Everybody knows Dora the Explorer, right? That Nickelodeon character who has earned bajillions by endearing her animated self to pre-schoolers and coaxed them into using a few words of Spanish as well as English?

She's big in our house, you know. She's big *everywhere*. She's not just on television.

Maybe by this time next year (or the year after), everybody will know Kai-lan, too. (That's a New York Times link, but if you're not in the mood to register for free, you can read the same thing here or, slightly differently, at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.)

Ni hao, Kai-lan! is a show about a bicultural family created by someone from a bicultural family -- Karen Chao. Based on the success of Sagwa, it's a good bet everybody's going to know Kai-lan soon enough.

But they won't see the face behind the voice -- a face that belongs to Jade-Lianna Peters, a 10-year-old from Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, born Gao Jian in Yunnan province.

Yep. The Chinese answer to Dora (plus the interactivity of Blue's Clues, which has taken our household by storm) is being voiced by a young lady adopted from China. She's also been the face for Welch's grape juice.

And she's the target demographic. Think about that for a second. The executive producer is quoted in the NY Times saying she hopes the series will have "a special resonance for the estimated 60,000 girls in the United States who have been adopted from Chinese orphanages."

There are that many children like mine. We have market share.

The whole production seems to be a nice, hopeful example of how things can work between the U.S., the P.R.C. and that little island off the Chinese coast where lives the democratic government in exile. The animation for Kai-lan is being designed in Taipei and Shanghai. It looks kicky. But Peters is having to take special Mandarin lessons to get the words behind the pictures just right.

Some folks, like the fellow on this blog over here, think if Kai-lan is going to face any competition, it's going to be from all-Chinese productions. Maybe so, maybe so (and I second the commenter's recommendation of Firefly on there, if you don't mind learning *those* Mandarin words). The language does seem to be seeping into the mainstream from a few different directions at once.

Ni hao, Kai-lan!