Red Scarf Girl by Ji-li Jiang is a memoir about the author when she was in middle school in communist China. The book details her family’s brutal experience during the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Under Chairman Mao Ze-dong’s terrifying rule, the country of China fell into disarray and poverty and many people died. Chairman Mao brought up poor people and punished rich people. He made it so that no one had trust in one another. The following paragraphs will address characters’ desire to belong, the shame of exclusion, and the courage to resist.
In both Red Scarf Girl and The Giver, everyone really wants to fit in. In the Red Scarf Girl, Ji-li feels like an outsider. She wants to belong in her community with her peers and be a good communist. …show more content…
In “The Bear That Wasn’t”, the Bear starts to believe everyone in the factory and the circus and the zoo that he isn’t a Bear and that he’s just a silly man who needs to shave and wears a fur coat, but while he’s hibernating, he knows and realizes that everyone was wrong and that he was a Bear and he still is a Bear. The Bear wanted to belong so much that he started to believe the townspeople to the point that he actually thought he might be just a hairy man.This is very important in “The Bear That Wasn’t”, even after everyone said “no, you are not a bear”, “you are just a silly man who works in the factory,” the Bear still knew deep inside of him that he was Bear and that he always would be one, no matter what other people said. This relates to Red Scarf Girl because when Ji-yong, Ji-li’s brother fights the ransacker who takes his borrowed book and starts ripping it apart in front of him, he shows the same determination that the Bear did. I know that Ji-li never would have had enough courage to do this on her own, so for her brother to do this must have been pretty courageous to her. The Bear and Ji-yong stand up despite pressure and
In both Red Scarf Girl and The Giver, everyone really wants to fit in. In the Red Scarf Girl, Ji-li feels like an outsider. She wants to belong in her community with her peers and be a good communist. …show more content…
In “The Bear That Wasn’t”, the Bear starts to believe everyone in the factory and the circus and the zoo that he isn’t a Bear and that he’s just a silly man who needs to shave and wears a fur coat, but while he’s hibernating, he knows and realizes that everyone was wrong and that he was a Bear and he still is a Bear. The Bear wanted to belong so much that he started to believe the townspeople to the point that he actually thought he might be just a hairy man.This is very important in “The Bear That Wasn’t”, even after everyone said “no, you are not a bear”, “you are just a silly man who works in the factory,” the Bear still knew deep inside of him that he was Bear and that he always would be one, no matter what other people said. This relates to Red Scarf Girl because when Ji-yong, Ji-li’s brother fights the ransacker who takes his borrowed book and starts ripping it apart in front of him, he shows the same determination that the Bear did. I know that Ji-li never would have had enough courage to do this on her own, so for her brother to do this must have been pretty courageous to her. The Bear and Ji-yong stand up despite pressure and