Spelling showdown was made for multilingual student

By MILA KOUMPILOVA, St. Paul Pioneer Press

BURNSVILLE, Minn. (AP) — One of the first purchases Jasmine Lim's dad made when he came to Minnesota from Malaysia was a set of phonetics tapes for his young daughters. Before long, Jasmine, her mom and her sister lugged home dozens of books from the public library.

In the Twin Cities regional spelling bee, the Burnsville eighth-grader faced a two-time winner from Edina after six grueling hours of competition. A veteran contestant herself, Jasmine and her older sister, Savannah, have won three of the past four Burnsville-Eagan-Savage district bees, outspelling thousands of fellow middle schoolers.

Jasmine traces her curiosity about words back to growing up in an immigrant family of readers where four languages were spoken.

"As first-generation immigrants, we are more interested in language," she said. "We're interested in opening our minds to cultural things."

At the March 12 seven-county bee at the Minnesota History Center, Jasmine looked supremely calm. She sat with her back straight and her hands resting in her lap as other spellers took turns at the microphone. The winner would get an all-expenses-paid trip to compete at the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., in May.

At the microphone, too, Jasmine was unflappable, spelling without hesitation: charpoy, alchemy, zephyr, mukhtar, vorlage, dossier, Baedeker.

"Oh, my goodness, here's another difficult word," her mom, Fheelan Hui, would say to herself. "Does she know how to spell that?"

Jasmine's family moved to the area from Malaysia in 1998, when her dad, Vincent Lim, was recruited to work on an expansion of the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Jasmine was 2 at the time.

Her parents spoke Cantonese, Mandarin, Malay and English. Her father wanted the girls to speak perfect English - hence, the phonetics tapes. Jasmine was reading and writing by age 4, stunning parents at her preschool by reading signs out loud.

Before long, she and her sister read and wrote all the time. "My mom would hide those library books and only give them back to us when we finished our homework," Savannah said.

In fifth grade, Jasmine was the Midwest winner of a national essay competition sponsored by pen-maker Bic that drew more than 11,000 entries.

More recently, said language arts teacher Brad Sorensen, "The work she turns in is closer to the 12th grade or college level than the eighth grade. Her grasp of the English language is just beyond anything you could believe."

Savannah was the first to get hooked on spelling bees, finishing third at the metro-area regional competition in 2008. Jasmine followed suit. Her sister taught her to guess the spelling from the origin of words, one clue spelling bee judges provide for contestants.

For Jasmine, spelling bees held instant appeal. She has played the piano since age 6, recently winning a competition to perform with a MacPhail Orchestra in Minneapolis in April.

"I like to perform," she said. "Being on stage for spelling bees was that same kind of excitement."

Jasmine won her district competition last year and this February, when some 3,000 students in grades five to eight took part. At the regional contest last year, she finished sixth.

For her second turn at regionals, she said she didn't get around to going over word lists until the night before, after her piano lesson. She is a busy girl: jazz band, Mandarin lessons, student council, a student leadership group and, starting up again this spring, track and field.

Still, even as the competition entered nail-biting territory, she was poised. For three rounds, none of the remaining six spellers missed a word. Jasmine stumbled upon the first word that got her to hesitate and pepper the judge with questions: jackanapes, a mischievous child. When she spelled it correctly, her mom gasped with relief.

Then, Jasmine and the other remaining contestant, two-time winner Anja Beth Swoap, had to wait until four students took a written test for third place. When Jasmine stepped back up to the microphone, the word "garniture" tripped her up.

A part of her was relieved: She had worried it would be tough to juggle prep for the Washington, D.C., competition with the rest of her pursuits.

"I am pretty happy with second place," she said. "I didn't even expect I'd come this far."

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Information from: St. Paul Pioneer Press

(Copyright 2011 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

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