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Chapter 17: Sweeping
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
In a direct address to readers, an adult Ji-li reflects on the experiences she has described in her memoir. The most frequent questions she gets, she says, is why she did not hate Chairman Mao despite the persecution she and her family suffered. She says the answer is simple: she, like everyone else, was brainwashed into thinking of Mao as a god-like figure who could do no wrong. Even Teacher Wei didn’t blame Mao when she was made the climb the factory chimney. In fact, she told Ji-li later that she was willing to undergo her sufferings so that the country could continue to benefit from Chinese Communist Party rule. It was only years later that Teacher Wei, Ji-li, or anyone else understood that Mao started the Cultural Revolution not to improve China, but to eliminate his rivals and consolidate his waning power.
In the epilogue, author Ji-li Jiang directly addresses the power of propaganda over people. Frequently, the book’s narrative hints at moments where Party ideology and propaganda fail to capture reality—the difference between the stereotypical landlords’ wives of propaganda art and Grandma, for instance. But the narrative often revealed this disconnect more clearly to reader than to Ji-li, who accepted what she was told throughout her childhood. Teacher Wei points even more eloquently to the power of propaganda; even when her life was in actual danger, she could not bring herself to consider Chairman Mao or the Party responsible for her undeserved suffering. Only learning, many years later, that the Revolution was never about ideological purity as much as it was about Mao’s need to consolidate power, could they revisit and reinterpret their experiences.
Themes
Ji-li briefly surveys many things that happened in the 30 years between the Cultural Revolution and the book’s initial publication. Soon after Thin-Face and the others raided the Jiangs’ home, another group took control of the theater. Most of the detainees were freed, including Uncle Fan, Aunt Wu, and Uncle Tian. But because he had been declared a landlord, Dad was sentenced to months of hard labor in the countryside. Mom had to write self-criticism reports frequently because she refused to denounce Dad, and Grandma had to sweep the alley until the end of the Cultural Revolution. The family’s class status continued to limit their opportunities. Dad became a janitor. Ji-li, Ji-yong, and Ji-yun were denied the chance to train for careers in the performing arts. But, after the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, the three siblings all went to college.
Thin-Face, like other revolutionaries, made the most of the power he seized to abuse others. But because power was granted by class and class was granted to those who could claim the greatest alignment with ever-shifting Party ideology, his power was vulnerable to shifting political and social opinions. Without a fair and impartial standard, abusers can easily become victims, too. Still, some charges were worse than others; by legally changing Dad’s, Mom’s, and Grandma’s status to “landlord,” Thin-Face ensured that the family’s social and political punishments would long outlast his temporary power.
Themes
Ji-li explains that Dad finally cleared his name in 1980. At that time, she learned more about the history of his political troubles. He joined the Communist Party long before it won control of the government and was still an illegal, underground organization. But he was forced to resign his Party membership in 1958 after he expressed disagreement with official policies during the Antirightist Movement. Being a disgraced former Party member ruined his career. After he cleared his name, the Shanghai Children’s Theater, where he worked for more than 30 years, appointed him Vice President. But, eventually, ongoing troubles drove the family from China to the United States—except Song Po-po, who died in the mid-1980s, and Grandma, who died in 1992, at the age of 98.
Dad’s expulsion from the Party suggests yet again the immense pressure to conform to communist ideology Chinese citizens experienced, especially during the years that Chairman Mao led the Party. His initial loyalty apparently counted less than his willingness to think for himself, especially in a moment when free-minded people were targeted for elimination to ensure the Party’s continued grasp on power. Ultimately, almost everyone in the Jiang family rejects this pressure to conform, emigrating from China to make lives in places where their individual identities are assets, not liabilities.
Themes
Ji-li describes how most of her contemporaries were sent to the countryside in the early 1970s as part of an urban-rural exchange program that Chairman Mao created. It was supposed to make the urban youth respect the working masses and to bring technological innovation and education to rural areas. It was not successful. An entire generation of Chinese people had their young adulthoods stolen from them. Chang Hong worked for many years on a farm near Mongolia, where she met her husband—who was the son of a former capitalist. Eventually, they returned to Shanghai. Bai Shan also lived in the remote countryside for years before returning to Shanghai and getting an office job. An Yi never left the city and grew up to work in a factory. So did Du Hai. Lin-lin became a doctor serving at a factory clinic. But when the clinic closed, she lost her job.
During the summer rice harvest, Ji-li, Bai Shan, and others got a taste of the Down to the Countryside Movement. This initiative moved millions of young Chinese people from urban to rural areas, in part to correct what Mao saw as increasingly bourgeois attitudes among educated city-dwellers, in part to quell the chaos he himself incited with the Cultural Revolution, and in part to correct educational and social imbalances between urban and rural populations. It’s clear that Ji-li and many of her involved peers resent this campaign and the way it permanently compromised the educational and professional opportunities of an entire generation. In the name of greater parity, the book suggests, Mao merely reduced the whole population to the level of the uneducated, unskilled rural poor.
Themes
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Ji-li tells readers that very few people were punished for their roles in the Cultural Revolution. But the aggressors were victims, too: they were victims of Chairman Mao’s lies, although it took Ji-li years to realize this. After attending an American college and working in the hospitality and health care industries for many years, she founded her own company, the East West Exchange, to help people from the United States and China to gain insight into one another’s culture and histories. And she became a writer to pursue that goal, too.
The idea of victim-perpetrators suggests the inherent violence of a regime that sees its citizens as tools to empower a tiny political elite (or, worse, one dictatorial leader at the top, like Chairman Mao) and that uses propaganda to manipulate people into doing its will. Ultimately, Ji-li assures readers, her hard work and perseverance did pay off, even if she had to leave China to find success. With hard work, she did advance every day until she finally created the life she always imagined for herself.
Themes
