Red Scarf Girl Essay

Red Scarf Girl Essay The Cultural Revolution was a time of much confusion in china. The memoir Red Scarf Girl by Ji-li Jiang illustrates the chaos of that time. Ji-li’s experiences during this time period led to her point of view changing. Ji-li starts the Cultural Revolution full of progressive thoughts, but this quickly turns to confusion, and leads to an important choice, something that impacts the rest of her life. In the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Ji-li is full of thoughts of moving forward, and helping Mao’s work to succeed. She believes that she can make a difference in the world. Ji-li helps with the “Destroy the Four Olds” campaign, and is nearby when a shop sign is smashed for having a name that does not concede with the communist principles. This gives her a feeling of kinship with everyone there. “Although what we had smashed was no more than a piece of wood, we felt like we had won a victory in a real battle.”(Pg. 24). But even as she was aiding the revolution, her thoughts soon turned to confusion and frustration with the policies of the Communist party. In short, Ji-li begins the revolution full of progressive thoughts but she soon becomes puzzled with the parties policies. As the glossiness of the revolution begins to fade, Ji-li becomes perturbed with the rules of the Communist party, as the Red guards constantly contradict them. The paper says that “a historic counterrevolutionary” had “confessed and had a positive attitude, he was pardoned”(Both on Pg. 176). However, this is opposite from how Uncle Zhu was treated after his confession, as he was pushed for more information to make Ji-li’s father confess. All this chaos led to Ji-li having to make a choice between her father, or Chairmen Mao, because the Red guards needed her to be a witness of her father’s antirevolutionary activates to convict her father, and if she did not she would be stuck with a bad class status. This demonstrates the immense confusion there was during that