This year, however, he expects student enrolment to hit 400, and plans to open four more schools in Dallas, Denver, Milwaukee, and Houston to cater to growing interest in other parts of the United States.

Across town at the Confucius Institute in Chicago, a partnership between China's Education Ministry and Chicago Public Schools, Ms Jane Lu is also pondering how best to meet the growing demand for Chinese language classes.

Though the programme she currently oversees has 60 teachers compared to just three when it began 11 years ago, resources are still being stretched thin and she often has to say no to new requests from the city’s public schools.

Recent statistics confirm what educators like Mr Zhang and Ms Lu are saying anecdotally, that is, China's economic rise is fuelling growing interest in its language in the US.

In US public schools, an estimated 60,000 students aged between four and 19 are studying Chinese, according to a study released last month by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

While this figure is minuscule compared to the six million American students who take Spanish classes, it is the category that has witnessed the most significant growth in recent years.

For instance, in the 2004-2005 academic year, only 20,292 students enrolled for Chinese classes. This figure shot up to 59,860, or a 195 per cent increase, in the 2007-2008 academic year, the latest year where data is provided by the Council.

Overall, Chinese ranks seventh as a foreign language in US schools. But in cities like Chicago where there has been a greater effort to promote Chinese, the growth in popularity has been much more noticeable.

According to Ms Lu, 54, the director of the Confucius Institute, Chinese is already the third biggest foreign language behind French and first-placed Spanish in Chicago schools. An estimated 12,000 students in the city’s public schools are reportedly learning Chinese, making it the largest such programme in the US.

And as China steps up its investment in the US in the years ahead, would this interest grow even faster? Indeed, would proficiency in the Chinese language become an important economic skill for American workers and executives as mainland entrepreneurs set up new factories or acquire more business assets here?

This possibility has dawned on some students at Chicago's Walter Payton High School. Seventeen-year-old Naomi Klionsky said she first enrolled in Chinese classes out of interest, but is beginning to realise its future potential.

“I'm hearing more and more about how really useful it can be in finding a job, in doing business, or just opportunities in life in general. I would love to spend some time working in China,’’ she added.

Mr Zhang, the principal of the Chicago Mandarin Chinese Center, says a growing number of jobseekers he encountered also regard Chinese language proficiency as a major plus in their resumes.

CAUTIONARY TALE OF JAPANESE

However, US-based Chinese language teachers who spoke to The Straits Times have a more modest view of the evolving trend, and point to Japan as a cautionary tale against unrealistic expectations. In the 1980s, American interest in the Japanese language similarly grew as Tokyo poured large amounts of investments into the US.

But the interest petered out quickly as the red-hot Japanese economy began fizzling out in the 1990s. Today, no one would regard Japanese as an essential language at the workplace.

“We've been discussing this issue as well and studying lessons from the Japanese experience,’’ said Ms Lu. “No one can guarantee that this interest in the Chinese language will last forever. But at the moment, you can't say it's a flash in the pan either.’’

Much will depend on China's economic future, naturally. But the health of the American economy will be an important factor as well.

As local governments across the US struggle to stay afloat amid a sea of red ink, funding for programmes such as foreign language education in schools are likely to be an early victim of major spending cuts.

For instance, Mr Craig Douglas, the superintendent of the Carrollton Public Schools in Saginaw, Michigan, would ideally like to spend five per cent of the school's budget on global studies and foreign language education.

But right now, he can only afford to spend a tenth of that amount on such programmes, and is concerned about impending cuts.

“A dollar spent on these programmes will yield back benefits many, many times over for the students,’’ he added. “We would love to (spend more) on language and global studies. But it's a dream that's a long way from being reality.’’

But eating a 38cm, 1.6kg hotdog dubbed the 'Home Wrecker' must count as one of the more unusual - and certainly most unhealthy - challenges.

The monster-sized hotdog, weighing more than 10 times a regular one, has been called 'the hotdog from Hell' and a 'weapon of cardiovascular mass destruction' by food bloggers.

