Red Scarf Girl Read online

  The light turned green. Ji-yong stood up on the pedals again, but the pedicab did not move. “Push!” he shouted, and I leaned into the pedicab with all my might. At last it began to move. We had just mastered a slight rise and had reached the middle of an intersection when a bus horn blared in my ear. The light had changed without our realizing it, and the bus driver was waving at us to get out of the way. I gave a start and nearly fell, just as Ji-yong picked up some speed. By the time I recovered, the pedicab was ten yards in front of me and gaining. Ji-yun had stopped when she saw me slip. Now we both ran after the pedicab.

  Ahead of us Ji-yong turned back to smile at Grandma, and the pedicab swerved crazily toward the curb. I shouted. Ji-yong turned back and yanked on the handlebars. One back wheel jolted up over the sidewalk and back down to the street. Ji-yong did not slow down, We finally caught up to them at the next red light.

  As we panted up to the pedicab, the light changed. “Push!” Ji-yong shouted over his shoulder.

  I shook my head. “You’d better slow down. You nearly made Grandma fall out when you hit that curb.” I looked into the pedicab and saw Grandma kneading her hands nervously. “Ji-yong has already promised me to be more careful,” she said with a stern glance at his back. From his sheepish smile I knew that she had given him a real scolding.

  All the rest of the way to the clinic, and all the way home again, we drove slowly and carefully. Even Ji-yong gave a sigh of relief when we were back in the alley at last.

  But I heard him boast to Mom when she got home from work. “It was easy,” he said. “Anytime Grandma needs to go to the clinic, we’ll just take her.”

  Dad was often kept late at the theater, and sometimes he did not come home until after we were in bed. There were a lot of meetings, he told us. Often I would wake up when I heard him come in, and as I went back to sleep, I heard him and Mom talking in low voices. They must have made their decision about the trunks at one of those late-night conferences, but the first we knew about it was on a Sunday morning when they started carrying the trunks up to the roof.

  The four trunks were pan of Grandma’s dowry. They were a rich red leather, with a pattern stamped in gold. Each trunk had two sets of brass locks on its front and a round brass handle on each end. When they were stacked up on their rack, they made our room shine. Now Dad was going to dye them black so that they would not be considered fourolds.

  Four stools were waiting in the middle of the roof, and the first chest was placed upon them. The dark dye was already mixed. Dad set to work.

  “Wait a minute,” exclaimed Grandma. There was a dark stain about the size of a thumb print on one of the brass handles. She took out her handkerchief and rubbed the handle over and over until it was clean and bright. She looked at the chest with a dreamy expression and gently laid her hand on it. Against the deep red leather her skin seemed even paler.

  “It won’t look bad after it’s painted,” Dad said softly.

  Grandma seemed to wake up. “Oh, I know,” she said. “You go ahead.” She went down to the room and did not come back.

  “Her mother gave her these trunks when Grandma got married. That’s why she’s sad,” Dad explained.

  I thought of Grandma getting married so long ago, bringing the four beautiful trunks full of gifts her mother had sent from Tianjin to Shanghai. Grandma must have been excited and exhausted, traveling a thousand miles to marry a man she had never met.

  Dad started to paint, wielding the brush awkwardly.

  “Dad, it’s too dry. Look how it’s streaking.”

  Dad dipped the brush in the dye again.

  “Look out! It’s dripping, Dad.”

  Shouting advice, we ran around the trunks excitedly.

  Eventually Dad’s painting improved, and the first trunk was finished. But the original color could still be seen through the dye, and he had to put on a second coat. Ji-yun and I grew tired of watching and went back downstairs. Ji-yong stayed to help.

  An amazing sight stopped the two of us in the doorway.

  “Wow,” Ji-yun said.

  Glowing silks and satins spilled out of an old trunk. The whole room was alive with color.

  Ji-yun grabbed a piece of silk. “Gorgeous! Are these costumes, Mom?”

