Cultural Notes for Big Bird In China



CULTURE NOTES

BIG BIRD IN CHINA

Sesame Street’s Big Bird in China (1987) takes Big Bird and Barkley on a quest to find the legendary Chinese phoenix. Young children love this seventy-five minute video, but there are problems with using it as a teaching tool. The following is a review by Ms. Sha Zhao that will help teachers take a critical look at the video, in order to use appropriately.

A Review by Sha Zhao, University of Pittsburgh (2002)

If segments of this film were shown along with other educational materials, it could entertain kids while giving them a fuller sense of China. However, I would not recommend using this film in isolation as a teaching tool for children.

The film is very limited in terms of giving us a true impression of China. There are beautiful landscapes and famous sites, but hardly any shots of real streets and people. The film does not address current lifestyles, customs or daily life. Big Bird is visiting a well-filtered place. For example, most people in China live in crowded, somewhat messy conditions. At the same time, China is also much livelier than what is portrayed in the film.

The film was produced in 1987. At that time, the media in China was tightly controlled by the central government. The film was also co-produced by Central China Television, whose agenda among others is to present a better image of China to outsiders. The deficiencies of the film are thus understandable.

However, on his way to finding the Phoenix, Big Bird does bring us a well-defined taste of China. Various details, such as watching children playing traditional games and elders paying Taichi, meeting with the Monkey King and the Phoenix are very memorable scenes. The song of the Phoenix was one of the highlights of the film.

Some notes on details in the film.

1. Bear in mind that the film was produced in 1987. Nowadays the Chinese do not wear the uniform-like clothes shown in the film. People like to wear Jeans and other casual clothes just like people do in the United States.

2. Bicycles are all over the streets and country roads in China. They are still the major way of getting around. They are shown in the film only in a short sequence where a group of bicycles frighten Big Bird.

3. Big Bird sees people “dancing with a wooden sword.” This is Taichi swordplay. Taichi is a type of traditional exercise believed to be a way to pursue oneness between one’s inner spirit and the universe by moving one’s Qi (inner force) in special cyclic ways. Many people practice Taichi in the mornings in parks.

4. Big Bird steps into a calligraphy class and gets to write the Chinese character for “big” with brush and ink. Unlike English that is alphabetic, the Chinese written language is made up of characters that are constructed from a series of strokes of the brush; these characters are both pictographic and ideographic (meaning that sometimes the characters do have some relationship to pictures but often they represent abstract ideas). A single character can refer to an entire word. For example, “big” is a simplified picture of a person opening up his arms, and the character for “big” shown in the film is a single character referring to the concept “big” or “large.” For thousands of years, the Chinese have used brushes and ink to write. The written language was originally written in columns, usually read from top to bottom and from right to left. It has only been about one hundred years since people started to use pens and to write primarily in rows from left to right. Ancient ways of writing are still taught in elementary schools.

5. The Monkey King is a famous character in a well-known novel called “Journey to the West” written 400 years ago. He was born from a rock and is extremely intelligent, capable and naughty. He can transform his appearance into one of seventy-two different images, such as a temple, a tree, a person, or a bug. Using Clouds as a vehicle Monkey King can travel 180, 000 miles with a single somersault. When Xiao Fu, the child in the film, says that in China every child loves him, this statement is very true.

Update (2009): in very large cities such as Beijing, cars now predominate. However, in more rural cities, such as Guilin, bikes are still everywhere, mixed in with other traffic. (Brenda G. Jordan)

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