The Push To Save SF City College's Cantonese Language Program

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — The Asian grandmother in the waiting room at Mission Bernal Hospital in San Francisco had a big purple lump around her eye. Confused, injured and unable to speak English, she flagged down Alan Wong, a City College of San Francisco trustee, who was at the hospital as a visitor.

The woman had just been the victim of an unprovoked attack while taking the No. 15 bus. She was punched in the eye and shoved out. The police couldn’t speak Cantonese. Neither could the hospital staff. So she saw Wong, a “random Chinese guy in the hallway,” and asked him to help interpret, according to Wong.

“I always think about that incident when I think about language access and ensuring that people have access to resources in our community,” Wong said in an interview with Patch.

For Wong and a group of student leaders at the City College of San Francisco, those resources include the school’s Cantonese language program, which has been on the brink of elimination since the university announced in fall 2021 that it was making budget cuts.

The UC Issue

Wong’s January resolution supporting Cantonese classes at city college drew unanimous support from the rest of the board of trustees. The resolution aimed to fix what Wong called an “obvious and glaring” problem: the fact that Cantonese is the only language program at the college that isn’t transferable to the University of California level and doesn’t lead to any certificate program.

As a result, Cantonese is often at the top of the list for elimination. City college administrators have said that they must prioritize classes that lead toward student outcomes such as certificates and transferable classes, according to Wong.

City college currently has either certificate or degree programs in Spanish, Russian, Filipino, Japanese, Italian, German, French and Mandarin — but not Cantonese, even though slots for both fall 2021 classes filled at 152 percent and 120 percent capacity.

Only one Cantonese class is being offered in the spring semester, and the college has just one part-time instructor. It previously had as many as five, according to Wong.

“It’s some institutional inertia and lack of movement,” Wong said. “The program is at risk of being shut down because it doesn’t lead toward student outcomes, but at the same time: Why aren’t they transferable, and why isn’t there a certificate program?”

Diana Garcia-Denson, the chair of the world languages and culture department, did not respond to an interview request from Patch about the Cantonese language program.

The Practical Use

Wong’s resolution highlighted the importance of the Cantonese language in San Francisco, where many immigrants from the southeastern Guangdong region of China settled. (Guangdong was previously transliterated as "Canton.")

Cantonese is the language most commonly spoken by the Chinese American population in San Francisco, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Related: 'Not Just A Language': The Fight To Save Cantonese At Stanford

Of the more than 659,000 interactions among San Francisco’s various city departments and limited English speakers, 44 percent took place in Cantonese — the highest level among all languages. Cantonese is also the second-most requested translation for domestic violence calls in the city, according to the San Francisco Family Violence Council.

“What this resolution demonstrates is that people from all over San Francisco and the community want to support Cantonese,” said Julia Quon, one of the student leaders of the push to save the program. “In a way, we’re trying to demonstrate that Cantonese is a language worth fighting for. It’s a language worth preserving, and it’s also a legitimate language.”

Organizers hope to go beyond just protecting the language’s history and culture, emphasizing Cantonese’s practical use. Many seniors and monolingual immigrants in the city rely on people who are bilingual in Cantonese to use services such as public safety, health care and transportation, according to Wong.

“If we have an entire community that is isolated and cannot communicate with the rest of the city because we don’t have interpreters, that’s an erasure of an entire community, as if they don’t exist,” Wong said.

Melissa Chow, another student leader who was born and raised in San Francisco, said she took Cantonese classes at city college to be able to speak with her grandparents, who also live in the city. Chow worried about what would happen if her grandparents were the victims of an anti-Asian hate incident. When her father had triple bypass surgery following a heart attack, she was able to communicate the details in Cantonese with her grandparents.

At her job working on clinical trials with cancer patients at University of California, San Francisco, Medical Center, Chow realized the importance of Cantonese beyond her personal experience. She comforted a quiet older patient during his hospital visits in her limited Cantonese, with simple phrases such as, “The doctor is here to take care of you,” “We are here to support you,” and “We are going to help you get better.”

“He opened up and wanted to talk to me more about him doing tai chi and all these activities that he really enjoyed doing,” Chow said. “I feel like breaking the language barrier just opened so many doors.”

The next day, Chow received a thank you email from the man’s daughter that said her father’s entire personality was “brighter and happier.”

Uncertainty Remains

City college is one of 19 colleges and universities in the United States that offer Cantonese programs, according to the Cantonese Language Association at Brigham Young University. Another is at Stanford University, which recently received a $1 million donation toward its Cantonese language program after a similar movement protested budget cuts threatening the future of Cantonese classes.

Student leaders at city college said they have been in touch with organizers at Stanford as part of a broader "Save Cantonese" movement, which aims to promote and preserve the language in part through supporting Cantonese courses at universities.

Though Wong’s resolution passed, the process of making Cantonese classes transferable to UC could take up to two years. Until then, Wong said, “Consistent and persistent community support” will be necessary to ensure the goals of the resolution are met.

For student leaders, the nod from the trustees provided a level of comfort. But uncertainty over the future of the program remains.

“Although we’re making great progress, the classes are not saved,” Chow said. “That is something we worry about. In a couple of years, this program might be cut again, and there might not be students who have the time to fight for the classes the same way we have.”

Visit savecantonese.org/ccsf for more information.