Red Scarf Girl Read online

  I sat on our usual bench, prying the juicy red seeds out of the fruit and slowly sucking on them one by one, staring at the fleecy white clouds. One cloud looked like a two-humped camel, and another looked like an old man whose long, white beard nearly reached the ground. The camel was leading the old man slowly past.

  Grandma coughed and I looked at her, but she was staring into the distance.

  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. No one knew what would happen tomorrow.

  I wondered what I would be doing if I had been born into a red family instead of a black one. Searching people’s houses? Hating landlords and rightists? Of course I would hate them; I hated them even now. I hated my grandfather, just as I hated all of Chairman Mao’s enemies. But I had felt sorry for Old Qian even though he was wrong. And I did not know if I could hate Grandma if she was officially classified 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.

  When we got home, the mop was still hanging from the balcony.

  A week had passed, and still nothing had happened. I waited anxiously, not knowing what I waited for.

  It was late in the afternoon.

  “Ji-yong’s been fighting again,” Ji-yun announced as soon as she saw him walk in. His T-shirt was covered with dirt, and one sleeve was half torn off. He carried a broken-strapped sandal.

  “What happened?” Grandma rushed in from the kitchen.

  “They robbed me! They took my army cap.” He wiped his face with his sleeve and angrily threw his sandal on the floor.

  “Robbed you? You must have done something to upset them,” I scolded. “Why would anybody just grab your cap for no reason? You shouldn’t be so ornery to people. Don’t go making more trouble for us.”

  “How can you say that? I was just minding my own business, looking for crickets. They wanted to trade a cricket for my cap, and when I said no, they just took it.”

  “Who were they? Do you know them?”

  Ji-yong nodded grimly. “They won’t get away with this, I swear!”

  The army cap was one of Ji-yong’s treasures. It wasn’t one of the ordinary olive-green caps you could buy in a store. It was a real army cap that he had gotten from his friend Ming-ming’s father, a Liberation Army veteran. It had been washed and sun bleached until it was nearly white, and anybody could see at a glance that it was the real thing. All the boys envied his cap. No wonder he was so angry.

  “Well, it’s only a hat. Forget about it. It’s not worth stirring up trouble.” Grandma took out her sewing kit to mend his shirt.

  “Just wait, I’ll get it back,” he said, more to himself than to us. “Chairman Mao didn’t say that I can’t wear an army cap.”

  I turned to him attentively. “What do you mean? Who said that you couldn’t?”

  “They said it. They said, ‘What’s a black whelp like you doing with a real army cap?’” His eyes flashed with anger.

  Now I understood. Calling him a black whelp was the real cause of the incident.

  Of course a boy like Ji-yong would rather fight than take an insult like that. I wished I could protect him, but there was nothing I could do. I suddenly remembered that An Yi’s uncle used to be a mechanic in the army. Maybe he would still have an old cap. I decided to ask An Yi about it.

  In a little while Ji-yong disappeared. I was sure he had gone to find his buddies, Xiao-cheng and Ming-ming.

  Xiao-cheng and Ming-ming were our neighbors. Despite the fact that they were both three years older than Ji-yong and all three of them attended different schools, the three boys were close friends. In our alley they were known as “the three musketeers” because they were always together.

  Xiao-cheng’s father had been our District Superintendent. Now he was suspended and under investigation for being a capitalist follower. Ming-ming’s father had been the Party Secretary of the Shanghai Institute of Political Science and Law, and had been under arrest at the Institute for several weeks. He had been accused of being a traitor.

  Their family problems drew the three black whelps together more than ever.

  The next afternoon when Grandma and I came back from the park, Ji-yong was not at home. He was not home at dinnertime, either. I went to Xiao-cheng’s and Ming-ming’s houses, but none of the boys were there.

  “Where did he go?” Grandma scolded. “How could he miss dinner?”

  I was worried. I was sure that he and his friends had gone to get the cap back. I should have mentioned An Yi’s uncle, I thought, but I knew it would not have made any difference. If Ji-yong decided to do something, nothing I said would stop him. He was going to get hurt, and probably get the family in more trouble.

  At eight thirty he came in. He had a black eye, and he was limping, but he had a smile on his face.

  “Were you fighting again?” Mom snapped. “Don’t you think we have enough to worry about without you fighting too?”

  “We got my cap back!” He raised it triumphantly.

  “Look, the brim’s been torn off.” Ji-yun snatched the cap out of his hand.

  “You got a black eye for a rag like this?” I asked.

  “It was worth it,” he said. “They won’t dare push me around anymore.”

  I bit back the scolding I wanted to give him and got him a cold towel for his eye.

