Chang goes to his mother and says that Tikki Tikki Tembo-no Sa Rembo-chari Bari Ruchi-pip Peri Pembo has fallen in the well. They stay away from the well for several months, but then there's there's a festival and they go to the well to eat their rice cakes, play around, and TTTSRBRPP falls in. The older brother goes to the mother and says, "Chang fell in the well." Initially, the stream is so loud that she can't hear him, but then he yells at her and the mother says, "That troublesome boy." TTTSRBRPP has to go get "The Old Man with the Ladder" (kind of a sad thing to be known for), who lowers the ladder into the well, climbs in, and brings the boy back out. The mother says not to play by the well because they will fall in, and they don't listen to her and Chang falls in. Again, I can't say whether or not this is accurate, as I don't know enough about ancient China, or this mythical place that the author has conjured up which she claims is equivalent. Unless the people were concerned (and knowledgeable) about sanitation, in which case they were much more advanced than ancient Europeans. Which seems a strange place to put a well, since clearly there is water right next to it. On the bank of the stream, there's an old well. According to the internet, "Chang" means "constant" or "often", but depending on the intonation, can mean a whole lot of things, including "long" and "great" (as in "The Great Wall of China"), so kind of the opposite of "Little." Anyhow, every morning their mother washes clothes at a stream by her house. The elder brother's name is "Tikki Tikki Tembo-no Sa Rembo-chari Bari Ruchi-pip Peri Pembo", which is not Chinese, but the book claims means "The most wonderful thing in the whole wide world," and the youngest is "Chang", which apparently is Chinese, but does not actually mean "Little" or "Nothing". The story is this: there are two brothers in "ancient China", where the first and oldest son traditionally has a very long name, and the second son has hardly any name at all because they don't really matter. Notwithstanding the possible racism, which I have to confess I was mostly unaware of due to my lack of education about other cultures (the illustrations made me think of Japan, but I didn't want to assume that China couldn't have similar art and clothing styles). I certainly don't want to read this to my two sons.
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