A pair of American children who stunned the Chinese internet last year with their fluent Mandarin are now using their language skills to make a little money on the side.
In a recent interview, 75-year-old American investor guru Jim Rogers revealed that his two young daughters were now working part-time as Chinese teachers.
Rogers says that as a “simple person from Alabama” who happens to have hundreds of millions of dollars, he hopes to leave some money behind for his children, but not enough to spoil them.
“I told my daughter she had to get a job… I thought she would go to McDonald’s and make $8 an hour. She’s teaching Mandarin and making $25 an hour,” Rogers boasts.
Happy Rogers, 14, says that she teaches the language to two little girls, aged 4 and 7, while her younger sister, Bee Rogers, says she teaches Chinese to a pair of boys, which she describes as being a bit troublesome because boys can be a pain.
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Back in 2007, Rogers decided to move from the US to Singapore so that his daughters would grow up speaking Mandarin, which he sees as being the most important language of their lifetime. Rogers believes that the move has obviously paid off. “If you hear them speak, you think they are Chinese,” he said in an earlier interview.
With videos of them showing of their command of the language through songs, poetry recitals, and tongue twisters, the two little girls became Chinese internet celebrities last year, particularly Happy whose style of speaking netizens compared to that of a Chinese news broadcaster.
