Who is Lulu?

Hi!  I’m Lulu, and with Lacey, we have created Bitty Bao together in hopes of encouraging bilingual/multilingual families in their quest to learn a secondary language. 

 I grew up in Taiwan for most of my childhood.  While it seems that my Mandarin should be fluent, I had an Americanized education in Taiwan, and unfortunately Chinese became a secondary language for me.  I ended up having private tutors in an effort to maintain my Chinese and I later took Chinese as a second language in high school.  Sadly, I never took my Chinese classes seriously.  When I moved away from Taiwan to attend college and later graduate school in America, my ability to speak, read, write, and listen in Chinese diminished significantly.  There were even moments where I felt it was really difficult to communicate clearly with my own parents in Chinese.

Fast forward to today; I am a very lucky, ordinary, stay-at-home mom of two bitty babes, Ella (6) and Lucas (3), with 9 years of teaching experience.  I have so many hopes and dreams for my children.  The top hope on that list is that Ella and Lucas will have a close relationship with both sets of their grandparents.  And through that relationship, I dream my children will learn about their heritage and culture.  In learning a secondary language, I am hopeful that they will be proud of their language capabilities and background too.

With my children, I planted the seed from the moment that they were born, that Mandarin was going to be used as our primary language at home.  I wanted to ensure that my struggles with losing my Chinese language abilities would not be one my children would have to experience.  None of this came easily, as my husband speaks predominantly English, Cantonese, and limited Mandarin.  It would have been so much easier to just stick to English.  With my parents living in Taiwan, it was already a setback for the kiddos to develop a close relationship with them, let alone adding a language barrier to boot.  My parents and I have made great efforts to travel and visit each other in order to build the children’s relationship.  For many years before schooling, this was achievable timewise.  As Ella grew older, English became her predominant language of choice, even Lucas at age 2 began to lose his ability to speak Mandarin.

I knew that without the ability to communicate fluently with their grandparents in Chinese, my children would lose out on so many valuable conversations and experiences.  I spent hours looking for books in 注音 (zhù yīn, the phonetic equivalent in Chinese) so that I could read it and support my children in their language acquisition.  I also spent hours reading all of our baby English board books and picture books in Chinese (translating it as quickly as I could in my limited Chinese vocabulary).  As I spoke, and as I read more, I personally learned and gained more Chinese vocabulary than I had previously - I knew the importance of keeping the minority language up.  My parents’ visits and our visits to Taiwan all played a huge role in developing my children’s Mandarin skills, and today I see that dream of mine beginning to blossom right before my eyes.  Ella & Lucas are able to communicate in Chinese with their extended family, take trips, and are able to experience life together.

Books have been such an important aspect of language building skills and learning in our home.  The kids and I always look forward to story time, and we can spend hours reading together.  Over time though, it became apparent to me that what we were missing most were books in Chinese that allowed my non-Chinese reading husband to read to them as well.  My strength is in reading traditional Chinese characters with 注音 (zhù yīn), but most of these books are not available in 拼音(pīn yīn, the romanization of Chinese). This dilemma made it nearly impossible for my husband to participate and read Chinese to our children.    

I realized that incorporating my husband into the Chinese language learning process was going to be difficult. With that, and my own desire to provide the children an ongoing and engaging fluency in Chinese, a light bulb went off in my head.  I felt passionate about creating high-quality, engaging, and culturally relevant Chinese bilingual books for Chinese speaking families, non-Chinese speaking families, and families like mine.  These books needed to include all of the necessary language elements to support each family member wherever they may be in their language learning journey – engaging pictures for the youngest of readers, 拼音(pīn yīn) for non-native speakers, and traditional characters with 注音 (zhù yīn) for those who are native Chinese speakers or learning to read Chinese.  And without even realizing it, the first half of what would soon become the motivation for Bitty Bao was sparked...

Lulu Cheng

Meet Lulu, a wife, mom of 2 bitty babes, with her newest title - Bitty Bao Boss. Since her bitty babes were born, Lulu has worked hard to embed Chinese language and culture into everything that they do. Lulu’s struggle to find cute bilingual Chinese books for her kids’ bedtime soon evolved into a #bigbittydream to make Chinese boardbooks of her own for families just like hers. She looks forward to sharing her journey of parenting, homemade Chinese teaching resources, and some late night bookmaking with you.