Red Scarf Girl (rpkg): A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution

Description

It's 1966, and twelve-year-old Ji-li Jiang has everything a girl could want: brains, tons of friends, and a bright future in Communist China. But it's also the year that China's leader, Mao Ze-dong, launches the Cultural Revolution-and Ji-li's world begins to fall apart. Over the next few years, people who were once her friends and neighbors turn on her and her family, forcing them to live in constant terror of arrest. When Ji-li's father is finally imprisoned, she faces the most difficult dilemma of her life. This is the true story of one girl's determination to hold her family together during one of the most terrifying eras of the twentieth century.

Ji-li Jiang was born in Shanghai, China, in 1954. She graduated from Shanghai Teachers' College and Shanghai University and was a science teacher before she came to the United States in 1984. After her graduation from the University of Hawaii, Ms. Jiang worked as an operations analyst for a hotel chain in Hawaii,then as budget director for a health-care company in Chicago. In 1992 she started her own company, East West Exchange, to promote cultural exchange between Western countries and China.

"Absorbing. Jiang views devastating developments with the wide-eyed innocence of youth." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Heart-pounding. A page-turner. Excellent." - School Library Journal (starred review) "Engrossing. Transcends politics and becomes the story of one little girl trying to survive." - Booklist (starred review) "All the more powerful for the simplicity of its prose." - New York Times Book Review "I can only hope I would have shown the same decency and courage exhibited by Ji-li Jiang. Her actions remind me that, even under unbearable circumstances, one can still cling to love and justice. Above all, one can still hope for a happier tomorrow." - David Henry Hwang, playwright of M. Butterfly