  Early in the morning Song Po-po rushed upstairs to tell us the news. All the neighbors were saying that a knife had been found in the communal garbage bin. The Neighborhood Dictatorship Group had declared this to be an illegal weapon, so the entire bin had been searched and some incompletely burned pictures found. In one of them they recognized my Fourth Aunt. Because my Fourth Uncle had fled to Hong Kong right before Liberation, her family was on the Neighborhood Party Committee’s list of black families. The weapon was automatically associated with the pictures, and that was enough for Six-Fingers to report to the powerful Neighborhood Party Committee.

  All day we were terrified. Grandma and the three of us went to the park immediately after breakfast. This time none of us wanted to play. We just sat together on Grandma’s bench.

  “Will the Red Guards come?” Ji-yun asked.

  “Maybe they will, sweetie,” Grandma answered. “We just don’t know.”

  She took out her knitting. I tried to to do the same, but I kept finding myself staring into space with no idea of where I was in the pattern. Ji-yun and Ji-yong ran off to play but always came back to the bench after a few minutes. At four o’clock Grandma sent me to see if anything was happening at home.

  I cautiously walked into the alley, alert for anything unusual, but there was no sound of drums or gongs or noise at all. The mop was still on the balcony. I looked into our lane. There were no trucks. Everything seemed calm, and I told Grandma it was safe to go home.

  Mom and Dad both came home earlier than usual. Dinner was short and nearly silent. Soon after dinner we turned the lights off and got into bed, hoping that the day would end peacefully after all. I lay for a long while without sleeping but finally drifted into a restless doze. When I heard pounding on the door downstairs, I was not sure whether it was real or a dream.

  It was real.

  I heard my cousin You-mei ask bravely, “Who’s there?”

  Six-Fingers’s voice replied, “The Red Guards. They’re here to search your house. Open up!”

  They rushed into Fourth Aunt’s apartment downstairs.

  At first we could not hear much. Then we heard more: doors slamming, a cry from Hua-hua, crash after crash of dishes breaking overhead, and the indistinct voices of the Red Guards.
r />   By this time we were all awake, but no one turned on a light or said anything. We all lay and held our breaths and listened, trying to determine what was going on downstairs. No one even dared to turn over. My whole body was tense. Every sound from my Fourth Aunt’s room made me stiffen with dread.

  Thirty minutes passed, then an hour. In spite of the fear I began to feel sleepy again.

  I was jolted awake by shouts and thunderous knocks. Someone was shouting Dad’s name. “Jiang Xi-reng! Get up! Jiang Xi-reng!”

  Dad went to the door. “What do you want?”

  “Open up!” Six-Fingers shouted. “This is a search in passing! The Red Guards are going to search your home in passing.”

  We often asked somebody to buy something in passing or get information in passing, but I had never heard of searching a house in passing.

  Dad opened the door.

  The first one in was Six-Fingers, wearing an undershirt and dirty blue shorts and flip-flops. Behind him were about a dozen teenaged Red Guards. Though the weather was still quite warm, they all wore tightly belted army uniforms. Their leader was a zealous, loud-voiced girl with short hair and large eyes.

  “What’s your relationship with the Jiangs living downstairs?” the girl yelled, her hand aggressively on her hip.

  “He is her brother-in-law,” Six-Fingers answered before Dad could open his mouth.

  “Oh, so you’re a close relative,” she said, as if she only now realized that. “Leniency for confession, severity for resistance! Hand over your weapons now, or we will be forced to search the house.” She stood up straight and stared at Dad.

  “What weapons?” Dad asked calmly. “We have no—”

  “Search!” She cut Dad off with a shouted order and shoved him aside. At the wave of her arm the Red Guards behind her stormed in. Without speaking to each other, they split into three groups and charged toward our drawers, cabinets, and chests. The floor was instantly strewn with their contents.

  They demanded that Mom and Dad open anything that was locked, while we children sat on our beds, staring in paralyzed fascination. To my surprise, it was not as frightening as I had imagined through the weeks of waiting. Only Little White was panicked by the crowd and the noise. She scurried among the open chests until she was kicked by a Red Guard. Then she ran up into the attic and did not come down.

  I watched one boy going through the wardrobe. He took each piece of clothing off its hanger and threw it onto the floor behind him. He went carefully through a drawer and unrolled the neatly paired socks, tossing them over his shoulder one by one.

  I turned my head and saw another boy opening my desk drawer. He swept his hand through it and jumbled everything together before removing the drawer and turning it upside down on the floor. Before he could examine the contents, another one called him away to help move a chest.

  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 birthday gift from Grandma when I started school, and it was my dearest treasure. For six years I had been getting canceled 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.

  I looked at the Red Guards. They were still busy moving the chest. I slipped off the bed and tiptoed across the room. If I could hide it before they saw me… I stooped down and reached for the book.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” a voice demanded. I spun around in alarm. It was the Red Guard leader.

