Jonathan Rose (C), poses for a picture with other Au Pair students during a tour of Shenzhen Fairy Lake Botanical Garden in March. Courtesy of Love Au Pair
It's been over two months since Jonathan Rose, 18, came to Shenzhen to live with a Chinese family in Nanshan District as an Au Pair student.
Being an Au Pair student means that Rose is expected to speak English and do activities with the host family’s 6-year-old boy. In return, Rose gets to live with the host family for free during his six-month stay in Shenzhen.
Rose is a college student from New York. He decided to take a gap year before officially starting courses at his university. Rounds of Web browsing and interviews eventually brought him to a city he had known nothing about, to help a Chinese boy he had never met.
Like Rose, an increasing number of foreign students between the ages of 18 and 26 years old from European countries and the United States have started exchanging with families in China thanks to the Au Pair projects that originally started in France after World War II.
In recent years, there has been a trend of more Shenzhen families looking for Au Pair students to live at their homes and keep their children company in an English-speaking environment.
The Shenzhen Daily spoke to two Au Pair agencies in Shenzhen, and both of them raised concerns about more Shenzhen families lining up to hire Au Pair students. The increasing demand is hard to meet since the city is still not as famous among expats as destinations like Beijing and Shanghai.
“Shenzhen has a huge potential to become a large market for Au Pair projects, because the families here tend to be younger, more inclusive and tolerant and have a better education background,” said Zhang Yang, a manager with Shenzhen AU PAIR International Cultural Exchange.
However, as the number of families who wish to host Au Pair students grows year after year, the chances of finding matching students get smaller as the number of students coming from other countries remains at a similar level.
“We find that although quite a large number of Shenzhen students already study at international kindergartens or schools, their parents are still trying to provide an English-speaking environment for them,” said Zhang.
According to the manager, their cultural exchange center was the first agency to introduce Au Pair students to Shenzhen families and they have witnessed the increasing demand in recent years.
“We haven’t promoted our services very much, because we always have families on the waiting list. What we need is more qualified students with proficient English to live with these families,” said Zhang.
Another person in charge of an agency based in Shenzhen known as Love Au Pair, surnamed Hu, also said that the number of families asking for Au Pair students is more than the supply at the moment.
In earlier years, when the projects were first introduced to Chinese families around 2008, only families with relatively high incomes and open-minded educational concepts would look for Au Pair students.
But in recent years, more middle-class families in Shenzhen are recruiting Au Pair students, Hu said.
Most of the agencies in China are providing bilateral services that also bring Chinese Au Pair students to overseas families. However, compared to inbound students, the outbound services are harder to fulfill as there are more Chinese students wanting to live and teach overseas than families in foreign countries that are looking for Chinese-speaking students.
“In most cases, if an overseas family is looking for a Chinese Au Pair student, they are overseas Chinese families that want their descendants to learn the language,” said Hu.
Since the concept of Au Pair students is still not familiar to most Chinese families, Zhang said that she needed to clarify two common misconceptions.
“First of all, Au Pair students are not professional foreign teachers. They can interact with the children, but are not necessarily responsible for the host children’s academic results,” said the manager. “Secondly, the students are supposed to be members of the host families, but are not required to shoulder housework.”
