Remember one of our favorite customer’s little girl who can recognize Chinese characters at 15 month old?  Well, this little girl is now 27 month old, and she can read a Chinese book!  So sweet and so smart.  She can also read in English too!  That’s so amazing.  This family does not live near a city with big Chinese population.  She doesn’t attend any Chinese school.  Her ability to read is through her mom’s tireless effort in teaching her.  Check out the video.  I am so proud of our cutest, youngest reader!

Asian American basketball player, will be the first NBA player since 1947, certainly made us all Asian Americans proud.  Of course, being a Chinese mother, I am also equally fond of him graduating from the Harvard Crimsons.  He was just signed by the Golden States Warriors, and he will be one of the guards in the team.

Jeremy grew up in Palo Alto, California.  His first exposure to professional basketball started at the age of 5, when his father took him to his first basketball game.  Yeah, so this has been a good year for us, first Ed Wang to the NFL, and now Jeremy Lin to the NBA!!!!

Check out his highlights here at his Harvard days.

加油 – jiā yóu

Today, my oldest had his first swim meet for the summer. While he was swiming with his teammates, his little brothers cheered him on. In particular, my 2 1/2  year old started saying 加油, jiā yóu, 加油 as he watched his brother swim. I was kind of surprised by this outburst of Chinese as his Chinese is limited to food and some simple instructional words such as go, come, eat, etc. It turned out, there was a Ni Hao Kai-lan episode where Kai-lan and her friends cheered for Ho Ho. The best way to understand 加油 is in a sentence, it basically is the equivelent of  “Go, Name (Ho Ho), Go!

This again affirms my believe television is ok as long as it’s educational! Seriously, if my kids are going to watch tv, at least I know they are learning!

Check this out!  A Qing Dynasty table clock was sold for $3.8M at a Sotheby’s auction this week.  This auction was held at the country estate of Patricia Kluge in Charlottesville.

The clock, one of the top showcase pieces sold Tuesday for a price more than triple the $1 million estimated top value after a heated telephone bidding session. A Chinese collector jumped in with an offer of $1.2 million for the nearly 200-year-old gilt-brass-and-enamel timepiece, then cast the winning bid of $3.78 million several minutes later.

This clock was dated back in the Qing Dynasty (1736-1795).  It’s definitely a masterpiece, I wonder what it would look like in my dining room…… 

Alright, I never thought that I would ever write anything about football or NFL, but I am weeping with joy about Ed Wang.  He is the first Chinese American football player ever been drafted into the NFL.  He is going to be playing for the Bills.

Ed Wang was born in the States, but both his parents were born and raised in China.  Both are former Chinese Olympians, his dad was a high-jumper, and his mom was a hurdler.  There you have it, Ed Wang is over 300 lbs, and 6′5″.  No, this is not a joke and it is not a typo.  Click here to listen to an interview with him.

I was very fortunate to get to talk (well, cyber chat)to one of our customers.  She is a VERY dedicated mom, and my hats off for her.  She works full time with a very demanding job, and she is dedicated in immersing her child with fun and educational materials, starting at a very young age.

She uses a couple of tools to teach her child Chinese, speaking and also recognizing the characters.  One of the tools she uses and loves is the Baby Learns Chinese DVDs.  She is teaching her child traditional Chinese characters, and she is always on the lookout for good materials.  When she finds good materials available in Simplified Chinese, she would reach out to the publishers about their traditional character versions.  She had painstakingly printed out the traditional characters on sticker paper and stick them onto the pages of some simplified Chinese books she found.  Did I already told you that she is dedicated?

Her little girl in this video is only 15 month old.  She is able to recognize Chinese characters!!!  At 15 months old!  Plus, she is sooo cute and adorable.  Be prepare to say “Wow”!

May is Asian-Pacific American Heritage month, as we celebrate Asian and Pacific Islanders in the United States.  The celebrations often include eating in Asian restaurants, and attending one of many festivals or parades organized by local Asian American community.  This is the month that you can taste various Asian cuisines, learn about the culture and history, and watch cultural performances.  I watched one of the HBO specials this weekend called, “Asian Aloud”, which different individuals were interviewed to talk about being Asian Americans.

Here’s a trivia question for you.  Do you know why May was picked to be the Asian-Pacific American Heritage month?

The month of May was chosen to commemorate the immigration of the first Japanese to the United States on May 7, 1843, and to mark the anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad on May 10, 1869. The majority of the workers who laid the tracks were Chinese immigrants.  Click here for full report

For those of you who remember, I mentioned that I would like to start a Family Recipe blog for everyone in the family to contribute recipes so that we can duplicate the familiar delicious food.  It took a few months, but I finally created a blog.  Right now it’s for family only, because I’ve only written an intro, without any recipe yet!  I believe my first entry will have to be Beef Chow Fun.  It’s a favorite of the boys and my husband.  After making this dish about 50 million times, I think I finally got it right.  I will definitely share my recipe with all of you when I write it down.  The tough thing about writing recipe for me is that I don’t ever measure anything.

It’s funny that as I get older, I miss the food that I grew up with more and more.  I guess that’s why they call it comfort food.  This weekend, my sisters threw me an early birthday party.  The theme was comfort food.  It was all the food that I love and grew up with.  Some of them are very much “street food”, for the lack of a better term.  I had such a great time, and came home with a very full stomach!  I think it’s a great idea though.  Throwing a party and making food that you grow up with!  Or better yet, have everyone bring a dish of one of your favorite childhood food!  That would be a fun party!

My older son is showing a lot of  interest in learning Chinese, and that’s music to my ears.  I would like him to learn Mandarin.  Our family speaks Cantonese, but Mandarin is the official language which I would definitely want him to learn.  I started researching in Chinese school, and my husband is definitely against sending the kids to Saturdays/Sundays Chinese school.  He is a Chinese school drop out, and had bad memories of giving up play time to go to Chinese school.  Weekends are always packed with activities: sports, birthday parties, grandparents visits, social events; so I don’t necessarily disagree with him.

My other idea is to find a Chinese tutor.  I really want this to be an interesting and fun experience for the kids.  My ideal situation is to team up with another family so it’s a few kids together to learn Chinese, they can even play a little after the tutoring session.  I would definitely want this tutor to have experience with kids, and to want to make this learning experience an interesting one.  I started asking around.  I posted a request on one of the yahoo moms group around where I live to see if anyone has any recommendations.  I got some pretty interesting results!  I got ONE recommendation, and I got like TEN responses asking me to share my findings as they are all looking for the same thing.

This reminded me of something.  This is exactly why Debbie and I started My Panda Paws – make learning Chinese fun and educational for the kids.  There’s a pretty good candidates that I am going to call tomorrow, let’s see how it works out.

The Northeast had a major snow storm this weekend, we had about 11 inches of snow here.  I am not going to talk about the headaches here, including the traffic, canceled flights, shoveling, and slippery roads.  Our family used this snow storm as an excuse to relax a little bit during this busiest time of the year.  I wrapped some presents, but not too motivated.  The boys played in the snow, super cute.  (Am I a bad mom for dreading the marathron winter suit prep session?)  Husband was the busiest of us all, painted a room, and working on putting up molding.  But honestly, it was such a relaxing weekend.  We cancelled all of our parties, and didn’t have to run around like crazy.  It was definitely an unexpected treat during this time of the year.

I was inspired, and found some beautiful snowy pictures, one of them is NYC of this weekend, courtesey of the New York Times, and of course, some of the most famous places in China.  Enjoy!