Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution (1997) by Ji-li Jiang covers two and a half years in the author’s life, from the spring of 1966 when she was 12 years old to the fall of 1968 when she was 14 (although the Cultural Revolution continued until Mao Ze-dong’s death in 1976). The memoir is also Jiang’s coming-of-age story, as it focuses on a key time in her adolescent development. This study guide uses the 2018 HarperCollins Reprint Edition of the text.

As the oldest child in her family, Ji-li must make crucial choices at a young age about whether to remain loyal to her family or bow to the ideological pressures of her community and country. When the book opens, Ji-li is a naïve and enthusiastic “red scarf girl,” convinced that she would always be as happy and successful as her name—“meaning happy and beautiful” (1)—as her experiences up until that point suggest. (The red scarf is worn by adherents to the Communist Party.) Then the Cultural Revolution begins, and Ji-li’s belief in herself and her family slowly erodes. Ji-li’s grandfather, long dead, comes from a family of landlords, and this fact casts a long shadow on the family, limiting Ji-li’s opportunities and ability to achieve political and academic success at school. As a result of her family’s “black” class status, she misses out on opportunities at school that once would have been available to her, such as auditioning for the Central Liberation Army Arts Academy and being elected as a Red Successor.

These new challenges and obstacles, along with the unfairness Ji-li witnesses around her—such as the brutal way a neighbor, Old Qian, is treated, and how it leads to the suicide of her best friend’s grandmother—make her question her fate and, eventually, hate her family history. Then her family’s home is searched, many of their possessions seized, and Ji-li’s father is detained; this is a huge blow in an escalating series of pressures on Ji-li. Despite her father’s situation and in some way because of it, Ji-li agrees to participate in a special event, the Class Education Exhibition, where she tells critical stories about landlords, the very thing her father is accused of being. Her participation is used as a way to get her to testify against her father. When she refuses to lie about his activities, she is kicked out of the Exhibition after months of hard work.

The final and most dramatic incident of the book happens after Ji-li has returned from her summer labor assignment harvesting rice. Her mother has written a letter criticizing the people who are imprisoning her husband that accurately details their abuses of power. Before this anonymous letter can be sent to the appropriate committee, a search party from Ji-li’s father’s workplace comes to search the Jiang home. Ji-li’s mother tells her to hide the letter, which she does—in the family cat’s litter box. The search party finds the letter, however, and Ji-li’s mother and grandmother are punished for it.

Though the Epilogue reveals that Ji-li’s father is eventually released and, after many years, his name is cleared, the narrative ends shortly after this search, with Ji-li newly committed to a life spent taking care of her family. In choosing not to testify against her father and to hide the letter for her mother, she has chosen loyalty to her family over loyalty to the state. The final chapter describes how she comes to terms with that choice—both a sad and a happy ending.