Is this book an inexcusable act of cultural borrowing, or is it just a story?

[ParanoiaPam]

Is anyone familiar with Tikki Tikki Tembo? If you know of it, do you think this book has "cringe factor"? Is it "imposing a story on Chinese people, and stripping them of their own personal narrative", as a friend of mine has claimed?

It may do, I could be completely wrong. But I believe it is just a story.

It is a story that I would class as a "bedtime story" because it is shortish, has repetition and rhythm, yet it has mild peril (!), fast dialogue, slow dialogue...and a happy resolution. It tells a tale that suggests that first born children in China used to be given great long names, but second borns were given little, short names-- and since having a long name caused trouble for the elder boy in the story, China's children now all have little, short names. It isn't true, of course, because it is a story. Something a Grandad might have made up, like Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. I have read Tikki Tikki Tembo to my children and now I read it to my grandchildren. Is it truly offensive?

[comingupafterthebreak]

Tembo is the Swahili word for elephant.

[AiryFairy1]

I found a battered old copy of it in a second hand bookstore the other day and read it to my kids ... I just take it as a traditional tale... it’s quite fun to read and we enjoyed the illustrations 🤷🏻‍♀️

[NotYourHun]

Even the title sounds a bit racist to me tbh.

[BilboBercow]

It sounds like it has a lot of outdated stereotypes that aren't really in step with modern times

[ParanoiaPam]

BilboBercow which stereotypes would those be?

[BilboBercow]

Well, I had a wee look at the book. I'm being generous because I understand it was the 60s but the characters are written the way people speak in old Kung Fu movies.
They wear kimonos and Japanese style sandals but it's set in China and Tikki Tikki Tembo isn't Chinese is it? Although it claims to be.
You don't think that's all a bit culturally insensitive and cringeworthy when seen through today's eyes?

[ParanoiaPam]

You had a "wee" look, did you? Have you just inappropriately appropriated my Scottish heritage?

[Witchend]

I remember that book from when we were little in the 80s. Although I knew it as Rikki Tikki Tembo No Sar Rembo Chari Bari Rutchi Pip Peri Pembo

There was an author's note saying that she was retelling a story she'd heard as a small child.

[ParanoiaPam]

I understand that our society sees things a bit differently from, say, 1968 when Arlene Mosel produced the version of the book that I have. One of the things that is different --we are more easily offended, or more willing to look for offense. Sometimes it does smack of manufactured moral outrage. If we accept that people are right to be entirely protective of their culture and stories, where does that lead us?

How far do we go with that, is it deemed wrong for Kipling to have written about an Ethiopian in the Just So Stories, who uses his fingertips to put dark spots on the leopard? Because that is probably racist, and it probably didn't happen either . And Monroe Leaf's Ferdinand...well. Where to start? There are some very ugly caricatures of the Spanish in that lovely little book, and in the real Spain of his time Ferdinand would have been taken outside and shot rather than returned to his flowers and his cork tree (so, way to rewrite a Spaniard's own "personal narrative"). I am worried that we are being asked to condemn children's stories, for being stories.

Let's everybody just calm down and read some stories to our children. (Thinking but not saying maybe a First World Problem).

[Echobelly]

It seems a bit cringe to me because it's imposing a Westerner's imagined idea of a 'Chinese' name and I'd be a bit uncomfortable with 'making up' real cultures because that suggests you feel guilty own it. I'm pretty much betting that in its time white kids probably taunted Chinese and Japanese kids with the name...

[Echobelly]

• not 'guilty', 'that you own it'!

[BilboBercow]

Paranoia I am Scottish so no, not appropriating anything

[BedStuy]

When you say it is "just a story" do you mean to say that it will not influence any children in any way after they've finished reading it? It doesn't have any take-home message, intended or otherwise, and won't be used as a cultural touchpoint by others in society? It won't serve as warning, encouragement, lesson or analogy? Does it serve as a first introduction to a culture that would form the basis of a child's understanding of that culture?
I don't know the book but it would be odd to have a story for kids that didn't run a chance of doing any of those things. I can't quite grasp the notion that a book is "just a story" to be forgotten.

[Namelessinseattle]

It doesn't sound like cultural appropriation to me, just awful inaccurate stereotypes. I think for someone's culture to be appropriated it needs to be borrowed. That doesn't sound like the author borrowed Chinese culture for her own profit, decimated it more like.

[Waffles80]

Such a goady thread.

[ParanoiaPam]

BilboBercow glad to hear it.

BedStuy It is just a story, but all stories and their people continue to live in our heads, yes, bringing whatever lessons the tale tried to pass on, or different ones if it was unsuccessful. When he was three years old my DS told me that his snowman had "floated into a purple mist" , using this book to enliven his vocabulary after I had read it to him about a hundred times (the old man in the story had "floated into a purple mist and found his youth again"). So no, not forgotten at all.

I am certainly not going to jump on the purity train and ask "who is Arlene Mosel to say why they have short names?" because it is just a story.

[hels71]

That was my absolute favourite book when I was in reception in the mid 1970s!