A New Person in My Life

And her name is Kai-Lan.

She's animated, a character on a new show on NickJr.

And she's Chinese-American. In fact, she's Chinese Dora.

We've been watching the same two episodes for two days now. The Dragonboat Races and the Ants' Playground. And the kids love it. Better than Dora, better than Little Bear.

Which is fine by me. Except I can't seem to catch the Chinese. As I wrote in a blog recently regarding Thai, I just don't hear the various tones and inflections that are so key to these languages. At one point, Kai-Lan is contrasting "up" and "down" and for the life of me I can't hear a difference, even when DP tried to help (she knows enough Mandarin from school to do that). I would strongly encourage Nickelodeon to put glossaries online for us poor lost parents (something I hoped they'd do with Dora, too, as my Spanish is only slightly better than my Chinese, though I hear it more clearly and am better able to repeat it). That way we can reinforce it between episodes (though, for now, on this rainy/snowy February day, we're watching them back to back).

I should add here that, in a waxing mood of Chinese-ophilia, which usually swamps DP around the New Year, we have looked into Chinese language school and will be signing them up for classes beginning in March. I get to go too. I'm actually pretty excited. I've wanted them to be bilingual and think Chinese will be great. I know DP has always felt removed from the Chinese community because she speaks better Thai than Mandarin (or Chou Jo, her family's dialect). Perhaps we can spare DD and DS that, as much as possible.

But back to "Ni Hao, Kai Lan." It looks Japanese to me, in that anime/Hello Kitty kind of way but that's okay. I like the approach in the show. The creators call it "biculturalism," in addition to "bilingualism," and are trying to stress aspects of Chinese and Chinese-American culture in the narratives. So far, this has involved a focus on teamwork and on staying calm. I haven't seen many episodes--they started last week to coincide with Chinese New Year, but we only started recording it this week, so we're behind.

I imagine we'll catch up. For those of us raising Chinese or bi-racial children without our own background in Chinese or Chinese culture (though I know more about Chinese art than DP from my schooling and years in museums), this show is a perfect way to help integrate that knowledge into our daily activities.

I should say that I'm on record for coming up with the idea first (or at least before they publicized it). About a year ago, when we first watched Dora, I told DP we should create Chinese Dora, especially with the ready audience of Chinese adoptees with non-Chinese parents in the country. So I'm glad to see that somewhere the universe was listening.

If only I could get royalties from all the merchandise I'm sure we'll be buying soon!