Xinhua – Miao Zhuang and Xia Lin 
Upper schoolers at the Walter Payton College Preparatory High School like to warm up their get-togethers with a rendition of Jasmine, the classic Chinese folk song that U.S. President Donald Trump’s grand-daughter performed months ago during her visit to the Chinese Embassy in Washington. “Chinese is one of the most widely used language in the world. So I think learning it is super important, because so many different people speak it,” Helen, a Payton enrollee, told Xinhua in a recent interview. Xu Qun, who came from China for her Mandarin-teaching job at Payton, has noticed for a long time the trendy choice among American children, saying that “I think a lot of children in the U.S. are very young when they start learning Chinese. Some parents think Chinese is so important that they hire a Chinese-speaking nanny to look after their children.”(more)