Red Scarf Girl

Dad likes to take long naps on Sunday afternoons, so to get a little peace and quiet, he gives Ji-li, Ji-yong, and Ji-yun some money to rent picture books from Grandpa Hong’s bookstall. Each child gets to pick 21 books with their share of the money. Ji-li likes fairytales, Ji-yong picks adventure stories, and Ji-yun likes books about animals, but the siblings also love trading until all of them have read each other’s books. Ji-li met many beloved friends in the pages of these books, like the Monkey King, the River Snail Lady, Snow White, and Aladdin.

On this Sunday, Ji-li’s best friend, An Yi, rushes to the bookstall and drags Ji-li, Ji-yong, and Ji-yun with her to watch a crowd destroying the sign at the Great Prosperity Market. Every day since the beginning of May, when Chairman Mao kicked off the Cultural Revolution, Ji-li and her family have heard on the radio about how people must destroy the “Four Olds”: old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits. Many shop names still “stink” of old culture, so people smash the signs to clear the way for new ideas. The Great Prosperity Market—one of the biggest and most successful grocery stores in the city—sits in a busy shopping district. Today, however, it is abandoned. A restless crowd has pulled down the heavy, gold-painted wooden sign and is trying—unsuccessfully—to smash it. Finally, a man with an axe pushes his way through the crowd and hacks the sign into two pieces.

Caught up in the crowd’s excitement, Ji-li, An Yi, and other children in the crowd rush forward to stamp on the sign, too. On their way home, the girls decide that Dad’s “Peace Theater” should be renamed the “Revolution Theater.” At home, Ji-li proudly tells Mom, Dad, and Grandma about the crowd’s actions. She’s surprised when Grandma declares the destruction of the sign “a shame.” Ji-yong lectures Grandma about the need to destroy old superstitions and reject capitalist attitudes. Ji-li chimes in with opinions she’s heard at school about how old ideas like heaven and old customs like funeral banquets to honor the dead are just old ideas that hold the country back. Mom and Dad remain quiet, in contrast to the enthusiasm they had for other campaigns started by Chairman Mao.

Within a few days, most Four Olds signs have been destroyed. Red banners displaying stores’ new names flap in the breeze. Dad’s theater does become the “Revolution Theater.” Because this was their idea, seeing it happen makes Ji-li and her friends feel like real revolutionaries—like the People’s Liberation Army soldiers who put their lives on the line for Communism in the Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese civil wars, and the Korean War.

One day, as Ji-li walks Ji-yun home from piano lessons, they come across a trio of high school students inspecting people’s clothing. The newspapers have just declared pointy shoes and narrow pants Four Olds. As Ji-li and Ji-yun push closer, the inspectors identify their next victim, a handsome, well-dressed man in his early 30s. Lecturing him about how he must oppose Western and bourgeois fashions, they cut his pointy shoes and narrow, fashionable pants to shreds before telling him to go home and “thoroughly remold [his] ideology.” Ji-li looks at the victim, who turns away in shame when their eyes meet. She takes pity on his evident embarrassment even as she agrees with the high school students that he should know better than to dress in Four Olds fashions.

One afternoon, when An Yi wishes aloud that she had her yang-san (her umbrella), a classmate named Yang Fan criticizes her for spreading Four Olds, since the word “yang” attached to anything means “foreign.” Another classmate, Du Hai, quickly joins her attack and he sounds much more serious. He accuses An Li of being a “xenophile who worships anything foreign,” repeating a phrase from the newspapers. Although his mother (Sang Hong-zhen) serves as Neighborhood Party Committee Secretary and no one wants to offend him or fall on his mother’s bad side, Ji-li leaps to An Yi’s defense, and the girls accuse him of various Four Olds superstitions. Du Hai in turn accuses Ji-li of being a capitalist because her family has a housekeeper. He also accuses An Yi of bourgeois ideology because of her long hair. Then Du Hai and Yang Fan saunter off, leaving Ji-li feeling helpless and angry.