With a similar duality, the children at Broadway Elementary in Los Angeles are learning to talk in English and Chinese, and some are becoming trilingual due to a Spanish-speaking parent.

As more parents have sought to give their children an edge in an era when China is a rising economic power, school districts have expanded Chinese language programs and students from a wide range of backgrounds have joined them.

Parents whose children speak Spanish or another language at home, Chinese in class and English on the playground hope their kids have limitless opportunities in a global economy bringing Asia, the US and Latin America closer together.

Broadway Elementary parent Karla Godoy, 41, speaks to her son, Paco, in English, her husband talks to him in Spanish and he learns Mandarin at school.

"With Spanish and Mandarin and English, he should be able to do just about anything he wants," she said.

There are at least 50 Chinese-language immersion programs at US schools for children in grades 12 and below, compared to about a dozen six years ago, said Tara Fortune, immersion project coordinator at the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition at the University of Minnesota.

At Broadway Elementary in Los Angeles, a city with a high Latino population where both English and Spanish are commonly heard in the school yard, the Mandarin program launched this year serves 44 kindergarten students including several, like Cindy Soriano, who speak Spanish.

"She likes to speak Chinese," said her mother, Isabelle Hernandez, 38. "She speaks all day what she learned." As for Susan Tuan, 40, a Chinese-American filmmaker, she speaks Mandarin to her son, Julian, and her husband of Chilean descent talks to him in Spanish.

For a time, Julian was not exposed to much English.

"It got to the point where on play dates, it was like a foreigner in another country," Tuan said. "He didn't really know what was going on, and we started feeling bad."