Identity and Individualism Theme Analysis

An Yi’s grandmother was short and skinny and she tottered on her bound feet. Her husband had been a wealthy man, a capitalist. He had owned a dye factory, but he had died a long time ago. For as long as I could remember, An Yi’s grandmother had lived with her only child—An Yi’s mother, Teacher Wei, An Yi’s father, and her elder sister, who was blind. An Yi’s grandmother took care of them all. I had known her so long that I called her Grandma too.

Grandma and her sister always dressed in black. Sometimes I saw them up on the roof of their apartment, smoking a water pipe and talking together in their funny Ningbo accent. Grandma loved to give us treats.

I sat on our usual bench […] staring at the fleecy white clouds. […]

In the three months since the Cultural Revolution had started, changes had been so constant that I often felt lost. One day the Conservative faction were revolutionaries that defended Chairman Mao’s ideas; the next day, the opposite Rebel faction became the heroes of the Cultural Revolution. I heard that even Chairman of the Nation Liu Shao-qi and General Secretary Deng Xiao-ping were having problems. […]

I wondered what I would be doing if I had been born into a red family […] I hated my grandfather [… but] I did know if I could hate Grandma if she was officially classed as a landlord’s wife. The harder I tried to figure things out, the more confused I felt. I wished I had been born into a red family so I could do my revolutionary duties without worrying.

All my treasures were scattered on the floor. The butterfly fell out of its glass box; one wing was crushed under a bottle of glass beads. My collection of candy wrappers had fallen out of their notebook and were crumpled under my stamp album.

My stamp album! It had been a gift from Grandma when I started school, and it was my dearest treasure. For six years, I had been getting cancelled stamps from my friends, carefully soaking them to get every bit of envelope paper off. I had collected them one by one until I had complete sets. I had even bought some inexpensive sets with my own allowance. I loved my collection even though I knew I should not. With the start of the Cultural Revolution all the stamp shops were closed down, because stamp collecting was considered bourgeois. Now I just knew something terrible was going to happen to it.

One by one I picked up all the clothes, folded them, and put them away. I picked up one of Dad’s white shirts and suddenly flushed with embarrassment and anger. My sanitary belt! It was lying on the floor, not even covered by its blue plastic bag. […]

This, of all things, was private. It was a girl’s secret. I never even let Dad or Ji-yong see it. […] Now one of those Red Guards, probably a boy, had looked at it—had held it! I felt as if I had been stripped naked in public.

[…] Wasn’t a home a private place? A place where the family could feel secure? How could strangers come through and search through our secrets? If Grandpa was a landlord, they could confiscate all his things. But I was not a landlord. Why did they have to search through my things?