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Sesame Street includes first Asian-American muppet
A new, Korean-American muppet named Ji-Young will appear in the popular children’s series Sesame Street.
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Sesame Street long-time muppets include (left to right): Elmo, Cookie Monster, Grover, Big Bird, and Abby Cadabby. The street residents will welcome the first Asian-American muppet called Ji-Young on Thanksgiving Day. (Instagram/Courtesy of Sesame Street) (Instagram/Courtesy of Sesame Street)
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new, Korean-American muppet named Ji-Young will appear in the popular children’s series Sesame Street. She is the first Asian-American muppet in the 52 years history of the TV program.
Ji-Young, only 7 years old, loves cooking traditional Korean dishes like tteokbokki (chewy rice cakes) with her halmoni (grandmother). Other than that, her passions lie in skateboarding and playing electric guitar.
During a first look at the new kid on the street, the muppet character explained to the Associated Press that Ji means smart or wise in Korean, while Young means brave and strong.
“But we were looking it up and guess what?” she said. “Ji also means sesame.”
Ji-Young will be introduced in “See Us Coming Together: A Sesame Street Special” several celebrities will also appear, such as Marvel’s Shang-Chi lead actor Simu Liu, TV host Padma Lakshmi and tennis star Naomi Osaka.
The muppet’s personality was greatly shaped by her puppeteer, Kathleen Kim, who became part of the Sesame Street team in 2015.
“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, 41 and Korean-American, said to the Associated Press.
Ji-Young’s existence is the culmination of many discussions following George Floyd’s death and anti-Asian hate attacks in 2020, according to Kay Wilson Stallings, executive vice-president of Creative and Production for Sesame Workshop.
Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind Sesame Street, then established Coming Together as a response, an initiative addressing how to talk to children about race, ethnicity and culture.
Ji-Young, who will be heavily present throughout the new season, is intended to help teach children that they can be “upstanders,” which means that one will “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 to AP.
In the “See Us Coming Together” special, Ji-Young becomes upset after a kid, off-screen, tells her “to go back home,” an insult commonly directed toward Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders. But she feels empowered after all the residents of Sesame Street assure her that she belongs as much as anyone else.
The special will air on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 25 on HBO Max, Sesame Street social media platforms and PBS stations across the United States.
