Since I am in China now, I thought it would be appropriate to read something about local people, their traditions and culture. To be honest, all I know about China is impressions that I got from Pearl Buck's novels and she was a foreigner anyway. However, when facing thousands of years of local history, their countless dynasties and emperors, it looks a bit intimidating - where to start? I have checked Wikipedia pages and found out about phenomenon previously unknown to me, a period from 1965-76 when so called "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" had thousands of people publicly executed, humiliated and imprisoned during what was basically a political purge, very much like the ones in Stalin's era except that here it was all about Mao Zedong who fanned the flames. This is something we don't really know in the West and I encountered expression "Cultural Revolution" already several times during my visits to local museums, when curators wanted to stress how miraculously these priceless objects escaped destruction during the decade when officials demanded that everything that connected people with historical past has to be eliminated. Mainly, it is described as movement against four olds: old customs, culture, habits, and ideas. So it was down with books, temples, churches and anything remotely historical (including The Great Wall of China) and naturally ordinary citizens were harassed for any real or imaginary suspicion of being counter-revolutionaries.
More terrifying than any horror fiction, "Red Scarf Girl" is a first person narrative of a woman whose childhood was forever scarred with whirlwind of Cultural Revolution" - just like any children, Ji-li Jiang just wanted to be accepted in a school and to succeed in her little preoccupations, until political turmoil changed her life overnight: in a world where neighbours denounce neighbours, children denounce their teachers and parents, police raids loot civilian's homes with party blessings and people are imprisoned for having bourgeois ancestors in the family, there is no place left for careless childhood games. Confused and scared, Ji-li Jiang swings between what school brainwashed her with (total faith into personality cult of a great leader) and emotional attachment to her (suddenly blacklisted and humiliated) family. At times, she is even embarrassed to bear that family name, since it just brings her taunting in the school.
Writing from her adult perspective, Ji-li Jiang still bears the scars of that age, although I wonder how much is she aware of it all, since she insist that no one is to blame and it was all one terrible political chaos. Reader must focus between the lines and find descriptions of who exactly were rabid dogs who persecuted all those innocent people: frustrated and unfulfilled characters who found their first taste of power as party members who sadistically tortured neighbours who happen to always posses more than they had. Old man who refused to lend his bicycle to Red Guards finds himself beaten at his doorstep. Elderly widow humiliated for being well-off and forced to sweep the garbage in the street. Lazy kids denouncing their school teachers for deliberately ruining students’ eyesight by making them read a lot, so they could not join the Liberation Army. Arrests, torture and public humiliations at every step. At times, Ji-li Jiang gets a bit annoying with her insistence on her school achievements in all this mayhem (can't she see the bigger picture?) but we have to remember that she was just a kid and naturally her's was tunnel vision. I got so swept away with the book that I read it in one day - it felt as book read itself - and naturally it changed my perspective to the China that I see around me, suddenly I am more aware of the people's faces and all those sculptures in the parks. And definitely more aware how powerful the mob could be.
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