Dear Educators,

Welcome to the world of Jimmy Lin! In many ways, Jimmy is a typical 11-year-old boy: active, curious, learning to navigate the shark-infested social waters of his 5th grade class. But Jimmy is also a boy who is straddling two cultures: the Midwest culture of Buffalo Grove, the small town in Kansas where his family runs the town’s only Chinese restaurant and his ancestral culture, that of mainland China. Jimmy feels the pull of both and this book is the story of how he learns to understand, live with and even embrace their differences.

We here at the Kansas Committee for International Education in the Schools published this chapter book to give you a way to present your students with an entertaining and informative way to learn about Chinese culture and the Chinese immigrant experience in Kansas. The book is formatted so that the story of Jimmy Lin and his family alternates with chapters about Chinese culture, history and the history of Chinese immigrants in the United States. It is our hope that reading this book will foster international learning, cross-cultural understanding and tolerance among young Americans. Today’s elementary school students will graduate college and enter a global culture; we are now experiencing just the tip of this. Reading The Fastest Pig in the West and using the on-line Teachers’ Guide can give students a head start and help prepare them to be fully operational citizens of the global society.

To assist you in furthering your students’ knowledge of China, its culture and the Chinese immigrant experience, we have created this chapter-by-chapter Teachers’ Guide. In it you will find suggestions, lesson plans and links to other sources with more ideas, methods and information that will enable you to build on and enhance the lessons in the book. We have listed several Kansas State Standards that correspond to the extensions of these lessons but we encourage you to identify others that link –directly or indirectly – to the story of Jimmy Lin and his experience in Kansas.

Enjoy the book and please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions, suggestions or comments.

Yours truly,

Randi Hacker
Kansas Committee for International Education in the Schools
rhacker@ku.edu

Errata:

On page 23 in The Story of the Chinese Zodiac, we neglected to give the gloss for “Cat”. The very first character that appears in the story is the one for cat and it is pronounced “mao”. This character appears on one of the flashcards.

On page 87, it says that the population of China is about twice as large as that of the US. It should say about four times as large.

Note:
The characters used in The Fastest Pig in the West are traditional characters. This type of character is used today in Taiwan. On the mainland, many characters have been simplified. I chose to use traditional characters because they preserve more of the history in their orthography.
In the flashcards, however, simplified characters are used just to give your students a look at the difference.