62 pages • 2 hours read
Ji-li JiangRed Scarf Girl
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Red Scarf
The red scarf is the symbol of devotion to Chairman Mao and the Communist Revolution. The title of the book is Red Scarf Girl because the book as a whole illustrates the connection between girlish naiveté and blind devotion to Chairman Mao. In the Prologue, the red scarf is connected to Ji-li’s “heart bursting with joy” (1), and in the Epilogue, Jiang pairs the red scarf with the naïve belief that one can achieve anything. Not surprisingly, then, by the end of the book’s narrative, the red scarf has disappeared, and so has the “girl” who wore it, replaced by a much wiser young woman
Great Prosperity Market Sign
Though this sign plays a small part in the overall book, showing up in only one scene early on, the story of its destruction at the start of the Cultural Revolution is symbolic of the durability of the “‘Four Olds’: old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits” (21), and why, for better or worse, these things are not easily broken. People throw the board on the ground, they jump on it, and even suggest running it over with a truck. Finally someone takes an ax to it, and the board “groaned with the impact” (24). Ji-li and An Yi are inspired by this event and excited about the prospect of change, but the personification of the board—with its groaning—invites us to pause and consider what is being lost in this oncoming revolution, not the least of which is “great prosperity.”
Old Family Photos and Ancestors’ Clothes
The ancestors’ clothes (96-98) and old family photos (124-25) that the Jiang family destroy and repurpose in anticipation of their home being searched are literally and symbolically links to the family’s past and, like the Great Prosperity Market sign, are destroyed because they are “Four Olds.” What they represent, however, is not destroyed, as the book as a whole attests to the persistence of devoted family ties. Though the material reminders of family history are lost, the less tangible but more powerful connections remain in the love between family members.
Stamp Collection
Officially, Ji-li’s stamp collection is a symbol of bourgeois attitudes and pastimes—a “fourold” possession that has no place in the Cultural Revolution. For Ji-li, however, it is a labor of love and a symbol of her connections to other people—her grandmother, who gave her the album for her birthday and the friends from whom she gathered canceled stamps for six years. The Red Guards take it away during the first search of the Jiang home, which is symbolic of how the Cultural Revolution has taken away Ji-li’s childhood innocence. Significantly, another of her prized possessions, a dead butterfly she has carefully preserved, is torn apart; symbolizing how the promise she felt at the start of the Cultural Revolution has been lost: The wings have been torn and will never “take flight.”
Sweeping
Ji-li’s Aunt Xi-wen and grandmother are both forced to become street sweepers—a fate seemingly reserved for old women who fall into one of the “Black Categories.” Sweeping is meant to be a form of humiliation, and it seems to be just that for Aunt Xi-wen, but the description of Grandma sweeping in the last chapter, appropriately titled “Sweeping,” suggests something other than humiliation. Grandma sweeps “slowly and carefully” (260), and Ji-li watches her every day, in a reversal of the scene of her first year at school, when she was seven and “Grandma watched and waited […] at this very window” (263) for Ji-li to return home from school. Watching Grandma sweep allows Ji-li to change her own perspective: “Now it was my turn to watch her and take care of her. I was no longer worried that she was a landlord’s wife. She was my grandmother” (263). This is the culmination of Ji-li’s development in the book—the recognition of what really matters to her, especially since she has spent much of it bemoaning her class status and hating her family’s past.