-- ST PHOTO: CHUA CHIN HON

No one in Huntington eats the 'Home Wrecker' on a regular basis, of course. Obesity is also caused by unhealthy habits over a long period of time, rather than a few sessions of binge eating.

'People eat the 'Home Wrecker' as a novelty,' explained Ms Sherri Shaw, manager of the Hillbilly Hotdogs restaurant that has been serving up the giant hotdog for four years. 'The ones who order it are usually college kids, tourists and visitors.'

Still, my wife and I wanted to check out what the frontier of extreme eating was like in a city that had been labelled, fairly or unfairly, the 'fattest in America'.

So on our third day in Huntington, we finally mustered enough courage and trooped down to Hillbilly Hotdogs for a shot at the 'Home Wrecker'.

You get a free T-shirt if you can finish the hotdog in 12 minutes. You eat for free if you can beat the current record of three minutes and forty-five seconds set by Mr Dale Boone, a competitive eater from Atlanta.

Nicknamed 'the Mouth of the South', Mr Boone's previous accomplishments include eating 100 oysters in two minutes, 24 doughnuts in 40 seconds, and 115 pieces of sushi in 10 minutes.

The waitress who took our order did not even bother asking if we wanted to challenge Mr Boone's record.

And just as well. We were ready to surrender even before we started eating. The sight of the giant hotdog on our table along made us wonder how any one person had the stomach capacity to put it all away, let alone eat it in record time.

The giant hotdog itself featured a one pound beef sausage. Nestled in a thick chewy hotdog bun, it was piled high with toppings - a smorgasbord of cheese, a meat sauce, tomatoes, peppers, coleslaw, and onions. It looked like it could feel a family of four.

We had to use both hands to lift it off the plate and it nearly broke into two as it strained under its own weight.

-- ST PHOTO: CHUA CHIN HON

Then came the moment of truth, the eating of the 'Home Wrecker'. This was the first hotdog I had to eat with a knife and fork. We each sliced off some of the deep-fried hotdog and bread, and paired it with some of the topping.

It didn't taste too bad at first. The toppings were fresh as we chomped down on the strange savoury mix.

But by the fifth or sixth bite, the going got harder. The mess that one made while battling the giant sausage and its mountain of sauce and shredded vegetables made the whole experience worse.

We soldiered on but gave up the fight after finishing about half of the 'Home Wrecker', which still dwarfed a regular-sized hotdog that we ordered for comparison.

-- ST PHOTO: CHUA CHIN HON

Ms Shaw told us that only one in 10 people who order the 'Home Wrecker' ever succeed in finishing the super-sized meal. But still, five to six diners each day would attempt the challenge.

As we drove back to the hotel, we took some small comfort in the fact we wisely chose not to take on the other food challenge on the menu - the Hillbilly Double-wide Burger.

At 8kg, the burger is said to be about the size of a dustbin lid and feeds 30 people.

I hope they serve a health warning, instead of fries, with that.

Read more on the Saturday Special here

AMONG the many iconic images that helped define the Great Depression in the 1930s, the best remembered is arguably the photograph of a weary-looking mother with her two children burying their faces in her shoulder.

The photograph taken by Dorothea Lange in 1936 "stands apart from all but a few others in telling the human story of a profound time in American history", according to the Library of Congress.

With the United States back in the grips of another historic economic downturn, what are the images that would similarly tell the story of this new era of uncertainty?

For six days in May, my colleague Bhagya and I travelled through several Michigan cities in the American Midwest in search of faces and stories that might shed light on this question.

We found no easy answers.

Is the face of the Great Recession, as some call the current slump, that of Mr Rollain Green, 23? The plight of laid-off auto-workers like him has come to symbolise the squeeze on the American middle class, and the decline of a once iconic industry in the US.

Or are the foreclosed homes on the gritty streets of Detroit a more fitting portrait of the recession? Reckless lending and borrowing in the US housing market precipitated a meltdown that rippled through the country’s economy and beyond.