  They were old clothes, long gowns like the ones ancient courtiers and scholars wore in the movies. Many of them were embroidered with golden dragons or phoenixes. Some were printed with magnificent colorful patterns, and some were even crusted with pearls and gold sequins.

  “These belonged to our ancestors. Grandma thought they were too nice to throw away, so we kept them in the bottom of this chest.” Mom reached in and pulled out a bunch of colorful silk neckties. She threw them all on the floor.

  I was worried. “Mom, aren’t these all fourolds?”

  “That’s right. That’s why Grandma and I decided to make comforter covers out of them. We can use the ties to make a mop.”

  “It seems terrible to just cut them all up. Why don’t we just give them to the theater or to the Red Guards?” Ji-yun held a gown up in front of her. She was imagining what it would be like to wear it, I knew.

  “The theater doesn’t need them, and it’s too late to turn them in now. The Red Guards would say that we were hiding them and waiting for New China to fall. Besides, even if we did turn them in, the Red Guards would just burn them anyway.” Grandma looked at me and shook her head as she picked up her scissors. “I just couldn’t bear to sell them,” she said sadly. “Even when your father was in college and we needed money.” She picked up a lovely gold-patterned robe and said softly, “This was a government official’s uniform. I remember my grandfather wearing it.”

  “It is pretty, Grandma,” I said, “but it is fourolds. Don’t feel bad about it.”

  The long gowns were so large that the back of one was big enough for half a quilt cover. Mom and Grandma discussed the job while cutting: which parts could be used for covers and which parts for cushions. Ji-yun and I were enchanted by the pearls and gold sequins littering the floor. We pestered Grandma and Mom to let us have them, and finally Mom sighed and yielded.

  Ji-yun and I were overjoyed. We sat amid the piles of silks, picking up pearls and putting them in a jar. Little White was happy too. She rolled over and over among the scraps of silk and batted pearls around the floor.

  While we played, Mom made two quilt covers out of the gowns, one deep purple and the other a bright gold. Then she made a pair of mops from the ties. We were delighted with them. You could not find anything like our tie mops in the stores.

  Dad and Ji-yong finally finished the second coat of dye on the trunks. The gold stamping still obstinately showed through the layers, but the deep red had become a dark burgundy. The room seemed dressed up with the glowing new quilts and the repainted trunks. I felt good. We had really done what Chairman Mao asked, breaking with the old and establishing the new.

  “You did a nice job on the trunks,” Grandma said. “I don’t think the Red Guards will notice them.”

  Ji-yun looked up from the bed where she was lying with her face in the silky new cover. “Are the Red Guards going to come and search our house?”

  Everyone stood still. I stopped playing with the pearls. Even Little White stopped rolling around the floor.

  “It’s possible,” Mom said slowly, “but you don’t have to be afraid. You are just children, and a search would have nothing to do with you.”

  The new decor lost all its brightness. The pearls I had been playing with lost their luster, and I put them down.

  THE PROPAGANDA WALL

  Right at the entrance to our alley, where you could not help noticing it, stood the propaganda wall. It was tall and wide, covering the whole end of one building and looming over the street. Every time a new campaign started, a picture would be painted on it to promote the campaign’s message. When I was little, the wail had been covered with a picture of a woman dressed in a cook’s white uniform and white hat, and holding a large tra
y of food. The slogan beneath the picture had been ALL FOR ONE AND ONE FOR ALL. That was when the government was encouraging families to eat at neighborhood canteens to reduce housework and allow women to work outside the family. Right before the Cultural Revolution, the picture had been of a huge mushroom cloud from an atomic explosion, with a tiny big-nosed American trembling in the corner. MASTER NUCLEAR WEAPONS, SCARE THE AMERICAN BARBARIANS, the slogan said.

  Now the wall was being painted again. After a few weeks a beautiful copy of the popular painting Mao Ze-dong on His Way to Anyuan appeared in our alley. I had always loved this painting and the story behind it. When he was a young man, our beloved leader, Chairman Mao, had risked his life to go to the mines of Anyuan by himself to establish a revolutionary base there.

