Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution (urspr publ 1997; utgåvan 2018)

Excellent Memoir of a Turbulent Time

"Red Scarf Girl" by Jiang Ji-Li covers the two years of Jiang's life in which the Cultural Revolution most effects her family. It is an intense and emotional book. The target audience is middle-school and junior high students but the book can be read quickly by adult readers.

As the book opens, Jiang is a wide-eyed member of the Red Guard, promising to uphold Mao's ideas of communism. She is a model student in Shanghai with expectations of going to an elite junior high. Quickly, however, the Cultural Revolution turns on her own family and her family falls victim.

The book is not a comprehensive history of the Cultural Revolution. It is a simple, jarring account of one girl's tragic experience. We do not learn about the political struggles in Beijing, cow sheds, or "sent down youth," but there are insights into work units and their factions, house raids, and daily life. ( )

It was amazing, well-written, and touching. I'm really glad to have read it. ( )

This was a difficult book. The author recounts her experiences as a 12–14-year old during the Cultural Revolution in China. She tells the story in a very matter-of-fact way. I'm sure things were different in different places, but my recollections of the time is that things sounded pretty horrible, and, of course, I wasn't even there. But, this helps confirm my recollections.

We did, however, have some sense of the cultural revolution even here in the U.S. We had a group of nitwits running around with Mao's little red book. I know their hearts were in the right place, but they were clearly not very bright. They thought that if they brought down "the system", everyone would suddenly become moral and holy and get along like lions with lambs. Likely those nitwits have turned into libertarians now: same kind of naive stupidity. [But I digress....sorry].

I read this, in part, because the parents of my soon-to-be, son-in-law, Victor, were swept up in the Cultural Revolution. They had been teachers who were sent into the country side to be agricultural workers for ten years (nope! they were teachers in the countryside). This process was to reeducate them in some way. I'm not sure how, and Victor wasn't much interested in telling me more. Unlike Jiang Ji-li, the author, who still espouses a strong affection for the country of her birth, our Victor's parents aren't much interested in going back, and Victor himself has zero interest in ever visiting the country of his parents' birth. [According to Victor's father, the greatest horror was in having no sense that a decent future was possible, no idea what might happen next. Fortunately, they did have a future: after 10 or so years, they came here and prospered.]

I dunno, there's a lesson in all this. When a charismatic leader, who is also a supreme narcissist with little interest in effective governance, takes control of things, bad things are bound to ensue. And so they did; and so they always have, and so, I fear, they will again.
( )

The gender difference is an important issue of investigation in Chinese Cultural Revolution research, and it arises from the different accounts of personal encounters during the Cultural Revolution period. The Red Scarf Girl is an engaging memoir of a bright girl whose life was hugely impacted by the Cultural Revolution, with her father imprisoned and once close neighbors becoming enemies. She had to choose, absurdly, between to save her father and herself, and to follow the instructions of Chairman Mao. ( )

It was so sad, I hated when she had to work in the rice fields. ( )