Elsewhere, pictures of the homeless and the urban poor point to socio-economic problems made worse by the fresh bout of economic hardship.

But these photographs of a down-and-out America don’t quite tell the full story. Amid the gloom, we found hopeful signs of optimism and determination as well.

Some American workers, like Mr Jeff Mitchell, 44, are already in the midst of retraining themselves for the much talked about "green economy" – industries focused on renewable energy and environmental technology.

Others like Mr Tim Colonnese, 49, are hoping to blaze a new trail as "green entrepreneurs" who would lead this nascent industry that promises to deliver the new jobs that the country needs.

At the end of the trip, however, the biggest question on my mind wasn't about how these disparate facets add up. Instead, the one question that repeatedly popped into my head was how a country with such wealth and resources could have gotten into an economic mess this deep in the first place.

In Detroit, for instance, the images that left the deepest impression on me were not the obvious signs of urban decay, but rather, the unmistakable reminders of the city’s tremendous wealth in the past. You can tell simply from the architecture and design of the beautiful churches and skyscrapers, even though most of them now look worse for wear.

The nearby city of Highland Park is not your typical slum or ghetto either. It was where famed American industrialist Henry Ford built the world’s first auto-assembly line, a breakthrough that ushered in the age of mass market automobiles and reshaped 20th century life in America.

As a first-time visitor, I was astounded by how cities with such proud and rich legacies could deteriorate this way in just a matter of decades. Who allowed this to happen? Where did the entrepreneurial drive that built this city go?

More importantly, who would come to their rescue? The answers, unfortunately, appear to lie beyond the edge of any photograph.

View exclusive photographs from the writer's trek through the United States here & read the full Saturday Special Report in today's edition of The Straits Times.

NOW that US President Barack Obama has laid out his ambitious agenda with a US$787 billion economic stimulus package and a US$3.6 trillion budget, all eyes are on how the opposition Republicans would fight back.

Who will lead them in the political battles ahead? The past weekend threw up some interesting possibilities.

On the cover of the New York Times magazine on Sunday was former House speaker Newt Gingrich with a provocative headline: "The Anti-Obama?"

Credited for leading the "Republican Revolution" in the mid 1990s that ended four decades of Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, Mr Gingrich is looked upon once again by many in the opposition party as a leadership figure who can rally the troops against the popular Mr Obama and his fellow Democrats.

The cover story described the resurgent Mr Gingrich as being at the "zenith of influence in conservative Washington". He is also a "total idea factory", someone who would send suggestions on politics, policy, and strategy at the rate of about 10 an hour.

And ideas are exactly what the Republicans need right now, the magazine suggested, adding: "Gingrich thinks about ideas strategically, as a way of countering his opponents or wooing new constituencies, and this is something Republicans have failed to do almost from the day he left Capitol Hill."

But will ideas return the Republicans to power?

Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, another stalwart of the conservative movement in the US, does not think so.

Attracting just as much media attention over the weekend as the keynote speaker for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington DC, Mr Limbaugh told a 8,000-strong crowd that what the party needed to do was to return to its conservative roots of small government and fiscal discipline, not dream up policy alternatives.

"Everyone asks me 'what can we do', 'how can we overcome this'," said Mr Limbaugh. "Well, the one thing we can all do is stop assuming that the way to beat them is with better policy ideas right now. It's philosophy folks."

This yin-yang, mind-versus-heart contrast in approaches championed by Mr Gingrich and Mr Limbaugh are fitting examples of the turmoil in the Republicans party as it searches not just for a way to beat the Democrats, but also for answers to fractious internal debates.

Can there be a middle way?

Perhaps the third likely leadership figure in the Republicans party – former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney – might provide an answer.

A straw poll of 1,757 people who attended CPAC identified Mr Romney as the person they would most likely vote for as the Republican nominee for the Presidential race in 2012. He ran for last year's presidential campaign, but dropped out of the race eventually to endorse Senator John McCain’s bid instead.

