Red Scarf Girl

The chapter opens with an uncharacteristically sober visit from Ji-li’s parents’ friends, Uncle Tian and Aunt Wu. The next day, the children and their grandmother are sent to the park for the day. The children think it’s for fun and a picnic, but after lunch Grandma explains to Ji-li that she can’t sleep after witnessing what happened to Old Qian and is anxious about the Red Guards coming to search the house. When Ji-li looks at her grandmother, she decides that she “doesn’t seem like a landlord’s wife” because she is “beautiful, kind, and smart” (121). When they return home, the children are sent outside again to play. When Ji-li comes back in, she finds her parents burning family photos, because “photos of people in old-fashioned long gowns and mandarin jackets are considered fourolds” (123).

A week later, Ji-yong comes home after having been in a fight with some boys who called him a “black whelp” (127) and stole his authentic Liberation Army cap that “he had gotten from his friend Ming-ming’s father” (127). The next afternoon, Ji-yong goes missing with his best friends, Xiao-cheng and Ming-ming, who are also considered “black whelps.” He comes home late with a black eye, having gotten his cap back, minus its brim.

The next night, Ji-li’s Fourth Aunt, who lives downstairs from them, has her apartment raided by the Red Guards. The family listens with dread to the sound of the search, and soon the Red Guards are at their own door. The teenagers, led by Six-Fingers, search their home for weapons, dumping out all the family’s possessions on the floor. Ji-li tries to hide her treasured stamp collection, which is considered bourgeois, but she is caught and sent to the bathroom with her brother and sister.

The loss of her stamp collection saddens Ji-li, but the thing that shocks her into a new kind of understanding of the Cultural Revolution is that the search party threw her sanitary belt on the floor for everyone to see. She feels especially violated by this, since it’s not something she even lets the males in her own family see. An Yi comes over to help with the cleaning-up, which takes days, and Ji-li is reminded of An Yi’s grandmother’s death. Remembering the old woman’s despair and suicide in the context of her own sense of violation, she realizes there is nothing she can do to change her “bad class status” (139).

This chapter is set in late October, when Ji-li’s brother and sister finally go back to school. Junior high school teachers are not yet back at work—they are “still out of the city establishing revolutionary ties” (140)—so Ji-li remains home, bored and “worried about An Yi’s mother” (140), Teacher Wei, whose “situation was very bad” (140). Whereas before the Cultural Revolution began, Teacher Wei was a “Model Teacher,” she was now subject to harassment, since her father was a capitalist and her mother committed suicide. The Red Guards force her to wear a sign around her neck that labels her a “REACTIONARY MONSTER” and chant “I am a reactionary teacher. I am a reactionary monster” (141). When she stops to catch her breath, she is kicked and hit.

The chapter also includes another story about Ji-li’s Aunt Xi-wen, who was part of the group required to do public penance every day at the Propaganda Wall during Morning Repentance and Evening Report. One afternoon, Ji-li sees her sweeping the street, looking haggard and much older. She falls down, and Ji-li watches her cousin Shan-shan walk right by his injured mother, as if he doesn’t know her. Ji-li remembers that her cousin had officially disowned his mother, even though they still live together in the same room. Ji-li considers whether or not to help her aunt, worrying that she will be criticized if she is seen. While she hesitates, another neighbor, Mrs. Wang, helps Aunt Xi-wen home.

In December, Ji-li and An Yi witness another public incident, when Du Hai’s mother, who used to be in a position of power as the secretary of the Neighborhood Party Committee, is publicly accused by Xu A-san of immorality. An Yi, who was terrified that the person at the center of this disturbance was her mother, is relieved to see that she is not and believes that “the wheel of fate is turning” (146) in favor of their own families now. But then, a few days later, Ji-li’s sister comes home crying because some of her classmates threw her schoolbag out of the window. They had been bullying her and her friend for weeks, and Ji-yun refused to go and get her bag when the boys demanded that she do so. Ji-li gives her new schoolbag to her sister to use and wonders why someone so young has to suffer.

The Chinese New Year passes, as does Ji-li’s 13th birthday. One day, with her brother and his friend Xiao-cheng, she watches Xiao-cheng’s father ride by in a truck wearing a dunce cap and a wooden sign that reads, “CAPITALIST EXECUTIONER SHAN YI-DAN.” Xiao-cheng does not appear to be upset, and Ji-li is shocked by his response. Then her brother tells her that the boys’ other friend, Ming-ming, has just found out that his father is dead, apparently as a result of suicide. Deeply upset, Ji-li goes to see An Yi, who gives her more bad news: The day before, An Yi’s mother was forced to climb the factory chimney; she and her father are terrified if her mother comes home late, wondering what may have happened to her. Ji-li asks An Yi if she blames her mother, and she says she does, sometimes. Ji-li admits that she hates her grandfather for having been a landlord. The girls decide to predict their future, which they know is “fourolds,” but they do it anyway. They write different things on pieces of paper. The first one to fly off the windowsill is their future: “SOME GOOD AND SOME BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN.”