  The young Mao in the painting wore a long cotton gown and cloth shoes, and he carried an umbrella under his arm. His brilliant eyes were looking into the distance as if he were already thinking about the great revolutionary task that lay ahead of him. I could not look at the painting without feeling inspired. I was ready to follow him anywhere.

  As soon as the painting was finished, two new rituals, Morning Repentance and Evening Report, began. Now every morning as I returned from the market in the cool morning air, I saw a group at the foot of the propaganda wall. Five or six people who had been landlords or counterrevolutionaries or rightists—people in the Five Black Categories—bowed in front of Chairman Mao. They waved their copies of the Selected Quotations from the Writings of Chairman Mao, the Precious Red Book, in the air and chanted, “Long life to Chairman Mao! Long life! Long life! Long life!” Then one by one they confessed their guilt. In the evening they had to do it again. To my shame Aunt Xi-wen was among them. Like all of them she wore ragged and faded clothes and looked anxious. Six-Fingers, the chairman of the new Neighborhood Dictatorship Group, presided over them, wearing a red armband and an expression of importance.

  I could not help watching as the Five Black Categories confessed. But when they bowed their heads before the picture, they did not look sorry to me so much as weary. Or perhaps sullen or resigned. I could never decide what it was they seemed to feel.

  If I came back a little later, Aunt Xi-wen and the others would be at work sweeping their assigned parts of the alley. After the first few days Six-Fingers would not let the boys throw stones at them, but the boys still gathered to jeer and taunt the sweepers. With lowered faces the sweepers swept on. They did not raise their heads, not even when Six-Fingers strutted by to stand over them and check their work. When every scrap of paper in the street had disappeared, they shuffled home, heads still bowed.

  The Neighborhood Dictatorship Group and the Black Categories were all we could think of. Neighbors discussed who was in each group and wondered what would happen next. More and more, Six-Fingers and the rest of the Neighborhood Dictatorship Group seemed to be everywhere. They suggested names of possible Black Category families to the Neighborhood Party Committee. They monitored what the members of the Black Categories did during the day, recorded any visitors to their homes, watched their Morning Repentance and Evening Reports, and supervised their sweeping the alley twice a day. In addition, the Neighborhood Dictatorship Group patrolled the neighborhood day and night. As chairman of the group, Six-Fingers was especially cocky and especially visible.

  One evening they actually caught a counterrevolutionary! A ragpicker, who was collecting scrap paper to recycle, pulled some old da-zi-bao off the wall and happened to tear the newspaper that was posted underneath. A picture of Chairman Mao on this newspaper ripped in half. Witnessing this criminal act, Six-Fingers and his deputies immediately detained the man and took him to the police station.

  After that, Six-Fingers was cockier than ever.

  The notice posted next to the propaganda wall drew everyone’s attention. Jia Hong-yu, our district’s most famous Red Guard leader, had returned from Beijing and would give her report at a neighborhood meeting.

  Jia Hong-yu was famous all over the district because she had led a group of Red Guards on a fifteen-day march into the countryside to spread word about the Cultural Revolution, and none of the boys had been able to outwalk her. She also persuaded a spy sent by the Nationalists in Taiwan to confess—without even beating him, although she said she was perfectly willing to beat those who did not confess.

  Ji-yong and I had arrived early, but we still ended up sitting near the back of the factory cafeteria. The lazily turning ceiling fans did little to cool the heavy air, and several people around us were smoking, but we hardly noticed. All we could see was Jia Hong-yu.

  She was standing on a low stage under a red banner: CHAIRMAN MAO AND THE RED GUARDS—THEIR HEARTS ARE ONE. She wore the belted army uniform and red armband of the Red Guards. In the dim light it was hard to see her face, but it was easy to know how she felt from her voice.

  “When Chairman Mao invited the Red Guards to travel to establish revolutionary ties, my father forbade me to go,” she began. “My mother was sick and I was needed at home. But how can we put personal matters ahead of the revolution? 1 saw that it was adopting an individualist line to stay for such a reason, so I secretly packed up my bedroll and left without telling anyone. I determined that I should go to Beijing so that I could establish revolutionary ties, not just with comrades from Beijing, but with comrades from all over China who would meet in Beijing.

