal reaches 22.180 million Euros by the end of this year. It’s a rather low number, when considering the totality of the1.6 billion Euros that shoe exports contribute to the Portuguese economy, according to the Portuguese Footwear, Components and Leather Goods Manufacturer´s Association (APICCAPS). Only 1.4 % of revenues come from China. But in São João da Madeira, few doubt that these figures could reach other proportions if the Chinese economy continues to grow, rising along with it a new middle-class for which a single pair of shoes won’t suffice. When that time comes, it is expected that Tiago and Francisco know how to speak Mandarin. Beyond simple greetings, they’ll have to know how to close deals.
“We’ll send Cavaco Silva to China!”
When Tiago and Francisco sit on the colorful benches of the reading corner at the school library and think about what will happen in a few years, it’s not business they talk about. It’s war. Tiago, an avid player of Call of Duty, a well-known videogame saga, sets the tone: “In about 20 years, the world will be split in half. One half is for Portugal and the other half is for China. And then of course, it’ll end in war“. He bursts out laughing while talking, aware of the unlikelihood of this scenario. But amid the laughter, he keeps tracing the outlines of the Portugal-China conflict. “There will be missiles and atomic bombs everywhere. I know what I’m talking about, I play Call of Duty!”
Francisco joins Tiago. “Then, during the war, Portugal will build a wall like the Chinese, only ours will be just a bit north of Lisbon. We couldn´t care less about Lisbon! The Chinese can have it, all they have is traffic anyway!” he says, his excited voice echoing off the walls of the children’s library. “But, mind you, we will keep the Algarve!” he remembers, incapable of giving away his favorite holiday destination to the Chinese. “We seize the situation and go to the Forte de Sagres. Then we only have to put President Cavaco Silva inside one of those cannons there and shoot him straight to China! Keep him!”
When he hears about the future his son Francisco draws for Portugal, Hugo Lima laughs, like he has already heard this conversation and others like that at home. Hugo is a sales manager at Carvalho & Lima Lda., a small to medium company in the footwear business, which is still managed by the grandparents of young Francisco. When he arrives at his son’s school, at the wheel of a white commercial van, he is wearing blue suede shoes stitched with white lines. Made in Portugal, of course.
“Our company focuses more on the domestic market. We have three stores, one in São João da Madeira, another in Aveiro and a third one in Águeda. And we also sell shoes to other Portuguese stores. As we’re small, that’s just what we are interested in, rather than exports”, Hugo explains. Will it be an older and fluent in Mandarin Francisco to change the profile of Carvalho & Lima Lda.? “It’s still very early to talk about that, Francisco is very young, he still has a long way to go before he decides what to do”, he answers.
What’s certain is that Francisco comes home speaking Mandarin several times. Upon returning from his guitar lessons or handball practice, the boy greets his family with a “ni háo”, as if he has forgot the word “hello”. Or when someone passes him the salt at the dinner table, he thanks them with a “shié shié”. “There were times when Francisco would introduce Mandarin into the conversation whenever he could. Words, numbers, everything. And we would tell him ‘Hey Francisco, take it easy, because we don’t understand any of that’”, the father tells, remembering these episodes with pride.
It is also with the same tone that Tiago’s mother, Catarina Durães, talks about her boy. “If this project is to move forward while he’s in school, I think that, at the rate at which he is learning, it is likely that he will end up speaking Mandarin as the older people speak English nowadays”, the kindergarten teacher predicts.
Tiago and Francisco’s Mandarin teacher ensures the trick is the emphasis on orality. “More important than to write well, in a perfect manner, what we want is that they speak it well enough”, says Mónica Amaral, who studied Mandarin in the degree of Languages and Business Relations at the University of Aveiro. “If we keep this in mind, it’ll be easy to teach these children, because it’s at this age that they’ll learn more easily, without barriers.”
Doing homework at the Chinese store
The parents’ reaction, Sílvia Augusto observes, - the assistant director of one of the three school clusters of São João da Madeira - has been one of surprise. “They initially thought that this would be just fun, but now they have realized that this is real learning, and the outcome is that kids come home saying things in Mandarin”, she explains, herself a mother of one of those children. “At these ages, they’re like a sponge. I, for example, couldn’t learn any of that”, the mother of Tiago acknowledges, relieved for not having to help her child with Mandarin homework. Luckily, this is always done in school, immediately after class.
The 4th grade student living near the Bazar Ásia-Europa store, at the Castilho Shopping Center, in the heart of São João da Madeira, isn’t as lucky. “The teacher says that if it is homework, then it’s to be done at home, right?”, says Zhou, the owner of the store, laughing. “Sometimes he comes here with his homework, asking for help, because he doesn’t want to make mistakes”, she explains.
In January, when the 3rd year children began to take Mandarin classes, Zhou was surprised by her younger customers. “They would come to the store with their mothers, they’d look at me and say ’hello’ in Mandarin! ‘Ni háo!’.” Now she is used to it, and she sees some justice in those classes. “I think it’s good, it shouldn’t be just us learning your language! If the Portuguese speak Mandarin, then we’ll talk more with each other!”
Short and chubby, Zhou speaks Portuguese with a mixture of Chinese and northern accent, shooting every sentence with a smile. Since she left Shenzhen, a city with the same population of Portugal, in the Southeast of China, and went to São João da Madeira, she never took Portuguese classes. Twelve years later, she can easily communicate with customers, occasionally missing one word or another. In addition to understanding, she makes herself be understood. “If you speak wrong or mistaken makes no problem, the problem is to not speak anything. This is what is bad”, she says, while she places one customer purchases in a bag and the sound system of the store broadcasts the 3p.m. news bulletin.
Beside Zhou, her husband Wang is concentrated while changing the battery of another client’s wristwatch. Wang speaks little Portuguese, far less than his wife. But several times he says: “Learning Mandarin is good. It’s good for business.”