Nick Lee had one of those only-on-the-internet moments after running into two Mormon missionaries in a parking lot who could speak Mandarin.
What started as a regular street-style chat turned into a multilingual exchange once Lee realized the two young men in dress shirts and ties were comfortable holding a conversation in Chinese. One of the missionaries lit up the moment Mandarin came out, and the whole interaction stayed friendly and casual throughout.
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When asked how they learned the language, one of the missionaries said he had been in a Mandarin immersion school since he was little. The other reportedly picked it up through the church’s language training pipeline.
This is actually more common than people think. Missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly called Mormons, are routinely trained in foreign languages at Missionary Training Centers before being sent into the field. Difficult languages like Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic get weeks of intensive prep, followed by full immersion on assignment.
Utah, where the church is headquartered, also runs one of the biggest dual-language immersion school systems in the United States, with Mandarin being one of the most popular options. Plenty of LDS kids grow up already speaking a second language well before they ever put on the name tag.
The missionaries in Lee’s clip weren’t necessarily preparing for mainland China either. The church doesn’t send proselytizing missionaries there. Instead, Mandarin-speaking LDS congregations exist all over the place, from California and New York to Vancouver, Sydney, London, and Taiwan. Missionaries assigned to those communities can spend most of their day speaking Chinese without ever leaving North America.
