AI ToolsNew
Tools to make learning and teaching easier
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
Being at home comes as a relief to Ji-li even though she’s worried about her summons to the theater. One day, Uncle Tian comes by. He and Mom disappear into the bathroom for a private conversation. They’re evidently writing something together. Mom shows Uncle Tian out, and when she goes to the bathroom to prepare for sleep, Ji-li sneaks out of bed. On Mom’s nightstand, she finds a letter addressed to the Municipal Party Committee. It alleges that, under the auspices of the Cultural Revolution, a faction of rebels has taken over the theater working group to terrorize people. Ji-li goes back to bed, consumed by worries. If the rebels find out, will they punish Mom and Uncle Tian? Will they hurt Dad more? Will Thin-Face blame Ji-li for not telling him about the letter?
Mom and Uncle Tian allege that the members of the theater who have detained Dad and the others are working outside of the oversight of the Party, yet this kind of guerrilla rebellion is precisely what Chairman Mao initially encouraged. And revolutionaries have removed and persecuted other Party leaders—from the theater’s former Secretary, to Neighborhood Committee Secretary Sang Hong-zhen, to Ji-yong’s friends’ fathers—without retaliation. In Ji-li’s society, those who can claim revolutionary authority seem free to do whatever they choose. Chaos and arbitrary judgement rule the day.
Themes
Two days later, at dusk, Mom goes to make a telephone call while Ji-yun plays with her friend Xiao Hong-yin, Ji-yong makes a slingshot, and Ji-li and Grandma do chores. Ji-li wonders how Dad is doing. Suddenly, Mom runs up the stairs in a panic, shouting “The letter, the letter.” People from the theater are coming to search the house; they’ve blocked off the street at either end with guards to prevent escape. Telling Ji-li to hide the letter, Mom runs downstairs to stall the searchers. Xiao Hong-yin quietly follows her. Desperately, Ji-li searches the house for a safe hiding spot, finding none. Then she thinks to bury the letter in the cat’s litterbox up on the roof.
As the stage is set for yet another raid on the Jiang house, each member quietly goes about their business. Ji-yong’s slingshot points poetically towards his fighting spirit and his willingness to stand up for himself. Ji-li’s worry about Dad betrays her deep and abiding family loyalty. Ji-yun plays with a friend—an increasing rarity as the Jiangs are socially marginalized. Still, no one can escape from persecution, not even within the confines of their own homes.
Themes
When Ji-li comes back inside, she finds Mom blocking Thin-Face and others at the door. Mom reminds him that searches now require the permission of the police. In answer, he waves a document in her face, informing her that the authorities have declared Dad a landlord. Neither she nor he have any more rights. The theater group ransacks the house even more thoroughly than the Red Guards did, seizing a broken antique stool and the scraps from Grandma’s old gowns as evidence of Dad’s “luxurious lifestyle.” They confiscate a book Ji-yong borrowed, claiming that it propagates revisionist and bourgeois ideas because it’s a translation of a foreign work. Ji-yong springs at them, but they knock him back, denying the rights of “black bastards” like him to question their decisions.
If readers needed further proof of the unjust, arbitrary use of punishment during the Cultural Revolution, they need only look at how easily and casually Thin-Face strips Dad, Mom, and the rest of the family of their rights by declaring Dad a landlord, even though he has never exacted a penny from anyone in rent. Thin-Face and others like him use words like “landlord,” “revisionist,” or “bourgeois” to brand anything they disagree with, then use that to justify their persecutions. They acknowledge no rights but their own. The way the narrative highlights the searchers’ glee at finding luxurious items insinuates that petty jealousy, rather than revolutionary fervor, motivates them.
Themes
Upgrade to unlock the analysis and theme tracking for all of Red Scarf GirlRed Scarf Girl!
Get LitCharts A+
Then Six-Fingers saunters in the door. He whispers a few words to Thin-Face, then leaves. Thin-Face turns to Ji-li, Ji-yong, and Ji-yun. According to “reliable sources,” he says, he has learned that the family hid a very valuable letter. He wonders which child will earn the most revolutionary glory by confessing its whereabouts first. Ji-li realizes that Xiao Hong-yin, who was at the house when Mom asked Ji-li to hide the letter, must have reported it. But she left before she could see the hiding spot. Ji-li tells Thin-Face that she knows nothing. Thin-Face yells for his cronies to bring in the two landlords’ wives. Promising leniency for confession and severity for resistance, he asks them where the letter is.
