Red Guards Whole Story 268 - 275

THE RED GUARDS

By Ji-li Jiang

In the following excerpt, Ji-li Jiang is 12 years old, and the Cultural Revolution is underway. At first a loyal follower of Chairman Mao, Ji-li's perspective changes after her late grandfather's status as a wealthy landlord becomes known. Mao's government considers landlords and their families possible enemies of the people. Now classified by the Red Guards as having "suspicious status," the Jiang family lives in fear.

Mom got home from work that evening looking nervous. She whispered to Dad and Grandma, and as soon as we finished dinner, she told us to go outside and play.

"We have something to take care of," she said. I knew this had something to do with the Cultural Revolution. I wished she would just say so. We were too old to be fooled like little children. But I didn't say anything and went outside with the others. O

When it was nearly dark, Ji-yun and I went back home, leaving Ji-yong with his friends.

10 As we entered the apartment, I smelled smoke, acrid and choking. I looked around in alarm. But Grandma was sitting alone in the main room, showing no sign of worry.

"Grandma, is there a fire?" we shouted anxiously. "Don't you smell the smoke? "

1. Ji-yun (jé-yün) Ji-yong (jé-yöng): the author's younger sister and brother.

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"Hush, hush!" Grandma pulled us to her quickly. "It's nothing. They're just burning some pictures." We looked puzzled. "Your mother heard today that photos of people in old-fashioned long gowns and mandarin jackets are considered fourolds.2 So your parents are burning them in the bathroom." o "Can we go watch?" I loved looking at pictures, especially pictures of all those uncles and aunts I had never met.

Grandma shook her head. I winked at Ji-yun, and we both threw ourselves into her arms, begging and pleading. As always, she gave in, and went to the bathroom door to ask Mom and Dad.

Mom opened the door a crack and let us in.

The bathroom was filled with thick smoke that burned our eyes and made us cough. Dad passed us a glass of water. "We can't open the window any wider," he said. "The neighbors might notice the smoke and report us.

30 Mom and Dad were sitting on small wooden stools. On the floor was a tin washbowl full of ashes and a few pictures disappearing into flames. At Dad's side was a stack of old photo albums, their black covers stained and faded with age. Dad was looking through the albums, page by page, tearing out any pictures that might be fourolds. He put them in a pile next to Mom, who put them into the fire.

I picked up one of the pictures. It was of Dad, sitting on a camel, when he was about six or seven years old. He was wearing a wool hat and pants with suspenders, and he was laughing. Grandma, looking very young and beautiful and wearing a fur coat, was standing beside him.

40 "Mom, this one doesn't have long gowns or anything," Ji-yun said.

"Can't we keep it?”

"The Red Guards might say that only a rich child could ride a camel. And besides, Grandma's wearing a fur coat." She threw it into the fire.

Mom was right, I thought. A picture like that was fourolds.

The flames licked around the edges of the picture. The corners curled up, then turned brown. The brown spread quickly toward the center, swallowing Grandma, then the camel, and finally Dad's woolen hat.

Picture after picture was thrown into the fire. Each in turn curled, melted, and disappeared. The ashes in the washbowl grew deeper. Finally

50 there were no more pictures left. Mom poured the ashes into the toilet and flushed them away.

That night I dreamed that the house was on fire. .

2. mandarin jackets fourolds: Mandarin jackets are fancy jackets with narrow, stand-up collars. They were one of the ”four-olds" - old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits – that were forbidden during the Cultural Revolution.

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Early in the morning Song Po-po3 rushed upstairs to tell us the news.

All the neighbors were saying that a knife had been found in the communal4 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.5 Because my Fourth Uncle had fled to

Hong Kong right before Liberation, her family was on the Neighborhood

60 party Committee's list of black families.6 The weapon was automatically associated with the pictures, and that was enough for Six-Fingers7 to report to the powerful Neighborhood Party Committee.8

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

70 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.9 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

80 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?"

1. Song PO-po (song pö-pÖ): Jiang family's downstairs neighbor, friend, and former housekeeper.
2. communal: used by everyone in the building.
3. Fourth Aunt: Ji-li Jiang's aunt. "Fourth" means the fourth child born to the parents.
4. Because my. . . black families: The author's uncle had gone to Hong Kong (at that time independent from China) just before Chairman Mao established his government. Because of this, the Communist Party officers in charge of the neighborhood listed the family as opponents of Communism.
5. Six-Fingers: the nickname for Mr. Ni, chairman of the Neighborhood Dictatorship Group, who had six fingers on one of his hands.
6. Neighborhood Party Committee: the Communist Party officers in charge of a neighborhood.
7. The mop . . . balcony: a signal used by the Jiangs to indicate to family members returning home that the Red Guards were not in the house.

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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,10 crash after crash of dishes breaking 90 overhead, and the indistinct voices of the Red Guards.

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! "

1. 
2. Hua-hua (hwä-hwä): You-mei's daughter; Fourth Aunt's granddaughter.
3. Jiang Xi-reng (jyäng shé-réng): Ji-li's father, like other people in China, is called by his surname first.

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100 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

110 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—"

120 "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 White1 was panicked by the crowd and the noise.

She scurried among the open chests until she was kicked by a Red Guard.

130 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.

1. Little White – The family cat

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140 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

150 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 didn't do anything," I said guiltily, my eyes straying toward the stamp album.

160 "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." 14 "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.

170 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

1. bourgeois (bör-zhwä'): related to members of the middle class—that is, to people like merchants or professionals. Those labeled bourgeois were considered suspicious by the Communist Party.
2. xenophile (zén'e-fil'): person who loves foreigners and foreign objects.

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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

180 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.

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Interview with Ji-li Jiang

Why did you write Red Scarf Girl for young people instead of adults?

In 1984 1 moved to the States. The first year, I lived with an American family. They were very interested in my life in China. Using my limited English, I shared some of my stories with them. One day they gave me a present, a book, The Diary of Anne Frank. Inside they wrote: "In the hope that one day we will read the diary of Ji-li Jiange" Of course, I was very moved by the story, and also, I was inspired to write my own story through a little girl's eyes, instead of as an adult looking back. Honestly speaking, I didn't target my readers before I wrote it, but I am glad it turned out to be a children's book. I used to be a teacher in China. If my book has an impact on the kids who read it, I will feel most rewarded.

Why did you leave China?

After the Cultural Revolution, things didn't change much. Rigid policies and restrictions kept me from achieving my dream: to enter the Shanghai Drama Institute. I was not allowed to audition. When the universities re-opened, I passed the exam, but 1 because of my family's political situation, I was only accepted into a less prestigious university. After frustration upon frustration, when America opened the door to students from China, I decided to go to the United States. At that time, my only option was to go overseas and study in America.

Ji-li means "lucky and beautiful," a name your parents carefully selected for you. Do you consider yourself lucky?

Yes, I consider myself quite lucky.

Despite everything I experienced in China, I have never lacked for love from my family, my friends, and also God. After surviving the Cultural Revolution, I find myself more sensitive to the beauty of nature and the human spirit. I am grateful for having my mind in peace, grateful to have experienced other cultures and lifestyles, and especially grateful that I have been able to do something meaningful and enjoyable to me.

DMU Timestamp: December 19, 2018 18:14