Follow That Yellow Bird
LIZ CHANG
In 1985, the Children’s Television Workshop released a feature-length film called Follow That Bird. My best guess is that I watched it on television for the first time when I was about three or four. I knew it starred the same characters I was familiar with from my favorite television show, but the film terrified me. When I look back on it now, it is hard for me to pinpoint exactly what was so scary, except to say that I remember a sense of panic at Big Bird’s plight. I think I was afraid for myself.
The film begins with an unfamiliar group of birds at a conference table, deciding Big Bird’s fate. The villain in this film is Miss Finch, an overzealous social worker, who decides that Big Bird “…can’t be happy [because] he needs to be with a bird family.” In her view, Sesame Street is not an appropriate habitat for a young bird on his own, and he really should be living “with birds of [his] own kind.” In doing so, she misnames him, calling him “Big,” which I remember thinking was odd, because everyone else on Sesame Street had always called him “Big Bird” or just “Bird.” This awkward sense of unfamiliarity set off alarms to my young ears. She sells Big on being “happier in a big birdhouse with a bird family, singing and playing bird games all day long…” In the film, we’re treated to a montage inside Big Bird’s mind as she describes this, featuring birds that look exactly like him—large and pear-shaped, with yellow feathers protruding at odd angles—at a picnic. It always confused me that he was not adopted by a bunch of canaries, since Sesame Street lore says he’s supposed to be one, but I suppose there weren’t any available to take on a six-year old canary with gigantism. Miss Finch doesn’t specify that Big Bird, in accepting her invitation, is not to return to Sesame Street. It is unclear exactly what Bird thinks he’s agreeing to, but maybe it’s something like an extended vacation at bird camp—he even enlists his best friend to watch his nest while he’s gone “…so nothing happens to it.”
He’s sent to live with a family of Dodos: male-female parents and two children. When Big Bird disembarks from the plane, Daddy Dodo approaches him with a shy, “Excuse me, was there a big yellow bird on this plane?” Big Bird responds, “Only me,” and Mommy Dodo sighs, “…Maybe he’ll be on the next plane.” When the mix-up clears, Big Bird introduces himself and Daddy Dodo responds, “From now on, you’re Big Dodo!” thereby delivering on the naming gag that so unnerved me. The next few scenes capitalize on the inaccurate reputation of the dodo as having deserved its extinction. In fact, avian paleontologist Julian Hume says, “The dodos always been considered to be a comical animal … so ludicrous that it was destined to become extinct, which is absolutely not the case”. There are several jokes at the Dodos expense, including the detail that they own a ride-on mower but always forget to get on it and so they chase it (and are chased by it) each time they try to mow their corner of suburbia.
While it is clear within a few minutes of his arrival that Big Bird’s adoptive family is not a good fit for him, the final straw is when Mommy Dodo tells Big Bird that his best friend Mr. Snuffle-upagus will not be allowed to visit because he is not a bird, and that “soon [Big Bird] will have a new best friend.” Everything about Big Bird’s new life supports an underlying avian-(ethno)centrism: he is supposed to feel more affinity for these new family members because they share the Aves class designation; he is supposed to adjust to a totally new life in the suburbs after living in an urban neighborhood previously; and he is only supposed to be friends with his own kind.
Big Bird concludes that he must run back to Sesame Street. In the climax of the film, Big Bird jumps into Gordon’s (one of the few human residents on Sesame Street and a trusted adult) waiting arms from the back of a moving truck as Gordon perches on the hood of a Volkswagen Beetle.
It was Caroll Spinney’s (the original Big Bird) insight that Big Bird was simply the surrogate for the five- or six-year old who might be watching, and who was old enough to understand some—but not all—of how that world worked. When Sesame Street first aired, it was aimed at older children, up to about age ten, who might identify as early readers. It was after the rise of Elmo in 1980, performed by Kevin Clash, who is much more aligned with toddlers, that the show’s target audience shifted to younger viewers. I personally never really felt the same affinity for the small red puppet that I felt for Big Bird.
