Pamela Yoon Drakos hated studying Putonghua as a student, but now is leading a group of hundreds of parents pushing for the language to be offered in public schools in the Canadian province of British Columbia.
'My [Putonghua] training as a kid has really worked out well for me professionally,' said the Malaysian-born Yoon Drakos, who uses the language regularly at her job at an international financial institution in the Vancouver area.
'[We] see the vision of what the balance of world powers is going to be. In our children's generation, [Putonghua] is going to be very important.'
In the past, French and English, Canada's official languages, have been the primary languages of public schools, but parents involved in Yoon Drakos' group, Mandarin for BC Schools, are advocating a bilingual approach that would instead see half their children's lessons taught in Putonghua and the other half in English.
Chinese dialects, including Cantonese, Putonghua and others, are spoken by more than 8 per cent of British Columbia's population. In comparison, only 1.4 per cent of the province's population speaks French as a mother tongue, according to census data from 2006.
Yoon Drakos said the drive for a bilingual education that includes Putonghua was coming from families such as her own, where the children did not speak the language at home.