Once more, Six-Fingers invites Ji-li (and this time, Ji-yong and Ji-yun) to choose between their family and Chairman Mao and the Party. He claims that they have a revolutionary duty to conform to Party ideology and to root out black and bourgeois tendencies from themselves. But Ji-li no longer believes this to be true. Nor does she believe the line about leniency for confession. She knows the searchers will do what they want, regardless of whether she cooperates. The fact that a friend of the family turned them in to authorities suggests, however, that loyalty like the Jiangs show to each other and to their friends has become increasingly rare in China during the Cultural Revolution.
Themes
Get the entire Red Scarf Girl LitChart as a printable PDF.
When Grandma and Mom refuse to confess, Thin-Face slaps Grandma so hard that he knocks her into Mom’s arms. Then, calling her a “dammed old landlord’s wife,” he forces her to kneel facing the wall, promising to leave her there until someone tells him where to find the letter. Grandma sags forward until she’s supporting her weight on her hands, just like Old Qian did on the day they searched his house. Ji-li wonders if she should confess. But before she can make up her mind, Thin-Face comes back into the room, the letter in his hand and a look of triumph on his face. When the cat used the litterbox, she inadvertently exposed it.
Thin-Face shows his lack of empathy or respect for Grandma by subjecting her to physical torments. Propaganda has cast landlords as inhumane monsters for years, and it makes it easier for aggressors like Thin-Face to dehumanize and abuse their victims. Ji-li knows her grandmother to be a kind, gentle soul; Thin-Face treats her as if she’s the stereotypical monster portrayed in plays and movies.
Themes
Waving the letter in Mom’s face, Thin-Face tells her that no one will help her overturn the verdict against Dad. Now, he says, she is officially a landlord’s wife, and she must report her new classification to her work unit in the morning. Then, the theater group will invite her to join Dad’s struggle meeting. Stepping to Grandma, Thin-Face sentences her to sweeping the streets with the other landlords’ wives. As he turns to leave, his eyes fall on Ji-li. She has proved herself an ineducable child, he says, and he will tell her school about her firm class allegiance in the morning. Finally, at 4:30 a.m., the ordeal ends. Song Po-po creeps into the apartment to check on Mom, Grandma, Ji-li, Ji-yong, and Ji-yun.
Having read the letter, Thin-Face now knows for sure that Mom and Uncle Tian were trying to remove him from his position of power at the theater. By officially declaring Mom and Grandma landlords’ wives, he deprives them of their rights and ensures that they cannot overthrow him. But the threat of removal reminds him—and readers—that the chaos that results from the absence of a fair and impartial legal system cannot be stopped. As infighting continues, Thin-Face’s faction cannot guarantee its own power forever.
Themes
Mom says they must try to warn Uncle Tian in case the theater group members come for him next. Song Po-po volunteers to invent an errand so she can see whether guards still stand at the ends of the street. After a little while, she returns with bad news: the guards are still there. Ji-yong says he can slip past the guards by climbing over the back wall and will go to Uncle Tian. Mom warns him to approach Tian’s house quietly and cautiously, then sends him on his way. Then she makes a bed for Grandma on a pile of clothes. After what feels like an eternity, Ji-yong returns. No one was home at Uncle Tian’s. The family doesn’t know if he escaped or if he's already been taken away.
Song Po-po joins forces with the Jiangs and their friends immediately. In the face of terrible violence from the agents of a distant and uncaring Party, she remains loyal to the people she loves. Readers should recall that she, too, remains vulnerable to persecution thanks to her privileged childhood before the Communist Party seized power; it would benefit her more to turn on the Jiangs than to help them, making her example all the more powerful.
Themes
In the morning, Ji-yun goes with Mom to report to her work unit that she has been reclassified as a landlord’s wife. Ji-li surveys the aftermath of the search. Only an old-fashioned desk and a jumbled pile of clothes remain; the searchers took everything else. Then she helps Grandma down the stairs to make her report to the Neighborhood Dictatorship Group. For the first time in her life, Ji-li wonders if it’s worth it to keep on living.
Despite her attempts to work hard and advance, to show her revolutionary spirit, and to embody the ideals with which she’s been raised, Ji-li and her family lose everything to the Party and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The blow strikes to the heart of her individual identity, and it also strikes to the heart of her understanding of herself as a child of Mao’s revolution. But even as she wonders what makes life worth living, she answers her own question: helping her mom and Grandma. The Party has turned its back on the Jiangs, but they have not turned their backs on one another.
Themes