Although the genre of “child loses family and seeks to reunite after misadventure” (including such anxiety-inducing cartoons as An American Tale, and much later, Pixar’s Finding Nemo) has always caused me to break out into a cold sweat, the particular poignancy of Follow That Bird was, for me, the idea that everyone else—even strangers like the Feathered Friends—could see that Big Bird did not fit in inside his chosen environment, despite it being the only home he’s ever known. I grew up as a half-Asian child in a suburb of Philadelphia, the daughter of a mostly European woman and a Chinese man. I look like my father, who was born and raised in Honolulu. My parents met and married on the West Coast where “my kind of bird” is much more common.
When I was young and got the question “What are you?” or the slightly more delicate “Where are you from?” I would try to explain that my father grew up in Hawaii. Sometimes people would respond “Oh, so you’re Hawaiian.” “Native Hawaiian,” I would have to clarify, means “descendent of the people who lived in Hawaii for centuries before the Europeans” versus “from Hawaii.” Since I’ve lived most of my life in Pennsylvania, as I grew older, I would offer this analogy: “I’m Pennsylvanian because I was born here and I live here, but that does not make me ‘Pennsylvania Dutch.’” Pennsylvanians are much more familiar with our “Amish” neighbors (although, again, this term does not really cover the range of groups living in these farming communities) in Lancaster County who have turned away from modern technology and their relationship with the state at large. (Actually, journalist Karrie Gavin confirms something I heard a long time ago that “Pennsylvania Dutch” is also a misnomer: they were primarily German settlers and “Dutch” is an anglicization of Duetsch.) When I was little, I remember my father further muddied the conversation by always insisting when my little friends responded, “I’m American,” that American-ness had to do with citizenship—not ancestry. He was right, of course, but this complex tangle of identities was difficult to unpack myself, let alone on behalf of my friends and inquisitors, while I was growing up.
The Hawaiian word hapa (meaning “mixed” or “half” or “part,” depending on whom you ask) is the word I was offered early on to describe myself. My parents used this in our house, but few outside of our home would have recognized this as an identity or known what to do with it if they did. Recently there’s been some heated online discussion regarding who really gets to use this word to describe themselves. The controversy centers around it being a word from the Hawaiian language, which moved from a spoken language to a standardized one in the hands of the first Caucasian—colonizing—missionaries. Some Native Hawaiian scholars argue that hapa never meant “part-Asian” at all, and that the word should be reserved for those who are “part-Native Hawaiian” only. Others respond that the Hawaiian language has appropriated many words from other languages, for instance Portuguese and Japanese, so this word can be shared in kind.
Even in this debate, I feel some sense of being left out. I do not want to use a word to describe myself that reinforces colonization, and the story I grew up with was that my grandparents’ families emigrated from China but they were both born in Hawaii (as some of the youngest children in their families). This made them Chinese by background but Hawaii-born in a time when Chinese families were still largely barred from emigrating to mainland United States after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. They became naturalized U.S. citizens when Hawaii was officially made a state in 1959, when my father was seven years old.
In the Hawaii of my father’s youth, there were “haoles” (descendants of the European settlers or white tourists), hapa and “orientals.” I don’t know much about my father’s childhood except that he kept his head down and studied hard at a prestigious private school that was probably a universe unto itself. I know that, despite spending his first eighteen years living on an island, he never learned to surf and that he hates the beach. I also know that, as a Chinese man, my father still self-identifies as an “oriental” (a word that he tries to censor around my politically awakened sister) who married a haole. These days the term “oriental” (even capitalized) is no longer accepted as an appropriate moniker to attach to a human being (although it is still often applied to objects such as rugs and art), and there’s still active debate around whether haole is a slur.
