By Chester Leung
San Francisco Chinatown is undeniably the heart of Cantonese culture in the United States. As I stroll from Portsmouth Square to AA Bakery & Cafe for delicious egg tarts, all I hear on the street is Cantonese and Taishanese (a Cantonese dialect). Yet, the one place where you won’t hear any Chinese is at City College’s Chinatown campus. Why isn’t City College offering Cantonese classes in the neighborhood with the highest concentration of Cantonese speakers per capita?
This is not just my personal opinion. Trustees Alan Wong and Heather McCarty have publicly endorsed the idea, saying it makes perfect sense. When City College stopped offering online Cantonese classes, my former classmate and San Francisco Supervisor Danny Sauter had to turn to a private tutor to continue learning the language and better communicate with his constituents in Chinatown. It is baffling that a city-funded program like Free City is not accessible to someone who can decide its fate.
It is not just alumni and public officials who face challenges accessing Cantonese classes at City College. Many of my friends in Chinatown and Oakland would gladly enroll if the courses were offered at the Chinatown campus. Unfortunately, commuting to the Ocean campus is a major hurdle for working students and parents. At a time when the college is struggling with low enrollment, why not remove this barrier and bring classes to where the students live?
But San Francisco Chinatown is not just home to Cantonese learners. It is also home to many English learners. CCSF’s Chinatown campus is well known for its English as a Second Language classes. While scrolling on Douyin (China’s version of TikTok), I came across a 100-year-old elder attending one of these ESL classes at our Chinatown campus.
It reminded me of my middle-aged, new immigrant classmates who enrolled in CCSF’s Cantonese classes to help them learn English. At the Ocean campus, Professor Yu and my English-speaking classmates would help them translate Cantonese passages into English. In return, the new immigrant classmates helped Cantonese learners with pronunciation and offered cultural insights for our American-born Chinese classmates. It was a beautiful example of language learners supporting each other across generational and cultural lines.
Cantonese classes at the Chinatown campus are about more than just language instruction. They build bridges across cultures and generations while honoring the community that still lives in San Francisco’s Chinatown. That’s why our community leaders, alumni and students continue to advocate for an additional Cantonese instructor at the Chinatown campus.
Our community cannot miss this opportunity for greater mutual exchange and deeper connection. It’s time to invest in our neighborhood. It’s time to teach Cantonese in Chinatown.