  “The train was very full. I could not even get in the door, but I refused to let small difficulties stand in my way. I asked some Red Guard comrades in the train to reach their arms out to me and help me to climb in the window. I had to sit on the floor, and I was hungry and thirsty. When night came I had to sleep under the seat, but I didn’t mind. Getting used to hard conditions is good for revolutionaries. I thought about our Volunteer Army soldiers and how they had to sleep in the snow in Korea.”

  Sitting on the hard bench in the cafeteria, I pictured her thirty-hour trip to Beijing, the train crowded with enthusiastic Red Guards. Someone in front of me lit a cigarette. As the match flared, I saw Du Hai sitting in rapt attention.

  Jia Hong-yu continued: “It was so stirring to arrive in Beijing. The whole city was crowded with revolutionary comrades. All the guest houses were full, and all the university dormitories were full too, so comrades brought quilts and plates from their own homes and opened their offices to us. I shared an office with seventeen girls from all parts of China. We talked about the revolutionary situations in other places. We were so full of revolutionary zeal that we hardly slept at night. We had to walk all the way to the university for our meals. There were too many of us to sit in the cafeteria, so we all had to take our food outside and sit on the ground to eat. We were so happy to be there that we hardly noticed, even when it rained.

  “One day we heard that Chairman Mao was going to receive all the Red Guards at Tienanmen Square.” There was a sudden catch in her voice when she said his name. “We all went to the square right away, because we didn’t know when he would come. We waited all afternoon. When night came, we stayed. There were thousands of comrades in the square, and we spent all night establishing revolutionary ties. Right next to me there was a comrade whose cousin had seen Chairman Mao. It was hard to believe that I would see him too. No one slept a wink. The next morning many more came. The whole square was terribly crowded. There were tens of thousands of us sitting there, most of us dressed in army uniforms and all wearing red armbands. The sky was blue, and the day was very clear. Everywhere you looked were revolutionary comrades. It was a truly magnificent sight.

  “We waited and waited, straining our necks to be the first to see him. The sun was so hot. A few female comrades felt faint, but no one wanted to leave. Some comrades brought us water, but we never even thought of eating anything. Finally at five o’clock in the afternoon the people near the gate started cheering. I looked up, and there he was.”

  Now her voice broke again. Even from the back I could see tears glistening on her cheeks. “He was right in front of
me, up on top of the gate, waving to us. I was crying so much that I could hardly see anything else, but I could see him shining in his army uniform. And then, out of all the comrades in the square, he looked at me! He looked straight at me!”

  I felt tears welling out of my eyes. “Anyone who sees Chairman Mao is the happiest person in the world,” the saying went. That was my secret dream. And here was someone who had done it! I could not help feeling jealous.

  Practically everyone in the crowd was weeping too. I had to strain to hear her as she finished.

  “… I am very lucky to have had such an experience,” she said. “I have resolved to dedicate my whole life to Chairman Mao and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. I will give every drop of blood in my body to work to liberate all of mankind.”

  For a moment the whole room was silent. She raised her arm in a salute, and every teary eye was riveted to the red band she wore.

  “Long live Chairman Mao!” someone shouted. Someone else stood up to echo him. Then we were all standing up, all shouting. “Long live Chairman Mao! Long, long live Chairman Mao!”

  Wiping my eyes, I slowly walked home. With every step I hoped that Chairman Mao would forgive my black class status and let me be a Red Guard too.

  All my life I had seen Old Qian coming and going, his head high, his walking stick in his hand. His lips were always tightly shut, and he spoke to no one. No child in the alley would dare to climb into his courtyard to steal his mulberry leaves. Song Po-po said that he had always been stubborn, and since his son-in-law had been executed as a counterrevolutionary, he had become even more obstinate and solitary.

  I was not surprised when he became a target of the Red Guards. In fact, I was proud of them for having the nerve to face him.