But Mr Romney has not been in the media limelight as prominently as Mr Gingrich or Mr Limbaugh, and said recently that it was unlikely that he would run for President in 2012.

So who will rally the Republicans in the months and years ahead? For now, the search goes on.

In Beijing

IT IS said that a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing can sometimes cause a tornado in Florida, at least according to scientists who study the seemingly unpredictable behaviour of natural systems, such as the weather.

The financial hurricane blowing across the United States seems to be reversing the direction of this theory, popularly known as the Butterfly Effect.

Ordinary workers and consumers worldwide, who hitherto thought Wall Street's meltdown had nothing to do with them, are now waking up to the unpleasant realisation that a major financial storm brewing tens of thousands of miles away can suddenly clip their wings, so to speak.

At least one Beijing "butterfly" – actually my regular driver in the Chinese capital – feels this way.

The driver, let's call him Chen, has been running an unlicensed taxi service for years. Though Beijing has been trying to clamp down on such services in recent years, he has stayed out of trouble by working only with regulars and tourists. 

The latter group has been his cash cow. According to Chen, he practically earns his entire annual income during the peak tourist season in Beijing – between August and October.

Tourists usually make a beeline for attractions like the Great Wall during these months, when the sweltering summer gives way to Beijing's gorgeous autumn skies. In previous years, Chen would get at least two to three bookings every week during this period.

Depending on how far they travelled, these tourists paid between 800 yuan to 1,200 yuan per trip.

This year, however, Chen said he did not get one single booking from foreign tourists, be they American, European or Russian ones. Initially, he thought the tourists stayed away to avoid the Olympic crush in August.

But the Beijing Olympics has come and gone, and the tourists are not returning.

"Not a single soul," he told me during a recent drive to the airport. "It's never been like this before."

Chen, whose moment of epiphany came one afternoon in October while reading a newspaper article on the US financial crisis and how it was hurting the real economy, added: "In September, I thought to myself 'I have no investments, so this has nothing to do with me'.

"Now I know just how much this financial crisis will affect me. Who's going to come see the Great Wall if they can't even be sure about keeping their house?"

Even his regulars – businessmen, journalists, and the occasional Russian trader – are using his services less these days. Businesses are talking about cost cutting, while the usually gung-ho Russians have put their trade on ice. All this, no thanks to the rocky global currency markets, which might turn entire shipments of goods from profit-making one moment to a disastrous financial lost the next.

Further, a growing number of foreign journalists, meanwhile, have been filtering out of the Chinese capital since the buzz from the Olympics dissipated.

"It's mind-boggling when I think about how all these things add up and affect my business in the end," said an uncharacteristically downbeat Chen.  

He is hopeful though that the economic recovery would spread just as fast as the current spell of misery. For now, however, Chen said he is just going to hunker down for a potentially long winter.

WHAT do the North Korean nuclear crisis, the genocide in Sudan, last year's political unrest in Myanmar, and the current financial turmoil have in common?
 
Not much on first sight. But if you are Chinese President Hu Jintao, you would see a somewhat worrying trend in the international media's reports on these issues.
 
It would begin quietly and subtlely. But soon enough, the emphasis and the headlines would shift in a big way towards China's role in these issues, and what more it can or should do.
 
In more extreme instances, such as during the protracted North Korean nuclear crisis, China was almost portrayed as the only party that could resolve the impasse and save the day, a "white knight" so to speak.
 
With much of the financial world going down in flames, it's no surprise that media attention has once again turned to China, given that it has the world's largest foreign reserves of about US$2 trillion (S$3 trillion).
 
Arabic-language news network Al Jazeera headlined one of its stories on last week's Asia-Europe Meeting (Asem) in Beijing as "China urged to save world economy". Some regional leaders appeared to have bought this argument as well, according to sources with knowledge of last week's closed-door Asem meeting.
 
With an eye to China's considerable reserves, one leader even suggested that every country should cough up 10 per cent of its reserves in order to form a "global rescue fund" – a proposal that must have appalled Beijing.
 
