Jiang reveals that she was born on the Chinese New Year and explains what her name means—“lucky” and “beautiful.” Up until 1966, when the Cultural Revolution began in China, she was, as her parents had hoped, “the happiest girl in the world (1). In 1966—“that fateful year” (1)—Ji-li was 12 years old, in sixth grade, and a true believer in herself, Chairman Mao, and the Communist Revolution. All that was about to change.

Chapter 1 opens in springtime and introduces 12-year-old Ji-li, who lives with her brother and sister, Ji-yong and Ji-yun, and her parents and grandmother in a nice neighborhood in Shanghai in the sunny and relatively spacious top room of a converted townhome. Her family is also lucky enough to have a private bathroom—most families have to share a bathroom with others. They also have a housekeeper, Song Po-po, who used to be the family’s nanny and lives below them in the building. The chapter also introduces Ji-li’s best friend, An Yi, and her school, Xin Er Primary School.

At school, Ji-li is chosen by a member of the Liberation Army to audition for the Central Liberation Army Arts Academy. She is thrilled about the opportunity, but her excitement is quickly dashed when her parents tell her she cannot audition. They are afraid that the audition will reveal the family’s questionable political background. Ji-li’s late grandfather was a landlord, which makes the family a part of the “black” class—not true proletariats and therefore always suspect. This is the first major disappointment of Ji-li’s young life, and she is ashamed and saddened that she cannot audition.

This chapter describes the brownstones in Shanghai where Ji-li and her friend live; they used to be single-family homes but are now shared by many families. Ji-li describes her father’s Sunday afternoon nap, and how he would send the children out to the bookseller’s shop to rent and read enormous stacks of books while he slept. It is during one of these Sunday afternoon trips that the children witness the destruction of the store sign for the Great Prosperity Market. This is part of the new Cultural Revolution—the destruction of the “‘Four Olds’: old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits” (21). The sign is representative of the “Four Olds,” and the children are excited to bear witness to its destruction.

Ji-li also witnesses a young man accosted on the street by a group of teenagers patrolling for people wearing the wrong clothes. She watches as they cut open his pants legs as punishment for wearing clothes that “the Western bourgeoisie admire” (30).

This chapter also describes one of Ji-li’s first run-ins with Du Hai, whose mother is the Neighborhood Party Committee secretary. Du Hai is “mischievous and a terrible student,” but “hard to beat in an argument” (34-35). The argument they have is about whether using the word “umbrella,” using face cream, having long hair, having a housekeeper, and respecting teachers (or parents) is “fourolds,” and it foreshadows what a minefield the Cultural Revolution will become, where even the everyday words one uses can be grounds for suspicion and persecution.

Chapter 3 recounts how teachers have been banned from school and the students spend their time at school writing propaganda posters, called da-zi-bao, that criticize their teachers and then posting them outside the school. Once they’ve finished writing about the teachers, they move onto community members, including Ji-li’s aunt and the bookseller she rents her Sunday books from. For all her patriotism and commitment to the revolutionary cause, Ji-li is very conflicted about the da-zi-bao and had difficulty writing anything that criticizes her teachers.

The writing of the da-zi-bao is led by the worst students in the school, and it escalates when they realize that bullying other children and adults is sanctioned by their community and government. Ji-li has da-zi-bao written about her that suggest she is in an inappropriate relationship with her math teacher. An Yi’s mother, who is a teacher at the school, is also the subject of a da-zi-bao.

Ji-li stays home sick from school for 10 days after the writing of da-zi-bao, and when she goes back to school, a summer storm has washed it away. It feels like a new beginning. The school is holding an election for choosing “Red Successors,” who are the younger version of the “Red Guards” of the high schools and universities. Ji-li is nominated to be a Red Successor and wants to be elected, but during the election campaign, her late grandfather is outed as a landlord by Du Hai, who also accuses Ji-li’s father of being a “rightist.” A landlord is “the worst of the ‘Five Black Categories,’ even worse than criminals or counterrevolutionaries” (58), and a rightist is defined as “[o]ne of the reactionary intellectuals who attacked the Party and socialism” (58). The “Five Black Categories” also include “rich peasants” (277).

At this accusation, Ji-li runs out of the classroom and the school and arrives home sobbing. Her grandmother assures her that her father is not a “rightist,” but cannot deny her dead husband’s status as a landlord, though she does remind Ji-li that her grandfather has been gone for 30 years.

