NYTimes | To Give Children an Edge, Au Pairs from China

By Ginia Bellafante

[...] [P]arents assume that China’s expanding influence will make Mandarin the sophisticates’ language decades hence.
“Our clientele is middle and upper middle class,” said William L. Gertz, chairman of the American Institute for Foreign Study, which oversees Au Pair in America. “They see something really happening, and they don’t want to be left behind.”
The last two years have seen an astonishing increase in the number of American parents wishing to employ Mandarin-speaking nannies, difficult to find here and even harder to obtain from China. [...]

NYTimes.com 5 September 2006