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Carsten Brown, an officer with the Houston Police Department, was driving his squad car one evening in 2018 and was flagged down by an elderly Chinese woman on the side of the road. She spoke no English and had been stranded at an intersection by her frustrated cab driver, who couldn’t understand her directions. In halting, broken Mandarin, and with the help of a remote “language line” available to officers who encounter language barriers on the job, Officer Brown pieced together the woman’s story and was able to deliver her safely to her retirement home. Brown is not a native Chinese speaker, but he and his fellow officers are learning how to speak basic Mandarin Chinese to serve the sizeable population of Mandarinspeakers living in Houston. Their first teacher was Li-Ya Mar, a 2016 UWM graduate who earned her PhD in Linguistics.
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“[Officer Brown] told me that the fact that he actually knew some of these simple phrases and words in Mandarin really helped this lady to trust him and allowed him to take her back to her home,” she says as she finishes relating her student’s story. Mar is from Taiwan. She attended college in her native country, but found herself at UWM for graduate school, enticed by the prospect of working with well-known educators in the field of second language acquistion. During her time at UWM, Mar also served as a teaching assistant and a lecturer in Chinese in the Foreign Language and Literature Department.
After graduation, she and her husband traveled to Houston for her husband’s job. Mar reached out to the local universities to offer her services in teaching Chinese – and found some unexpected students. “University of St. Thomas in downtown Houston connected me to the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Houston,” Mar explained. “The Houston Police and the office were trying to establish a language course to help
