According to the China Daily, having a Chinese nanny is chic in New York's wealthier circles.

"I'm desperately seeking qualified Chinese women," he says. "Bring me one and I can give her a choice of ten top families." The in-demand nannies from Beijing or Shanghai can easily earn $100,000 per year with the right references -- $60,000 more than their colleagues from Old Europe, who used to be so popular.

It took six months for Jim Rogers and Paige Parker to find a nanny. For a while only unqualified candidates from New York's Chinatown answered their ads in Chinese-American newspapers.

"Most of them come from the countryside and speak Cantonese," says Rogers. "We didn't want that." Hilton Augusta will one day have to communicate with the business elite of Shanghai, and they speak Mandarin.

Other industries have also caught onto this trend: Toymakers now produce dolls that can say "My name is Ling" in both Chinese and English, and private schools like St. Hilda's & St. Hugh's in Manhattan have Mandarin classes for three-year-olds.

The article says that "many Americans believe China will overtake the US both economically and politically by 2040," which is about ten years after [see comments] five years before Ray Kurzweil believes the Singularity will occur. Actually, even with no Singularity and even if other Hilton Augustas do not have a "Mandarin chip" in their heads by then, I am sure machine translation will do the job just as well. Kurzweil has predicted that by 2012, machine translation will be powerful enough to dominate the translation field. MIT's Technology Review also listed universal translation and interpretation as likely "within a decade" in its 2004 list.