62 pages • 2 hours read
Ji-li JiangRed Scarf Girl
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Fate and Agency
The central question of the book is how does one live with one’s fate? Ji-li’s success at the start of the book makes her seem fated for—and fully in control of—a happy life, as does her name, which means “lucky” and “beautiful.” Soon, however, she curses her fate of being born to the wrong family—a family in one of the Five Black Categories, which are the “worst enemies of Communism and the common people”: “landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, criminals, and rightists” (277). Ji-li slowly and painfully realizes that what she does makes little difference in determining who she is in the context of the Cultural Revolution. If her actions have little consequence in determining her own fate, she must find a new framework for deciding how to act, moving from a focus on individual goals to family responsibility.
When Ji-li and An Yi decide to predict their futures during the year they are waiting to go to junior high school, the prediction turns out to be “some good and some bad” (155), a fate that we all share. Some good things happen and some bad things happen, and our responsibility, in the end, is to keep going, to keep making what few choices we are allowed to make in the context of our larger fates.
Ji-li’s acceptance of how fate works during the Cultural Revolution mirrors the larger population as it comes to terms with fate. The Cultural Revolution effectively dictated that those who held power determined fate. Those in “red” classes, who were sanctioned by the Communist Party, held power over those in “black” classes. Most everyone went along with this setup, as the memoir attests to, despite the fact that the Cultural Revolution was meant to do away with class power and class abuse. Ji-li, as well as the other figures in the memoir, don’t realize until after Chairman Mao’s death that the Cultural Revolution was ultimately a political maneuver, one that determined who lived and died, and who gained agency.
Coming of Age (as an “Educable Child”)
“An Educable Child” is the title of one of the chapters, and the idea is important to the coming-of-age theme of the book. As the book’s glossary tells us, an “educable child” is “from a ‘black’ family who is loyal to the Communist Party and rejects his or her black family. This is its ideological meaning, but “educable” also means, simply, “able to be educated,” and the question at the center of the book is what Ji-li will learn, ultimately, from these experiences. Will she grow away from her family and be an “educable child” in the ideological sense? Or will she become more closely tied to her family as a result of her “education” of fear, humiliation, and empathy for the suffering of others?
Though the timing is, in part, an accident of history, it is still significant that the memoir focuses on Ji-li from age 12 to 14—a key moment when childhood transforms into young adulthood, and children are trying to figure out who they want to be and how to make their ways in the world.
As mentioned earlier, empathy is an important theme in this book as it relates to personal growth, even though many of the people featured in it fail to show any empathy at all. It is central to Ji-li’s own experience and maturation. Though she is often subject to her classmates’ and others’ cruelty and lack of empathy, so much so that she is surprised when someone outside of her family and An Yi shows her empathy or friendliness, she herself is very empathetic to the suffering of others, even while she also tries to justify the reasons for their suffering using Chairman Mao’s teachings.
It is this ability to empathize that allows Jiang to continue to “wonder about China’s present” (217) and worry about her future, even though she has adopted the US as her home. Empathy is also what motivates the East West Exchange, the company that Jiang founded to “promote cultural exchanges between the United States and China” (271) so that everyone can better understand (and empathize with) one another. It is also her ability to empathize with the girl she once was that motivates her to write this book at all.
Individualism
The book’s glossary explains that an “individualist” is a person “who believes that each individual is more important than the group as a whole, and who favors freedom of action and belief” (278). Though individualism is celebrated in American culture, in the context of Communism, individualism “is in opposition to the Communist theory of the supremacy of the state, and therefore […] considered a moral weakness” (278). The book’s treatment of individualism, however, is more complex than Communist theory’s treatment of it. Though Communism sees individualism as a “moral weakness” that prevents people from acting in accordance with the state and the common good, Ji-li’s choice to stand by her family is about acting against her own individual goals and interest. Testifying against her parents would have isolated her and put her own individual goals above her duty to her family.
The irony is, then, that a successful “educable child” who rejects her own family becomes an individualist who believes that she is “more important than the group” that comprises her family. We see this illustrated in Ji-li’s cousin, who walks past his injured mother as if she does not exist. We see it, as well, in the false confessions of people who lie to improve their own individual situations at the expense of their friends and family. Looked at from this perspective, the “moral weakness” of individualism is the rejection of empathy on a small scale. Communist ideology asserts that submission to supremacy of the state compensates for the lack of individual empathy, but the story of Ji-li’s own coming of age calls this into question.
