Ji-li is chosen to audition for the Liberation Army Arts Academy but her parents forbid her because of the family's black class status.

Students at Ji-li's school begin writing da-zi-bao propaganda posters publicly criticizing their teachers.

Du Hai exposes Ji-li's grandfather as a landlord during the Red Successor election, destroying her chances of being selected.

Ji-li's father takes the children on a walk and explains that their grandfather was a landlord but they bear no responsibility for it.

The Jiang family dismisses their beloved housekeeper Song Po-po to avoid accusations of exploiting a working-class person.

An Yi's grandmother commits suicide by jumping from her bathroom window following the brutal public humiliation of neighbor Old Qian.

Red Guards led by Six-Fingers search the Jiang family home and confiscate Ji-li's treasured stamp collection along with many other belongings.

Ji-li starts junior high school relieved that none of her new classmates know her family's black class status.

Ji-li's father fails to come home and the family learns he has been detained on counterrevolutionary accusations.

Ji-li agrees to participate in the Class Education Exhibition after her teacher tells her she can overcome her family background.

Ji-li's father briefly returns home escorted by guards only to collect clothes, unable to tell his family when he will return.

Ji-li delivers a powerful speech about an evil landlord at the Class Education Exhibition preview that moves the entire audience to tears.

Thin-Face pressures Ji-li to testify against her father; she refuses to lie and is publicly removed from the Class Education Exhibition.

Ji-li hides her mother's anonymous letter criticizing the Rebels in the cat's litter box moments before a search party arrives at the apartment.

Ji-li watches her grandmother sweep the street as punishment and resolves to devote herself entirely to caring for her family.

Ji-li Jiang begins the Cultural Revolution as an enthusiastic model student until her family's landlord ancestry begins to close doors around her. Public exposure of her class status at school costs her a place among the Red Successors, and the wave of political pressure slowly moves from the street into the Jiang home. Her father's detention marks the most devastating blow, forcing Ji-li to take on adult responsibilities while navigating pressure from authorities to betray him. She finds brief purpose in the Class Education Exhibition before being publicly removed for refusing to lie about her father. The climax arrives when a search party tears apart the Jiang home looking for a hidden letter, and Ji-li's grandmother is punished for it. In the aftermath, Ji-li resolves that her life's purpose is to protect and care for her family above all else.

The headline events that drive Ji-li's story from beginning to end.

Ji-li witnesses teenagers destroy the Great Prosperity Market sign during a Sunday shopping trip, excited by the Destroy the Four Olds campaign.

A group of teenagers stops a young man on the street and cuts open his pants legs for wearing bourgeois-style clothing.

Ji-li calls a classmate 'Pauper' and is forced to stay after school to be criticized by the Red Successors for her bourgeois lifestyle.

Teacher Gu assures Ji-li and An Yi they will attend the best junior high based on teacher recommendations, but the promise is quickly cancelled.

The Jiang family destroys ancestral clothing decorated with gold dragons and phoenixes to remove evidence of fourolds from the home.

Old Qian is forced to kneel on a washboard in the hot sun for hours after refusing to let Red Guards borrow his bicycle.

Ji-li attends An Yi's grandmother's funeral at the crematorium, where the family is allowed only minutes to mourn in secret.

Ji-li's parents burn old family photographs because images of people in traditional clothing are considered dangerous fourolds.

Ji-yong fights to recover his stolen Liberation Army cap from neighborhood boys and returns home late with a black eye.

Ji-li's younger sister Ji-yun comes home crying because boys have been bullying her and threw her schoolbag out of a window.

Ji-li watches Xiao-cheng show no emotion as his father is paraded through the streets in a dunce cap on a truck.

Ji-li and An Yi perform a fortune-telling ritual and the slip of paper that flies off the windowsill reads 'SOME GOOD AND SOME BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN.'

Teacher Li announces Ji-li and Bai Shan's perfect test scores and selects them for the blackboard newspaper; Ji-li quietly declines due to her class status.

Ji-li's mother is called into her workplace while still ill and pressured by co-workers to confess what she knows about her detained husband.

Ji-yong is sent to warn Uncle Tian that the letter has been found but gets no answer, suggesting Tian has already been taken in.

While the Cultural Revolution's main blows fall on Ji-li's family, a surrounding world of incidents shapes her understanding of the movement's reach and cruelty. Early scenes of public destruction and street harassment show Ji-li how quickly ordinary life can become dangerous. Smaller humiliations at school, broken promises about her future, and the bullying of her younger siblings reveal that no one in a black-class family is shielded from the Revolution's effects. The deaths and parades of neighbors' fathers bring the terror close to home even before it strikes the Jiangs directly. Ji-li's own quiet acts of resistance at school, like declining an honor that could expose her, show her slowly adapting to survive. The final events of this pool reveal how completely the family's world has collapsed when the search party departs and a trusted ally appears to have been taken in the night.

The surrounding events that built pressure on Ji-li and her community.

Da-zi-bao accusing Ji-li of an inappropriate relationship with her math teacher are posted publicly at her school.

Ji-li's grandmother cannot deny that Ji-li's late grandfather was a landlord but tells the family he has been gone for thirty years.

Ji-li watches her neighbor Mrs. Rong's home being searched and realizes the capitalist bed being removed looks exactly like her own family's.

Red Guard Jia Hong-yu gives a neighborhood speech describing the day she saw Chairman Mao in person, moving the crowd to tears.

Ji-li's Aunt Xi-wen is assigned to a group required to publicly bow and chant confessions daily at the neighborhood propaganda wall.

Ji-li sees her father through a window at his workplace working in the cold and refuses the foreman's offer to become an informant against her parents.

Ji-li's sanitary belt is thrown on the floor during the home search, leaving her feeling violated in a way no other loss has.

An Yi's mother Teacher Wei is forced to wear a sign reading 'REACTIONARY MONSTER' and chant self-condemnations while being kicked and hit.

Ji-li sees Aunt Xi-wen fall while sweeping the street and hesitates to help as Aunt Xi-wen's own son walks past his injured mother without acknowledging her.

Du Hai's mother, once a powerful Neighborhood Party Committee secretary, is publicly accused of immorality and stripped of her standing.

Ji-li storms out on her mother after learning about the landlord 'Half-City Jiangs' cousins and goes to the police station to change her name.

Ji-li discovers Song Po-po still loyally helping the Jiang family without pay, recognizes her own selfishness, and reconciles with her mother.

Bai Shan warns Ji-li to 'brace herself' at the Exhibition entrance moments before Chairman Jin publicly announces she is being removed from the project.

Ji-li faints in the rice fields from illness and has a fever dream featuring masked figures and a giant Bai Shan mocking her.

Six-Fingers strikes Ji-li's grandmother across the face and forces her to kneel while the search party tears the home apart looking for the hidden letter.

This pool traces the moments of realization and choice that push Ji-li from an idealistic girl into a young woman who has chosen loyalty over ambition. Early revelations about what the Cultural Revolution really means for her family crack open the certainty she once felt about her future. Witnessing the humiliation of neighbors and relatives forces her to confront truths about class, fate, and complicity that her revolutionary education never prepared her for. The discovery that even the powerful are not safe, and that her own family's history cannot be escaped no matter how she tries, drives Ji-li to rage and then to grief. Her time in the rice fields ends in physical collapse and a disorienting fever dream that captures how completely her sense of self has fractured. The pool closes with the violent search of the Jiang home, which strips away what little remains and forces Ji-li to make her final, defining choice.

The key discoveries and decisions that transformed Ji-li's understanding of herself and her world.