West Side Spirit reporter Angela Barbuti profiles Sharon Huang, welcoming Bilingual Buds to the neighborhood...
Meet Sharon Huang, executive director and founder of Bilingual Buds, a Mandarin Chinese immersion school tucked away on Riverside Boulevard. Inside, teachers and students are growing silkworms, eating rice dumplings and, of course, speaking in Chinese, in the only program of its kind in the neighborhood.
West Side Spirit: What is your mission?
Sharon Huang: To prepare our children to be global citizens. We want them to be intellectually curious, culturally aware and linguistically capable. We expose them to different cultures so they have an openness about different people and different ways of thinking.
Why did you choose the UWS?
I lived on the Upper West Side over 12 years ago and always loved the energy of the area. I’ve since moved to San Francisco and New Jersey, but have always had a place in my heart for the Upper West Side because I spent so many of my single working years after business school living here. I started this business six years ago in Summit, New Jersey. Over the years, I’ve gotten emails from people in Manhattan looking for a program like the one I have in New Jersey. I thought surely someone would open a Mandarin immersion preschool here, but the years went by and nobody did. Parents on the Upper West Side are more forward thinking; they are willing to try different things.
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