Red Scarf Girl Sparknotes

The Cultural Revolution had a great impact on the author of the Red Scarf Girl memoir narrative, Ji-li Jiang. At the beginning of the story, Ji-li once believed her life was near ‘perfect’ because how unique her family was was how she was always ‘loved and respected” (Ji-li Jiang, PG 42). Now, in the end, Ji-Li acknowledged her struggles and had to come up with humiliation because her family ties of being a ‘black family’ and affected her life tremendously. In this essay, I will be talking about how Ji-Li changes throughout the story, and how it will impact her mindset and life. In the beginning of Ji-li’s Jiang memoir Red Scarf Girl, Ji-li once fervently believed that her family was “nearly perfect” and like no other.

While there she learned that the communist party was unfair full of a bunch of power hungry, lying politicians. Her first encounter with disillusionment was when her friend Huar who told her that during the famine many people in her village died of starvation. The claim completely threw Yang into disbelieve as she recalled the official newspaper stated that no one had died. Secondly, the attempted assassination of Mao left her to question the nature of the cultural revolution. Thirdly, Yang found out that not everyone volunteered to go to the Great North Wilderness. A girl who worked on the pig farm told Yang that she was forced to go because her father was told that a nationwide policy had been issued where all eldest children had to go to the countryside. Yang expressed that she seen the cruelty and propaganda that came out of the party. Finally, the biggest factor in Yang’s disillusionment was when she fell in love with Zhou. Zhou’s father fought for the nationalists in 1949. Therefore, Zhou and his whole family was seen as nationalist. She felt that the party was unfair in classing everyone by their “historical problems” which led them to have little opportunities and no future. These are prime examples what lead to Yang’s disillusion view of the communist party.

Red Scarf Girl Ji-li Jiang is the author of Red Scarf Girl. The Genre is Memoir. Ji-li Jiang isa very intelligent 12 year old girl. At the start she supported China’s leader, Mao Ze-dong launching the Cultural Revolution and everything went upside down.

Love. Adventure. Lust. Individuality. Liberty. Influence. Freedom. These are the things that give people the will and desire to live, and most of us cannot imagine a world or life without them. But what if these aspirations were taken away overnight? In Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie (戴思杰) illustrates these turn of events with a significant focus on three characters: Luo, the narrator, and the Little Chinese Seamstress. The story takes place during the Cultural Revolution in Maoist China when young intellectuals from the city were forced to be re-educated in the peasant environments. The narrator and Luo are among these people. They are relocated to the mountainous countryside and re-educated by the peasants there. Even though they are stripped away from all outside influences, they experience bits of freedom by reading forbidden foreign books in a suitcase. In addition, they share their findings among those in the countryside, especially with the Little Chinese Seamstress, an ordinary peasant girl as a result of her romance with Luo. Thus, their eyes are opened to new ideas, and their lives are changed with new understandings and perceptions. In his novel, Dai demonstrates the importance of intellectual liberty through the influence of outside cultures and the development of the characters.

During the hundred flower campaign, citizens where encouraged to openly express their opinions of the communist regime, as a means of entrapping “enemies of the state”. During the process, Mao changed his course and those involved which unfortunately included Liang’s mother were labelled ‘rightists’ (tending towards, or relating to the political right or its principles; conservative, traditionalist, or reactionary) and punished accordingly. This event led to Liang’s father divorcing his mother in order to spare the rest of the family the disgrace in which the mother’s actions brought upon the family. “Father’s traditional Confucian sense of family obligation told him to support Mother while his political allegiance told him to condemn her. In the end, his commitment to the Party won out, and he denounced her” (page 9). The conflict between family obligation and political allegiance that Liang’s father faces tells us a lot about how the society functioned, a society were political beliefs/ allegiance were in most cases regarded higher than even ones family. Liang later on brings into light how the loss of his mother had a massive effect on his life, he said “So perhaps inevitably, over the years, I came to resent my mother for making my life so miserable. I began to believe that she really had done something wrong” (Page16). Mao’s

After Xianglin died, Xianglin’s wife escaped alone from her husband home to Lu town as a widow. She looks nice and her limbs are strong plus her hard working attitude, so she quickly became a formal female worker at the home of Lu Si. However, her mother in-law kidnapped her one day and force her to married her second husband He Laoliu. They marriage life is better than her thought, and they had their first boy A Mao after years. Unluckily, both her husband and her son died for bad things happened.

“Come in, come in. I’ll be ready in no time.” (p. 214) After reading a newspaper article criticizing her family, Ji Li decides she wants to change her name so that the name Jiang won't follow her around anymore, which would improve her class status. But by doing this, it shows that she feels like her political life has more value than her family.

Describe the ways in which the life of the main character is influenced by traditional Chinese values. Everyone involved is guilty for what Xiang Lin’s widow has been through. Throughout her life, she does not have the right to decide her own life. In this story, the way women were treated unfairly and discriminatingly in the beginning of the twentieth century is clearly emphasized. The life of Xiang Lin's widow is like representing the difficulties and struggles of the women at that time, especially the poor.

