Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution Paperback – January 30, 2018

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.

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.

Ji-li Jiang's account of her adolescence which took place during China's Cultural Revolution made this reader appreciate that we live in a country where one can be totally unaware of politics and get along just fine. So often I get frustrated that people I know and love are interested in politics but don't have a deeper understanding of what is at stake and what the current issues are affecting the US. In Red Scarf Girl we see a girl living in a country and a time when even children would have been relentlessly indoctrinated with the governments political views and anyone who stepped outside of those proposed ideals for any reason at all, even one that is not of their choosing at all such as long-dead familial relations, can be segregated and driven out of the community. It is at times a hard story to take seriously because the world they are living in is almost a fun house mirror of our political system. Imagine if left wingers in the United States literally dragged the rich out of their homes subsequently beating and stoning them in the streets while their horrified family members looked on without saying a word to defend them and you have an approximation of what was going on during the Cultural Revolution.The most jarring and maybe problematic part of the book for an American reader like myself is that there is no resolution to the issue, no hero that swoops in and saves the day, no justice for those wrong or punishment for those who abused the power they had. But I suppose that that is the great enigma of modern China. They suffered so much during the hardcore Communist days with people occasionally killed by neighbors, others exiled to work in labor camps and many millions starved to death by heavy-handed utopian-minded economic maneuvers by an omnipotent party apparat gone wild. Despite all this they never renounced Communism like their Eastern European political brethren but they did embrace capitalism on an incredible scale while still referring to themselves as Communists without ever admitting to or even acknowledging the massive hypocrisy it implies. Statues and humongous portraits of Mao still adorn public buildings, cultural landmarks and peoples' homes and the majority of those who suffered underneath his despotic rule don't even have any hard feelings. One of the characters in the book even says something along the lines of "I never blamed Chairman Mao, I always assumed he was just trying to do what was best for the country." It made me think of the time Britney Spears said of Bush during the run-up to the Iraq War that "he is just the President and we should just follow him" or some such nonsense.At the end of the day this book made be even more cynical about any political process that involves more than a few million people that haven't all been living together for the past 3,000 years. When I said in the title for the review that the book may disappoint more mature readers, I say that because I think as you get older you crave definite resolutions to the different stories you're told. When you listen to or read a very tragic story with a definite antagonist, you need to know that that person was punished and that those who were wronged at least got to "have their day in court" or whathaveyou. For this reason I think younger people should read this book to learn that things in life aren't always divided into black & white or good & bad and that sometimes people who do horrible things often get to live out mediocre lives with no punishment ever for the crimes they have committed. I guess what I'm saying is I liked this book for allowing me to wallow in my pessimism a little while longer.

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