To further complicate things, I recently took a DNA test “for entertainment purposes only,” and I was surprised that my identity returned as only 40% East Asian (basically, Chinese). Ten percent was described as Pacific Islander. Initially I suspected this 10% could have even come from my mom’s side, but in comparing my results to hers, I discovered this wasn’t the case. Recently I received a notification of an “update” to my results that described my 10% heritage as Dai. Dai is a recognized ethnic minority group from the Southern Yunnan province in China that stretches toward the border of Myanmar and Laos. Frankly, this was the first time I’d even heard of this group. In addition, “the ancestors of the Dai, Thai, and Lao originate in what is now Yunnan…. [but] other scholars believe that the people group could even have diverged from early Pacific islanders.” …And so we’ve circled back to the conclusion that the 10% could qualify me to use the term hapa after all, since Pacific Islander refers to “people having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa or other Pacific Islands,” according to the United States government. Of course government definitions are not the sum total of an identity’s reach, but it is a start.
When my mother married my father in 1980, her parents disowned her because they did not want her to marry a Chinese man. Although I have never been treated to a full reenactment of this conversation, I extrapolate that her parents saw my mother as their angel middle child who would someday have a perfect American-looking family. “Mongrel children”—which, I learned four years ago, was a term that was used—did not fit this image. My parents wed in California on the campus where they met, a mere four hours’ drive from her childhood home, and promptly moved across the country to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania just 24 days later.
Despite half-formed plans to move back to the West Coast at some point, we ended up staying. In my suburban, upper middle-class school district, my family was the only Chang family I knew, despite it being the Trivial Pursuit answer to “What is the most common surname in the world?” I am the older sister, but my younger sister reports getting the question “Are you Liz’s sister?” constantly. Objectively, we do not look that much alike. Her coloring is lighter than mine, and she favors my mother more in her features. I later realized that this question came up so often because we were anomalies in our small suburban enclave. We didn’t look like each other, but we also didn’t look like everyone else.
So where are my birds? I might have had a different answer if I had grown up on the West Coast or in Hawaii. But as a lifelong Pennsylvanian, this is the question I was left to answer on my own when I was too young to understand all of these considerations. I think Follow That Bird might have implanted in my brain the idea that well-meaning people could come and remove me from my family (half of whom I did not have the advantage of obviously resembling, and could I count on my father to be home from work as the visual testament to my belonging?) with very little notice or word from me. While the rest of the film follows Big Bird through a series of minimally dangerous adventures, this opening was enough to color my whole sense of the movie and seed a serious existential fear. I even hesitated to laugh at the antics of the Dodo family. (Reading about the dodo’s undeserved reputation for stupidity and awkwardness, I feel a tiny bit vindicated.) Here was an adoptive family who was trying to help Big Bird learn a bit more about himself, and all they succeeded in doing was alienating him further. I felt that viscerally. Now it almost seems ludicrous that I should have struggled so much with a movie intended for kids, but… is it?
Is it a coincidence that Big Bird is large and yellow? In fifth grade, I remember the day that my injudicious teacher taught us that the world used to be divided into Black, White and Yellow races. There are still cosmetics companies that describe their shades of foundation as having “yellow” undertones, although most have switched over to the slightly less offensive “golden.” As recently as 2012, candidate for the U.S. Senate Pete Hoekstra produced a Super Bowl ad, which criticized his opponent Debbie Stabinow as “Debbie Spend It Now.” The ad features an Asian American model/actress on a bicycle—wearing a yellow shirt—in a rice paddy. She speaks directly into the camera in a put-on accented voice, saying, “Thank you, Michigan Senator Debbie Spend It Now! Debbie spend so much American money. You borrow more and more from us (the actress looks down coquettishly).. Your economy get very weak; ours get very good. We take your jobs! Thank you, Debbie Spend It Now!” The ad caused a few days’ kerfuffle, with some pointing out that—in addition to its racist script—the html code referred to the actress as “yellowgirl. Hoekstra’s campaign defended this as a “mistake” in the code (in other places, her shirt is referenced, they claim) and, when questioned, the candidate responded that the ad was “only ‘insensitive’ to the spending philosophy of Stabenow.”
