What’s in a name? Well, for Ji-young, the newest muppet resident of Sesame Street, her name is a sign she was meant to live there.
“So, in Korean, traditionally the two syllables each mean something different and ‘Ji’ means, like, ‘smart’ or ‘wise.’ And ‘Young’ means, like, ‘brave’ or ‘courageous and strong,’” Ji-young said in an interview. “But we were looking it up and guess what? ‘Ji’ also means ‘sesame.’”
At only seven years old, Ji-young is making history as the first Asian American muppet in the canon of Sesame Street, the children’s TV program, which first aired 52 years ago this month.
Photo: AP
She is Korean American and has two passions: rocking out on her electric guitar and skateboarding.
Ji-young is to formally be introduced in “See Us Coming Together: A Sesame Street Special.”
Simu Liu (劉思慕), Padma Lakshmi and Naomi Osaka are among the celebrities appearing in the special, which is to show on Thanksgiving Day on HBO Max, Sesame Street social media and on PBS stations in the US.
Some of Ji-young’s personality comes from her puppeteer. Kathleen Kim, a 41-year-old Korean American, got into puppetry in her 30s.
In 2014, she was accepted into a Sesame Street workshop. That evolved into a mentorship and becoming part of the team the following year.
Being a puppeteer on a show that Kim had watched growing up was a dream come true, but helping shape an original muppet is a whole other feat.
“I feel like I have a lot of weight that maybe I’m putting on myself to teach these lessons and to be this representative that I did not have as a kid,” Kim said.
However, fellow puppeteer Leslie Carrara-Rudolph — who performs Abby Cadabby — reminded her: “It’s not about us... It’s about this message.”
Ji-young’s existence is the culmination of a lot of discussions after the events of last year — George Floyd’s death and anti-Asian hate incidents.
Like a lot of companies, Sesame Street reflected on how it could “meet the moment,” said Kay Wilson Stallings, executive vice-president of Creative and Production for Sesame Workshop, the non-profit organization behind Sesame Street.
Sesame Workshop established two task forces — one to look at its content and another to look at its own diversity. What developed was Coming Together, a multi-year initiative addressing how to talk to children about race, ethnicity and culture.
One result was eight-year-old Tamir. While not the show’s first black muppet, he was one of the first used to talk about subjects such as racism.
“When we knew we were going to be doing this work that was going to focus on the Asian and Pacific Islanders’ experience, we of course knew we needed to create an Asian muppet as well,” Stallings said.
These newer muppets — their personalities and their looks — were remarkably constructed in a matter of a months. The process normally takes at least a couple of years.
There are outside experts and a cross-section of employees known as the “culture trust,” who weigh in on every aspect of a new muppet, Stallings said.
For Kim, it was crucial that Ji-young not be “generically pan-Asian.”
“Because that’s something that all Asian Americans have experienced. They kind of want to lump us into this monolithic ‘Asian,’” Kim said.
“So it was very important that she was specifically Korean American, not just like, generically Korean, but that she was born here,” Kim added.
One thing Ji-young is to help teach children is how to be a good “upstander.”
Sesame Street first used the term on its “The Power of We” TV special last year, which featured Tamir.
“Being an ‘upstander’ means you point out things that are wrong, or something that someone does or says that is based on their negative attitude toward the person, because of the color of their skin or the language they speak or where they’re from,” Stallings said. “We want our audience to understand they can be upstanders.”
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