  “I… I didn’t do anything,” I said guiltily, my eyes straying toward the stamp album.

  “A stamp album.” She picked it up. “Is this yours?”

  I nodded fearfully.

  “You’ve got a lot of fourolds for a kid,” she sneered as she flipped through it. “Foreign stamps too,” she remarked. “You little xenophile.”

  “I… I’m not…” I blushed as I fumbled for words.

  The girl looked at Ji-yong and Ji-yun, who were still sitting on their beds, watching, and she turned to another Red Guard. “Get the kids into the bathroom so they don’t get in the way of the revolution.” She threw the stamp album casually into the bag of things to be confiscated and went back downstairs. She didn’t even look at me.

  Inside the bathroom we could still hear the banging of furniture and the shouting of the Red Guards. Ji-yun lay with her head in my lap, quietly sobbing, and Ji-yong sat in silence.

  After a long time the noise died down. Dad opened the bathroom door, and we fearfully came out.

  The apartment was a mess. The middle of the floor was strewn with the contents of the overturned chests and drawers. Half of the clothes had been taken away. The rest were scattered on the floor along with some old copper coins. The chests themselves had been thrown on top of each other when the Red Guards decided to check the walls for holes where weapons could be hidden. Grandma’s German clock lay upside down on the floor with the little door on its back torn off.

  I looked for my things. The wing of the butterfly had been completely knocked off the body. The bottle holding the glass beads had smashed, and beads were rolling all over the floor. The trampled candy wrappers looked like trash.

  And the stamp album was gone forever.

  As bad as our apartment was, my Fourth Aunt’s apartment was even worse. She had been given lots of fine china when she had married, all of it beautiful and some of it antique. Now it was all destroyed. The Red Guards had carried it up to the roof and smashed it in the big concrete laundry sink. Broken pieces filled the sink and were scattered all over the roof.

  Two days after the search we were still cleaning up.

  After I put my desk drawer back in order, I began on the wardrobe. 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. Without thinking, I rolled it up and threw it angrily into the back of the wardrobe.

  This, of all things, was private. It was a girl’s secret. I never even let Dad or Ji-yong see it. Every time I washed it, I covered it with a towel while it dried in the sun. 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.

  Home, I thought. Wasn’t a home a private place? A place where the family could feel secure? How could strangers come 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 all my things?

  I sat on the stool resentfully.

  An Yi came in, leaned against a chest, and looked around the ransacked room.

  I turned away. I could not bear pity and sympathetic looks, even from An Yi.

  She stood for a while and then started to pick up books and put them back on the shelves. She looked thin and fragile. Her face was expressionless.

  I suddenly remembered her grandmother under the white sheet, and everything became clear.

  We had a bad class status. That was why An Yi was not allowed to wear mourning bands or even cry aloud for her grandmother. That was why my house was searched, and strangers could come in and do whatever they wanted. It was just a simple fact. Why should I ask why? There was absolutely nothing I could do to change it.

  I wiped away my tears and joined An Yi in tidying up the things on the floor.

  FATE

  A new campaign, “Return to class to promote the revolution,” finally took Ji-yong and Ji-y
un back to school. Although classes had not gone back to normal, my brother and sister were in school, and that was something.

  I was not so lucky. It was almost November, but the junior high school teachers were still out of the city establishing revolutionary ties, and no one could enroll us new students.

  I was bored. After finishing the marketing, I read, practiced calligraphy, knitted, and spent a lot of time with An Yi. I was bored, but I never stopped being frightened. I worried about Dad, I worried about Grandma. I worried about An Yi’s mother, too. Teacher Wei’s situation was very bad. She was a junior high school math teacher, and before the Cultural Revolution she had been a Model Teacher. Her study wall was covered with certificates of merit. Now she was called a black model, and because her father was a capitalist and her mother had committed suicide, she was criticized all the more. The Red Guards at her school held struggle meetings to criticize her almost every day. During those struggle meetings they beat her and whipped her with their belts.

  I had seen her coming home, surrounded by an escort of six or seven shouting Red Guards. Her head was bowed down by a sign that read, REACTIONARY MONSTER WEI DONG-LI. She beat a gong and shouted, “I am a reactionary teacher. I am a reactionary monster.” While I watched, she stopped shouting and tried to catch her breath. Immediately one of the Red Guards kicked her. Another cuffed her, and she began to croak out her chant once more.

  No matter what I did and where 1 went, the Cultural Revolution followed me.

  One cold, windy afternoon I saw Aunt Xi-wen sweeping the street.

  She seemed ten years older than the last time I had seen her. Her cheeks were hollow, and she had big bags beneath her eyes. Her once long and curled hair had been cut short and straight, like a country woman’s. Outside her padded coat she wore an old blue blouse, loose and faded, with a big patch on the elbow.