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Chapter 12: An Educable Child
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Red Scarf Girl, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Conformity vs. Loyalty
Class, Power, and Justice
The Power of Propaganda
Identity and Individualism
Hard Work and Success
Summary
Analysis
Eventually, the family receives good news: Dad has been cleared of the charges of listening to foreign radio broadcasts. Uncle Fan didn’t betray Dad, it was Uncle Zhu, who tried to improve his own situation by implicating others when he was detained. But he also falsely confessed that he buried his alleged shortwave radio in his yard. When members of his work unit couldn’t find it, they realized he had been lying about the whole thing. For the first time in months, everyone feels hopeful. Ji-li even begins to wonder if the God Grandma has been praying to each night might exist after all. But Dad only comes home, under guard, for long enough to gather some of his clothes. He looks thin and careworn, and he begins to weep. Soon the family is weeping too. When he leaves, no one knows where he is going or when—if—he will return.
Eventually, even the members of the theater group must acknowledge the implausibility of the confessions they coerced from Uncle Zhu and Uncle Fan. But even though they clear the men of their initial crimes, they continue to detain them, relying on their previously demonstrated power to arbitrarily change or reinterpret the rules to suit themselves. Without an impartial standard of behavior, injustice runs rampant. Dad’s enemies seem intent on tormenting him because of his inherited class status (or other, as-yet unnamed crimes from his past), regardless of whether his current behavior warrants it.
Themes
One week later, Ji-li comes home as Mom shows a strange man and woman out the apartment door. Mom and Grandma explain that the Workers’ Revolt newspaper ran a front-page story about the Jiang family the day before. It talked about how the family used to be so wealthy that people called them the “Half-City Jiangs,” implying that they owned half of everything. The strangers were Party officials investigating the claims in the story, which mentioned some of Ji-li’s cousins by name. Ji-li feels fury. Her family never told her the full extent of their ancestors’ crimes. Everyone at school reads the Workers’ Revolt. Now they will know about the family history she’s been working so hard to overcome. She exclaims, “I hate landlords. I hate this family” and storms out.
In a society defined by class status rather than by a person’s individual actions or beliefs, Ji-li shares the blame of her ancestors for their so-called crimes (even though wealth was not, at the time these Half-City Jiangs were living, a crime) without the benefits. She herself lives simply and tries to follow communist ideology. But her society still considers her complicit; nothing she can do (short of the “clean break” Thin-Face suggested) will clear her name. It’s a sign of how deeply she has accepted Party ideology that she takes this guilt seriously and personally.
Themes
For two days, Ji-li refuses to speak to Mom. She has grown tired of enduring the taunts of classmates and neighborhood boys. She has read newspaper stories about people who change their names to get a fresh start in life. As she stands outside the door of the local police station at lunchtime one warm spring afternoon, she thinks about much better her life would be as plain Ji Li, rather than as Jiang Ji-li. Taking a deep breath, she enters the station and finds her way to the Residence Registration office. Its door bears two large signs: “No Entrance Without Permission,” and “Class Struggle Is the Key.” The office seems empty, but with persistent knocks and calls of “Comrade!” she eventually gets the officer on duty to stick his head out from behind a partition.
It's possible to see Ji-li’s visit to the police station and her decision to change her name as willfully ignoring the facts of life during the Cultural Revolution. She knows that the newspapers lie—the situations of Uncle Fan and Uncle Zhu proved that confession doesn’t earn leniency. Shan-shan’s repudiation of his mother and Thin-Face’s suggestion that she should make a clean—or total—break from her family hint that a simple name change won’t suffice. The signs on the door offer her a metaphorical warning, too: without her full commitment to class struggle—without going all in for the Party’s ideology and turning on her landlord parents—she will find no way to escape her marginalized status. Only the permission of the Party and Mao’s revolutionaries can grant full rights in Ji-li’s society.
Themes
Apologetically, Ji-li explains that she wants to change her name to escape her bad class status. This news changes the officer’s initially irritated attitude entirely. Now, he snaps to attention and invites her inside, complimenting her on her good revolutionary action and telling her how society supports those who chose to make a clean break with their families to follow Chairman Mao. If her parents give her any trouble, he promises that the Party will back her up and hold struggle meetings against them. Ji-li feels confused— she only wants to break from her landlord ancestors, not her beloved Mom and Dad. When the officer leaves for a moment to wash his hands, she jumps up and runs out.
It isn’t until this moment that Ji-li must confront the truth of the choice her society asks her to make. Because it has declared her family black enemies of the communist cause in China, she cannot preserve both her revolutionary status and her family connections. Thus far, Ji-li has betrayed a tendency to consider her family more leniently than others; she’s faster to forgive Grandma for being married to a landlord than Mrs. Rong for being married to a businessman, for example. But her judgments and actions have been basically consistent with a belief that people should be held accountable for themselves. That’s what she wants for herself here, not fully realizing that the Party demands conformity from its followers at the expense of all their other loyalties. She’s been indoctrinated from a young age that Chairman Mao should be dearer to her than her own family. But she finds here that she does not, in fact, agree.
Themes
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Ji-li arrives home to find Grandma trying to talk Song Po-po out of mopping the stairs between their apartments. Since Dad’s detainment, Song Po-po has been helping the family out again, completing small tasks like mopping, dropping off food, and even helping to cook. Song Po-po protests that she wants to help. She claims that staying active makes her feel better, and so does helping her friends in their time of need. Ji-li begins to weep. She sees that Song Po-po doesn’t care what anyone says about the family. She loves them no matter who their ancestors were or what anyone else says. Ji-li recognizes the selfishness of her anger. As hard as her life is, she realizes that Mom’s life is harder right now—even without Ji-li’s silent treatment. She runs to give Song Po-po a hug.
Seeing Song Po-po’s enduring love and faithfulness to her family crystallizes Ji-li’s feelings about where her own loyalties lie. Her family loves her no matter what; Chairman Mao and the Party make their love conditional on her conformity with their ever-shifting ideas about purity. Earlier, Ji-li worried that her family was exploiting Po-po by paying her to help the family. But love and exploitation cannot coexist. And true love helps people to face challenges rather than run away. And this, by contrast, shows Ji-li how precarious the “love” offered by the Party truly is.
Themes
