Generations of ethnic Chinese youth have strengthened the bonds of culture and language to their parents and the motherland by attending daily classes at Mun Lun School.

Students and alumni of the oldest and largest daily Chinese-language school in Hawaii, founded in 1911, are celebrating its centennial with activities ranging from a sold-out banquet of more than 800 this month to a tour to China.

On a recent visit before classes, a loud cacophony of children’s voices echoed through the two-story building with 12 classrooms.

Once settled, calligraphy students quietly concentrated as they took ink-dipped brushes to paper.

Tiny first-graders paired up, one serving as teacher to the other, pointing to a character.

Others learned dances and songs.

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"My parents speak Cantonese and they don’t know much English, so if I didn’t learn, I wouldn’t be able to communicate with them," said Joanne Huang, a Kawananakoa Middle School eighth-grader who was born in China and emigrated at age 4. "When I talked to my parents, I didn’t know words, so I used English. So when I came here, I started learning words."

Her situation is unusual, however, and three years ago the school replaced Cantonese instruction with Mandarin.

About 70 percent to 80 percent of the students speak Cantonese at home, while only 10 percent speak Mandarin. Just 20 percent or less speak only English at home.

"We were encouraged to teach Mandarin by their parents," school President Wesley Fong said.

The parents, he said, wanted to know, "’Why do we need to send our children to school to learn Cantonese when we speak it at home?’

"The school felt it was very important to teach Mandarin as opposed to Cantonese because Mandarin is the language for the 21st century," he said. "China is an economic force to be reckoned with."

Since then, enrollment has more than tripled to 350 at the Chinatown school on Maunakea Street. Its enrollment peaked in the 1940s with 1,000.

‘Iolani School junior Adrienne Lee is at ‘Iolani from 7:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and then attends the Chinese school from 3:30 until well after 5 to practice pronunciation for speech contests.

"I really want to speak Mandarin, but the reading and writing are the same," said Lee, who has memorized about 2,000 characters. The school runs from first to ninth grade, and by the time students graduate, they should have a written vocabulary of 2,300 characters.

Jennifer Wong, 15, a Kapolei High School junior with a 4.0 GPA, won the Worldwide Chinese Student Writing Competition for three years with essays about her father and brother, who both died in the past three years.

"My father didn’t want me to forget my Chinese background," said Wong, who was born and raised in Hawaii.

First-grade teacher Daimei Li, who taught English in China, said, "I didn’t imagine I would teach Chinese here." She likes to pair up students for lessons on the principle that many hands make light work.

Camaraderie is also a plus.

"As long as they have friendship, they will keep coming," said seventh-grade language teacher Mengling Moulden.

And the benefits often are lasting.

Principal Chock Wong related how one graduate, away at college, wrote home in Chinese to his mother, who cannot read English.