The Little Red Book

This is a play I have been working on, an original story by yours truly, although I realize that Back to the Future also deserves a shout-out:

It is May, 1989. Lee, a young intellectual attending Beijing University hears about protests that are going to happen in Tiananmen Square for the end of corruption and the beginning of democracy. Excited about the possibilities of a new, free China, he ignores the advice of his aging parents from another era, and participates. Filled with a hope and optimism for the future that he has never felt before, he marches with everyone and takes part in the peaceful demonstrations.

Suddenly, he spots an old, tattered copy of Mao's Little Red Book just lying on the ground. He picks it up, and the moment he touches it, he is transported back in time to 1967, at the height of Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution. Soon discovered by a group of young Red Guards searching the towns for counter-revolutionaries and people disloyal to Mao, he is forced to pretend he is one of them. The Red Guards' youthful enthusiasm for being politically influential at such a young age disturbingly reminds him of himself, but their accusations and actions become increasingly unbearable and ridiculous, eventually resulting in deaths. Lee begins to enter a seriously dangerous and possibly fatal situation when he and a girl in the group, Fei, start falling for each other, sparking the ire and suspicions of the group's hot-headed and mean-spirited leader, Wong. Meanwhile, he flips through the Little Red Book at night, trying to get it to take him back to 1989, with no success.

In the climax, Lee refuses to take part in a particularly gruesome beating of an innocent man, showing weakness in front of the group and revealing his true sympathies. His suspicions confirmed, Wong vows to turn Lee in the next morning. That night, Lee and Fei struggle to make the Little Red Book take him back to his own time. She asks him to recall everything about the moment he touched the book, and he remembers the singular feeling of hope and optimism for the future, a new feeling he had never felt before. Unable to get that feeling back into his heart again, given his currently desperate situation, she comes up with an idea, leans in, and kisses him. With the book in hand and filled with another kind of hope, a possible new relationship with Fei, he is instantly taken back to 1989.

Once back, however, he finds that Tiananmen Square is not how he had left it. Martial law has been declared, international news cameras like CNN are nowhere to be found, and the People's Liberation Army and the protestors are apparently fighting a war in the Forbidden City, deaths happening on both sides. In love with Fei, Lee wants desperately to return to her in 1967, but the carnage he witnesses is too much, destroying the fleeting feeling of hope he had felt. Told that the soldiers were marching, but it was a protestor that fired the first shot, Lee is overwhelmed by the sense that militancy, whether from a Red Guard or a student protestor, is simply not a good political vehicle. In an ending that symbolizes the tragedy of how Tiananmen Square, with all its optimism, has come to nothing in terms of Chinese human rights and social change, Lee is shot to death by random gunfire, becoming just another one of the nameless thousands of victims that died there that summer -- his experiences also thus coming to nothing.