She wondered if there was more to her life than she had realized. The journey of discovering herself and her Chinese culture had begun. She goes through a time of change and self discovery and this makes her a dynamic character as well as the protagonist of the

The Chinese Cultural Revolution presents a fratricidal mass conflict that boasts the largest political movement of the 20th century. Its professed goal was to annihilate any traces of Capitalism in China and to overhaul the political and cultural values of the Chinese nation. Populist in ideology, this crusade was directed against ‘bourgeois’ and ‘intellectual’ archetypes. By targeting urban intellectuals, the Revolution channelled the energies of the masses in the service of Mao Zedong’s effort to re-asset firm-control over the nation and the ruling party. The outcome was a cult of personality so effective that it rivalled familial ties – traditionally seen the substratum of social interactions in China – in its allegations on people’s loyalties.

However, there was also a sizeable element of the population who were driven, at least in part, by self-preservation during the violent era of ‘struggle’. As there was little space for outright resistance to the Cultural Revolution[ ‘Dear Chairman Mao, Please Think About What You Are Doing’ (United States, 2016). First published 16 May 2016, Radio Free Asia, Accessed 3 June 2018 ], this segment of the population would often take advantage of the revolutionary climate to “out-red” potential opposition - effectively barring themselves from criticism. This phenomenon of outwardly embracing the Cultural Revolution as a defensive tactic can make it hard to distinguish ‘legitimate’ participants from those ‘playing along’. Yet, beneath the outward displays, there is a plethora of evidence to show that there were underlying social forces which motivated many people to participate in the Cultural Revolution, beyond mere loyalty to

However, we have to dissect the short story with the prospect of each approach in order to develop a keen sense of the story from top to bottom. The protagonist, Jing-mei, is an American born Chinese woman who despises her own cultural heritage. She was in denial of being Chinese, in the contrary, only considered herself as American. As silly as it sounds the only linkage connecting her to Chinese are her parents. Because of the cultural heritage difference, Chinese in Jing-mei’s perspective is a representation of embarrassment. “Haggling with store owners, picking her mouth with a toothpick in public, being ‘color blind’ to the fact that lemon yellow and pale pink are not good combinations for winter clothes” are behaviors Jing-mei associates with being Chinese. This quote that was stated in the short story shows that Jing-mei view her mom’s idiosyncrasies due to her the distinct Chinese life style. When she was fifteen years old she rejected being called Chinese and compared herself with her American friends. “I was as white as they were”. After a whole heated up debate with her mother and the death of her mother, Jing-mei came to a consensus to visit her sister in China. At this time, she was accepting the fact of being Chinese transitioning to having anxiety to fit in being Chinese. This transition was because of her upcoming unity with her sister from China. Since her sister doesn’t have any recognition of her mother, Jing-mei was in fear that there was no connection with her. Jing mei repeatedly imagine the upcoming scenario of meeting her sister. “Sister, Sister. We are here,” she imagines herself saying this in her poor version of Chinese. Now this is the point she wants to be Chinese. When she finally met her sister, Lily, she was scared she lost her only lineage and connection of being Chinese. One of the big changing

I grew up, watching the world’s understanding of my cultural heritage be reduced to ching chong’s and ling long’s, kimonos, and fortune cookies. I grew up, being asked if my parents belonged to the communist party, when I held in me the stories they told me of labor camps they were sent to at the age of 13, of how one day, they couldn’t go to school anymore, of how my grandparents tried desperately later on, long after Mao’s regime ended, to force their children, now adults, to eat copious amounts of food, as if to make up for times when there was nothing to

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was started by Mao Zedong in an attempt to rid himself of his enemies. While it may have accomplished its purpose, many innocents were killed as well. Families, parent and child, were ripped apart in Mao’s paranoia. The author, Moying Li, grew up in this period of history. Her family suffered alongside millions of others who had come under fire from the government and Communist Party. Snow Falling in Spring was her attempt to at coming to terms with her life and the events that had happened in it. It describes significant parts in the later years of Mao, starting the Great Leap Forward and ending with the death of the once beloved Chairman. Moying Li tells of her childhood to early adulthood when her whole world came crashing down with the Cultural Revolution. And she is most certainly qualified to be telling the story. Ms. Li first started writing and publishing works from the time she was still in China, at college. Her previous book, Beacon Hill: The Life & Times of a Neighborhood, had won the Julia Ward Howe Award. Snow Falling in Spring had won the IRA Children’s and Young Adult’s Book Award and was named a Notable Social Studies Trade Book. It was selected as a winner for the 2009 Massachusetts Book Award for Non-fiction (adult category) (Li, About the Author). As the story is a memoir, it shows bias in the fact that the author is inclined to show herself and her struggles in a way that generates support for what she has gone

Dark red Sunset is a Memoir of Ma Bo 's that sent a stun wave all through China when it was distributed and was even prohibited by the Communist Government for a set timeframe. This story paints an unmistakable picture for what the Great Chinese Cultural Revolution was truly similar to. Chinese living today can bear witness to if this the life that they needed to persevere amid the Cultural Revolution comparable if not indistinguishable experiences as communicated in Ma Bo 's story. The drudges of being a youthful Red Guard in inward China were experienced by many if not millions. The revulsions and monstrosities were across the board all through the nation, not simply in Inner Mongolia. The encounters outlined in Blood Red Sunset