Ji-li Jiang was 14 years old when members of her Revolutionary Committee pulled her out of class and told her that if she did not denounce her father in public, she would become an "enemy of the people. " "I was in such despair after they left. I didn't know what to do," Jiang told. She was speaking about 1968 and the height of China's Cultural Revolution. Growing out of an internal struggle within the Communist Party, Chairman Mao Tse-tung and millions of his most devoted followers sought in 1966 to revive the spirit of the revolution by stamping out traces of Western influence.In practice, that meant public humiliation and sometimes death for political opponents and better-off families.
Jiang's grandfather was a landlord and, despite his death years before the Cultural Revolution, his family suffered for his status. Jiang's father was detained for long stretches at the Shanghai children's theater, where he worked as an actor, and Jiang's 74-year- old grandmother was forced to sweep the neighborhood alley twice a day as punishment for being a landlord's widow. Jiang recounts the trials of those years in her 1997 memoir, "Red Scarf Girl. "Red Scarf Girl is a memoir that deals with the courage of a girl and her family when they are struggling to survive during Cultural Revolution that occurred in China in 1966.
According to Ji Li Jiang in the novel “Red Scarf Girl”, her family had to destroy their precious family heirlooms by painting over them. They also had to throw away priceless silk dresses, or be faced with awful punishments. In a word, Ji Li Jiang, the author, tells her story about the hardships that herself, her family and her friends went through, as well as the lessons that they learned over that period of time.Chairman Mao Ze-Dong, China’s leader launched the Cultural Revolution that was intended to “break with the old and establish the new” and which, as a cosequense, after all brought hardships to everyone. Many Chinese had to accustom to forgetting old ideas, old cultures, old habits, and anything that dealt with “old” China.
The things that were referred to as old customs were called Four Olds. They had Red Guards to help rebel against the old system. They would search houses for any four olds. When they found something they would confiscate and destroy it.
Ji Li Jiang was born into a family who used to be wealthy landlords that the Party did not like. Landlords were said to be awful men because they exploited farmers. They were enemies and were considered worse than criminals and counterrevolutionaries. A lot of people believed Ji Li’s father, Lao Jiang, was a rightist who attacked the Party and its socialism. This status caused Ji Li, her parents, grandma, brother and sister to be denied certain opportunities.
Ji Li Jiang was a girl that did well in school and did not want to be talked about.She goes through endeavors of self truth like when she was going to change her name to get rid of all the bad luck and humiliation the name Jiang gave her. She hated her family of landlords and was ashamed to be part of a family that everyone hated. Later she realizes her family was too precious to forget and too rare to rare to replace.
The Cultural Revolution had caused her father to go to jail for suspicion of committing a serious crime, her families’ treasures to be trashed or broken into pieces, fear of being arrested, her mothers’ sickness, lies, lost friendships, and just a whole new way of life.Living in the proletarian Cultural Revolution was harder than anyone thought it would be. Change is not always the best. Although the revolution was hard, I think that Ji Li and the other Chinese people benefited from Chairman Mao’s idea of change in China. The revolution was necessary to prevent capitalism from taking over China. In the book’s epilogue, Ji Li talks about how she realized that after Mao’s death in 1976, which people “woke up.
” People realized that the Cultural Revolution was just another thing that the Party did to administrate power over the country.This is similar to Orwell’s 1984 with the Party having spies, Thought Police, and telescreens everywhere to watch if you were being disloyal to your country. I think it is awesome that Ji Li Jiang wrote a book that told about her story and the hardships she faced during the revolution era in China. Its shows you how great our freedom is here, in the United States.
This isn’t a story of a made up character that is struggling with changes during a time when things are always changing. This actually happened to someone. She wrote the book well, in trying to get Americans to understand China more.Jiang has visited many schools in different states representing her book. One of the questions asked was “If Chairman Mao were still alive, would you follow his beliefs? ” Jiang, whose memoir, Red Scarf Girl, describes her childhood during China's Cultural Revolution, answered clearly and concisely. At that time - from 1966 to 1976 - she'd been swayed by the country's overwhelming faith in Mao as its savior.
She'd been a true believer, until it became clear that Mao's first allegiance was to himself, not his country or its people. From that point on, Jiang said, she resolved to never follow blindly, to always question, to trust her mind.
