Tikki Tikki Tembo Podcast

Blog Post 5: Podcast Draft

Maren Scott

Professor Vivian Vasquez

EDU-319-001 Children’s Literature

Tuesday, October 5, 2011

Poscast Review: Tikki Tikki Tembo by Arlene Mosel

My name is Maren Scott. I am a senior at American University from Harlem, New York. In all my years of attending New York City public school the presence of the Asians and Asian Americans in our curricular materials was minimal. Even though I attended exceptional schools that fought to maintain a diverse and inclusive curriculum, the limited resources provided made it difficult. Asian Americans like African Americans are not foreigners but are often treated like so in our American historical narrative. They have been part of our nation’s history for centuries. As a result of this exclusion, many of the texts that have been produced have often been ignorant and or offensive. An example of this is one of my favorite childhood books growing up, Tikki Tikki Tembo by Arlene Mosel published in 1968.

Tikki Tikki Tembo is an award winning children’s book that is referred to as a Chinese folktale “retold” by the author. The purpose of the story is to explain why the Chinese have “little, short names instead of great long names”. Indeed the story is retold but is NOT a Chinese folktale. Nor does it have any legitimacy as to explain the origin or length of Chinese names. Even the New York Times refers to the book as a Chinese folktale retold by Arlene Mosel without any regard for the actual history or its impact on the Chinese and Chinese-American communities. This first problematic thing about the book is that, even if it were a Chinese folktale the author goes to no extent to explain where and when the story originated or took place. The second is that it reinforces the stereotype that Asian names all sound like gibberish.

Mosel heard the story as a child and decided to convert into a children’s book. In the 30s and 40s it was a popular bedtime story in the US. At the time when the book was published, the US was at war with Asia, open racism and stereotyping was widely accepted, and there were limited depictions of Asians in the media let alone in non-stereotypical roles. The combination of these conditions made it easy for the book and author to go unchallenged.

I did some research on the actual origins of the tale. No one has yet found a Chinese folktale resembling this one, but there is a Japanese folktale called Jugemu which it is most likely based off of. It is a rakugo story about a boy with a “great long name” that leads to his demise. The name “Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sa Rembo Chari Bari Ruchi Pip Peri Pembo” however, is completely fictional without any significance in Chinese or Japanese. To confirm, I asked a friend of mine who is a fluent speaker of both if the names meant what they say. Chang can be used as a family name and the characters can mean ruthless, reckless, long, often, trying and to hide. The actual translation for “little or nothing” is “jin”. Knowing that Tikki Tikki Tembo had no significance we looked up the purported meaning instead. The closest translation was “chuen xi je juui hao de” which meant “world’s best”.