Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution

Red Scarf Girl. Red Scarf Girl by Ji-li Jiang was the first book to make me cry. Bridge Terabithia? Sad but not a true tale. Harry Potter? Sure a lot of great characters and people die in it and you'll claim you cried for certain people but you don't really cry. Red Scarf Girl however is-is a whole different category of sad. It gives you a knew look on sad. The book is a peace of a girl's life. Not only that but it doesn't show the good, it shows the bad, hard, and painful moments.When my teacher told me we would be reading another memoir I groaned. We've already read one, and that one was bearable. So naturally this one would be unbearable. When I got the book I read the first page. I was already thinking I can't read this. The author was already bragging about there perfect life. You know the type. Anyways that's what I don't like about memoirs. If it was any old book I would've stopped reading there. But unfortunately it was homework. Reluctantly I continued reading. And I started to forget, forget it was a memoir. This book is like Harry Potter but real and not magic.Then the book became the kind of book you can't put down. As I got further into the book I started crying at parts. It made me realize that however bad my day is this girl's day for 3 years is even worse. Filled with worry, fear, confusion, and all sorts of miserable and negative things. And to top it off. Almost every single thing she owned was taken from me. This is the part in a normal book when I would come back to reality and remember that it's not real. But in this book I don't get that. Instead I remember that this was real and this girl who would other wise be brilliant, respected and loved is slowly becoming more and more depressed and lost. The brilliant girl who was at the beginning of the book respected by everyone is bow nothing but a black welp. A dirty thing that nobody likes.Red Scarf girl is a true heart warming story that can make anybody's bad day a good one.

This is NOT a book about the "big picture" of what happened in Communist China during the Cultural Revolution. Rather, it is a memoir of the lives of a young girl and her family and her friends' families. For the Chinese people, society's rules about what is good and bad were reversed, first when the Communists conquered China in 1949, and then the reversal was emphasized seventeen years later, when the Cultural Revolution began. The result was that families who, before Communism, had worked hard and intelligently and had prospered suddenly became national enemies. Even those who had chosen not to flee China, out of a strong sense of Chinese patriotism, like the author's parents and grandparents, were declared by the state to be "enemies of the people". Even worse, no way was allowed for such a family to "make up" for its past, and even the children who were born into Communism, like the author and her siblings and friends, were declared to be guilty of the "crimes" of their ancestors. For the author, the Cultural Revolution was a turning point in her life. Until then, her parents and grandmother had kept their heads down and been left alone, but now they were denounced and actively persecuted. What the author was seeing daily in her life conflicted with the propaganda she was getting at school, which, before, she had accepted without question. Now her confusion kept increasing, as she tried to make sense of her new world. Finally, she was told bluntly that she had to choose between her country and her family, and only if she publicly rejected her family could she have the life she had always expected to have. Of course this was an agonizing decision, and took much time, but she finally made her choice.The book is well-written, and does an excellent job of showing life in this tumultuous time as seen by a highly intelligent girl who was only twelve years old when the Cultural Revolution began. I highly recommend it.

I somehow stumbled upon this book suggestion and gave it a go. First, I'll say that this book is suggested for Y/A audiences but I am an adult. It was a really easy read for me and it is now in my 11 and 13 year olds' queue. It was written I a fashion that would be easy enough for 10+ to read. (If you are not of Asian culture, point out the glossary in advance to your child or tell them to have a google translator or something similar nearby because there are a few things outside of Asian culture they may be unfamiliar with.)The reason why I was so intrigued by the story was hearing this first hand from someone that truly experienced it. It would have made an interesting novel. But this was her real life.A must read, for sure .

I liked the book very much. It's a good story about "communist" China, and it actually tells me why China never was a Communist country, but rather (and not actually, when looked at it deeper*) a proletarian country. In fact it shows that the people in chine weren't equal (as it should've been in communism) but it was rather like: The proletarians were everything while the Burgeois were nothing, their children bearing their mark, and actually becoming as worthless as their parents in the eyes of the community. Well except if they betrayed their family, which is hardly acceptable by anyone.In fact, it was in this book mostly, where I've got to understand why communism is so criticized, while it seems so good on Carl Marx's Communist Manifest. It simply got abused (atleast in china).* Checking it deeper, it wasn't even proletarian, as they weren't worth as much as the red guards, and they not as much as Mao... (and maybe we could put some other groups there inbetween... So much for equal rights)But well that's how I saw it. I believe many saw the whole story through a diferent perspective. Just give it a try, it's worth it.

I have not read the whole book. But the story seems interesting. I purchased it to donate to a school teacher’s classroom.