This current obsession with China as the financial world's "white knight", as with its previous incarnation during the North Korea nuclear crisis, conveniently ignores the limits of Chinese power and its own domestic problems.
 
China's own financial system is a shaky one, meaning the authorities are more concerned with preventing the global stocks meltdown from wrecking havoc domestically rather than rescuing the world.
 
Another fire Beijing has to fight in its own backyard is the slowdown in the country's massive exports sector, a major source of employment.
 
For sure, China must play a major role in any global solution to the current economic crisis. But clearly it cannot single-handedly resolve the crisis as it has many problems at home to look after.
 
Or as President Hu politely told his counterparts from Asia and Europe last week, China will play a responsible role, but it can help the situation best by keeping its own house in order.
 
In an unusually blunt commentary, the official Xinhua news agency said observers should not "hope for too much" from China in this financial crisis, adding: "Is China able to rescue the world, as some Western media ventured to ponder?"
 
"The bold proposition more mirrored desperation for hope and support in a sweeping crisis than true faith in China's strength to lead the world out of crisis."

In Beijing

WITH consumer confidence in Chinese diary products at an unprecedented low, senior leaders and officials here have been going all out to reassure the public that not every egg in the basket is rotten.

On Sunday, China's health minister Chen Zhu and newly-appointed quality control chief Wang Yong visited supermarkets and dairy factories in Beijing as part of a growing confidence building campaign.

Mr Chen was shown on state television interacting with shoppers at a supermarket, inspecting the shelves of diary products, and even drinking a glass of milk from Yili, one of the most popular brand in China, at least before the tainted milk scandal.

Likewise, Mr Wang was shown eating some yogurt when he visited an Yili-owned factory in Beijing.

It's hard to say if anyone's genuinely convinced, but the episode would at least point to the Chinese government having internalised some of the lessons from the Sars crisis, in this case, the need to swiftly restore public trust after a spectacular collapse.

Mr Chen was quoted saying by the official Xinhua news agency: "The best way to restore public trust in diary products is to produce quality and safe products, as well as increase supervision and corporate responsibility."

The affable health minister is only half right. Consumers will not be fully convinced until they have been told why the tainted milk scandal was covered up for so many months, and how such cover-ups can be prevented in future.

There are at least two ways to guard against such cover-ups: one, by giving consumers a reliable channel to report problems, and two, by giving the media the freedom to report these misdeeds.

But rights activists here suggest that the Chinese government has instead tightened its control over the media in recent weeks a bid to prevent public anger from boiling over.

This might work in the authorities favour in the short-run, but as last year's food scares and the latest tainted milk scandal show, such a move will only ensure that the problem returns to haunt them yet again.

THREE days after being thrust onto the hottest seat in the country, China's new quality control chief Wang Yong finally broke his silence today. 

Well, sort of. 

Mr Wang gave a speech at the headquarters of General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (GAQSIQ) on Monday after taking over from Mr Li Changjiang, who "resigned" in the face of the growing tainted milk powder scandal.

But strangely enough, the speech was not released for days and was posted on the administration's website only this morning.

This is a pity as many parents here were anxious to know what the new quality control chief would do about the melamine problem. What's doubly unfortunate is that Mr Wang's speech was full of the usual official-ese about "firmly upholding the central's decision", and "being mindful of the overall situation". 

No one expects Mr Wang, a little-known 53-year-old bureaucrat with no experience in this field, to make grand promises or detailed policy changes right away, of course.

But with consumer confidence on the decline and public anger on the rise, Mr Wang should have at least done some straight talking, or acknowledged the anxieties and anguish of the parents whose children were sickened.

This job has largely fallen to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who over the weekend visited supermarkets and ordinary families in Beijing to offer assurances and words of encouragement. He also condemned the errant dairy companies in plain speak, calling them mei liangxin, or unconscionable.

At times of crisis, the importance of a human touch cannot be underestimated, and as the lead agency in the safety issue, GAQSIQ should perhaps take the cue from Mr Wen.