I only recently learned that the term “Asian American” was adopted as a political choice, meant to unify a voting bloc. Although I can get behind this as an ideal, I have personally never felt this term fit me fully, since I don’t speak any Asian languages and have never set foot on that beautiful, diverse continent. I have had to accept that this is the term most people use in their heads to describe me. Asians represent the highest rates of immigration to the United States, but misinformation about the origin of the novel coronavirus led to a spike in anti-Asian violence this year. This issue has been exacerbated by the criminal carelessness of bigoted leaders in the previous Trump administration who referred to the novel coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu.” My Caucasian husband and I had the uncomfortable conversation as I played out the thought experiment that is hardly two generations removed for Japanese Americans living in the United States: what would happen to my family if I were separated or targeted for internment because of my Chinese heritage? My husband claims we’d leave the country, but it may not be that simple: if airports are being policed, even my American passport and citizenship might not get me through.
Now I read Follow That Bird: The Storybook Based on the Movie to my younger daughter nearly every night before bedtime. My parents unearthed it somewhere, and it has found its way into our house—of course, she loves it. My younger daughter looks a lot more like me than her sister does, but most people would probably not identify her as one-quarter Asian. I try to believe that I am bleeding the venom from this story for myself by emphasizing the ending when Big Bird finds his way back to his spiritual home among the friends who make up his chosen family. But I still find myself asking nightly, “…Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?”
Works Cited
Anthes, Emily. “The Smart, Agile and Completed Underrated Dodo.” The Atlantic, Emerson Collective, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/the-dodos-redemption/486086/. Posted 08 June 2016. Accessed 28 May 2020.
Baragona, Justin. “Trump Addresses ‘Kung-Flu’ Remark, says Asian -Americans Agree ‘100 Percent’ With Him Using ‘Chinese Virus.’” The Daily Beast, The Daily Beast Company, LLC, https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-addresses-kung-flu-remark-says-asian-americans-agree-100-with-him-using-chinese-virus. Posted 18 Mar. 2020. Accessed 29 May 2020.
Deason, Rachel. “An Introduction to China’s Dai People.” Culture Trip, The Culture Trip Ltd., https://theculturetrip.com/asia/china/articles/an-introduction-to-chinas-dai-people/. Accessed 25 May 2020.
“Elmo Puppet: Description.” National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, 2013, https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1444757. Accessed 25 May 2020.
Gavin, Karrie. “Pennsylvania Dutch History, Culture and Values.” TripSavvy, DotDash Inc., https://www.tripsavvy.com/pennsylvania-dutch-history-and-culture-2669262. Posted 23 Mar. 2019. Accessed 28 May 2020.
Henson, Jim and the Children’s Television Workshop. Follow That Bird: The Storybook Based on the Movie. RandomHouse, 1985.
I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story. Directed by Dave LaMattina and Chad Walker, Performances by Caroll Spinney, Frank Oz and Jim Henson, Copper Pot Films, 2014.
Johnson, Akemi. “Who Gets to Be ‘Hapa’?” Code Switch/NPR.org, National Public Radio, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/08/08/487821049/who-gets-to-be-hapa. Accessed 25 May 2020.
Lu, Chin. “The Not-Quite-American Feeling of Being a 1.5 Generation Immigrant.” Vice, Disney, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4wbj9m/the-not-quite-american-feeling-of-being-a-15-generation-immigrant. Posted 13 Apr. 2016. Accessed 31 May 2020.
Rivas, Jorge. “Hoekstra Also Has a Weird ‘Debbie Spend It Now’ Website.” Color Lines, Race Forward, https://www.colorlines.com/articles/hoekstra-also-has-weird-debbie-spend-it-now-website. Posted 07 Feb. 2012. Accessed 25 May 2020.
Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird. Directed by Ken Kwapis, Performed by Caroll Spinney, Jim Henson, Frank Oz and Jerry Nelson. Warner Brothers, 1985.
United States Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Minority Health. “Profile: Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders.” HHS. gov, United States Government, https://www.minorityhealth.hhs.gov/omh/browse.aspx?lvl=3&lvlid=65. Accessed 25 May 2020.
UpNorthLive. “Senate Candidate Pete Hoekstra Under Fire for Ad.” Youtube, Google, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-E2IhOc58k. Posted 06 Feb. 2012. Accessed 25 May 2020.
Zia, Helen. Asian American Dreams. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.