The next day, Ji-li’s father takes the children on a walk and tells them about his family, which had been large and wealthy, but whose wealth was mostly spent by the time he was born. He tells the children that they are not responsible for their grandfather being a landlord, but that the kind of thing that happened to Ji-li is likely to happen again because of their family’s history.

Du Hai and Yin Lan-lan are elected as Red Successors, and Ji-li soon has another run-in with them when she calls a girl named Deng Yi-yi “Pauper,” a nickname that the children use for her because she “is from a poor family and she isn’t neatly dressed” (65). Though Ji-li apologizes immediately and promises not to do it again, Du Hai orders her to stay after school to be criticized by the Red Successors for her “extravagant bourgeois lifestyle” (68). Aside from Du Hai, many of the Red Successors are Ji-li’s friends, and she can’t believe they treat her so poorly. She is very sad about “being punished for something [she] had not done” (70) and cries. The Red Successors are not sure what to do about her crying, so they let her go with a warning to “think seriously” (70) about her failings.

In this chapter, Ji-li explains how the entrance exams for junior high have been abolished. Ji-li worries about whether she will still be able to go to the best school. One of her favorite teachers, Teacher Gu, who is no longer someone that Ji-li wants to be seen with because of the da-zi-bao written about her, takes her aside and assures her that she and An Yi will go to the best junior high school because the junior high school assignments are being made based on teacher recommendations.

Excited, Ji-li and An Yi buy new school supplies after graduation in anticipation of their new school. Less than a week later, however, they hear that assignments are no longer being made based on teacher recommendations. When they go back to their old school to confirm this with Teacher Gu, they find her office has been changed—it is now decorated only with pictures of Chairman Mao. The school itself seems smaller and shabbier, its promise eroded.

This chapter opens in the worst heat of the summer and chronicles a “new tension” (80): All personal possessions are being eliminated, and the “sound of drums and gongs” of the chapter’s title refers to the drums and gongs banged by the Red Guards and Neighborhood Committees who carry out the searches and purges of households. The first search that Ji-li witnesses is the search of Mrs. Rong’s house. Mrs. Rong is the widowed wife of a factory owner, and though the factories have long since been turned over to the government, she “still lives on his ill-gotten gains” (82).

The logic behind these searches makes Ji-li nervous, even though she knows “they were the only way we were going to get rid of the Four Olds, once and for all” (82). Before she can watch the whole scene play out, her grandmother pulls her away, expressing sympathy, once they’ve returned home, for “those poor people” (83). Ji-li is not certain who her grandmother is sympathizing with, the search party or the people whose homes are being searched.

Later, Ji-li walks past Mrs. Rong’s house again, listening to the people who have gathered in front of the house gossip about how she flaunts her money. Ji-li sees Mrs. Rong’s bed being removed from her house and realizes that this “capitalist bed” is just like the one her own parents have.

The searches continue. The children grow bored of them, but the adults grow increasingly tense, and no one goes outside to play anymore. The chapter then introduces “Six-Fingers,” a man in the neighborhood who is “too sick to work at the light bulb factory, but […] not too sick to go to every search and carry things out” (86). During this time, Ji-li’s parents dismiss Song Po-po, even though she is a beloved member of their household, because they are afraid they will be accused of “exploiting working people” (87). After Song Po-po stops working for them (though she still lives downstairs from the family), Ji-li steps in to take over the housework and shopping. When her grandmother becomes ill, she takes over cooking for the household as well, which does not go very well. The children decide to take their grandmother to the acupuncture clinic one day. They borrow the Neighborhood Party Committee’s pedicab, and Ji-yong pedals it. The trip there is harrowing, as Ji-yong almost loses control of the cab.

The end of the chapter recounts the family’s attempts to get rid of or disguise the things in their home that might get them into trouble for being “fourolds.” They paint the red leather trunks that were part of Grandma’s dowry a dull black, and cut up and repurpose the family’s heirloom clothes—“long gowns like the ones ancient courtiers and scholars wore in the movies […] embroidered with gold dragons or phoenixes [or…] printed with magnificent colorful patterns [and…] even crusted with pearls and gold sequins” (96). Despite her grandmother’s sorrow at losing, for example, the “government official’s uniform” that her own grandfather used to wear, Ji-li tells her not to “feel bad about it” because “it is fourolds” (97), as she and her sister play with “the pearls and gold sequins littering the floor” (97).