The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir

by Wenguang Huang

  Thus, when Grandma talked to other elderly women in our neighborhood about her burial plan, none thought it excessive. Those to whom Father confided his dilemma—close friends at work, mostly men, and a few relatives—urged prudence. A distant grandnephew of Grandma’s and a regular at our house strongly opposed Grandma’s idea; we respected his advice because he had joined the Party at twenty-three and had embarked on a promising political career. “It would be a big political blunder,” he warned. “The ban is quite strict. You could get into serious trouble. Why don’t you promise Grandma a burial now and then do whatever you want to do after she passes away.”

  “If I did that,” Father said, “Grandma’s ghost would come back to haunt me the rest of my life. She’s a tough woman and I owe my life to her.”

  3.

  DILEMMA

  Grandma’s request presented a dilemma for Father, who felt obligated to give Grandma the burial she wanted but feared for his political future. For many years, Father had been a poster child for the Chinese Communist Party, having been voted model Party member at his workplace several years in a row. His black-and-white photograph was a regular feature on the company’s bulletin board. And every year on July 1, the day that marks the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, he would be presented with a red certificate at an all-staff meeting or sometimes coworkers would beat gongs and drums all the way to our house to deliver the honor.

  In today’s China, red certificates mean nothing—cash-stuffed red envelopes at year’s end are what count—but things were different then. Bonuses were a capitalistic practice that corrupted the soul and lacked honor. Father had his certificates framed and they hung within view of the front door. Grandma was unimpressed and, in her disdain for the impractical, muttered: “What good are they? Can you exchange them for steamed buns?” But realizing that she had offended Father, she conceded that red was a lucky color and that the certificates did look nice on the drab white walls.

  Membership in the Party involved not only embracing its ideology and policies but also having oneself held to a higher moral standard. Party members were supposed to work harder, inspire leadership, and live harmoniously with their families. The Party idealized its members and the people did so too.

  Father was a warehouse manager, which sounds grander than it was; he was more a warehouse keeper. He worked for a state-run company that manufactured cast-iron cookware and industrial water pipes. There was coal and lead dust everywhere in the factory, and it spread to the trees and rooftops. Workers coming out of the workshops looked like coal miners, their faces and hands smeared with soot from the cast-iron molds. Father only needed to visit the workshops once a day to check up on the quantities of cooking utensils. His face and overalls were clean. I used to visit his office after school and do my homework there. He always seemed to be hunched over in the backs of trucks, checking the quantity of cooking utensils loaded against the quantity ordered and tallying it against incoming and outgoing shipments. Often, the lines of trucks lasted all day, and once they were gone, he had to reconcile the books. He never complained.

  When my political-study teacher was looking for a speaker who could talk about the “bitterness” of life before the revolution and how much better things were in the new socialist society, I volunteered Father. I had heard him talk about those years, though I was still nervous because any gaffes would be magnified by my classmates and used to torment me. I was afraid that, like Grandma, he might blame the hardships on the vengeful ghost.

  Father was well prepared. A manager at his company’s propaganda department drafted a script that made it clear which regime to condemn and which to praise. The teacher said afterward that Father’s story was just what she wanted.

  This was how Father described his early years. He was born on December 16, 1928, according to the Chinese lunar calendar. He told us how, at an early age, he lost his father and other relatives to the TB epidemic. He pointed out that rural folks did not have access to education and were ignorant of modern medicine, relying on shamans and incense instead. China’s backward public-health system lacked the basic capacity to stem the epidemic.

  According to Father, his home village relied on a rich region of loess, good for wheat and peanuts, but flood and drought brought much sorrow. It was the 1942 famine that turned him into a fervent supporter of the Communists. He was fourteen, and the drought had created a severe food shortage. Local officials continued to levy their taxes, and grain reserves and livestock were sold to satisfy their demands. The famine and the ensuing locust plague killed more than three million people, aided by the Japanese invasion of Henan and the looting and burning of villages and the rape of women. In many places, peasants collaborated with the Japanese invaders because they were so fed up with the corrupt Nationalist government. Father and Grandma joined the other famine refugees walking west. The dead and dying were everywhere. Father didn’t tell of the gangs who killed and ate lone strangers on the road, but he did mention that a family, no longer strong enough to push their two boys and a girl ahead of them in a wheelbarrow, lifted their daughter out and left her by the road. They begged Grandma to take her, as a maid or a daughter, but her sole responsibility was Father and she walked on. Tears welled up in his eyes as he told how the little girl had been left to die.

  “At this point, one would assume that government officials would realize the extent of the emergency and would rush in with food supplies to help the refugees,” Father said to my class. “But no, the corrupt Nationalists were too busy helping themselves to what was left before running away from the Japanese, and then they went looting, too. It was hopeless,” Father said. “Without Chairman Mao and the Party, we would still be eating tree bark.” There was a degree of stiffness to Father’s delivery of that line and I could tell the part was written by the propaganda manager. Having lived through humiliating poverty in his childhood, Father said he embraced Chairman Mao’s promise of a new society built on equality and plenty.

  “When I was your age, I couldn’t afford to go to school,” he said. “I was envious of children who could sit in brightly lit classrooms and read books without worrying about food and shelter.” He recalled how close to death he and Grandma were in the abandoned temple as they lay stricken with typhoid. I stole a glance at my teacher and saw the light reflect a tear in the corner of each eye.

  While researching this book, I looked up the 1942 famine. It was true that the Nationalist government, which was preoccupied with war with Japan, acted indifferently, and its rescue efforts were slow in coming. About three million people perished in the famine. However, between 1959 and 1961, the famine caused by Chairman Mao’s radical policies led to the death of an estimated thirty to forty million people. With the Party’s relentless blocking of news and information, there was no way Father could know about it.

  In front of the whole class, Father declared how much better things were for us, how our lives had been changed for the better under Communism, how even his own family of seven could have two bicycles, two Red Flag–brand watches, a sewing machine, and a two-bedroom apartment. He even mentioned a giant mahogany armoire that he had bought for five yuan at a sale organized by the company’s Revolutionary Committee, which had confiscated furniture and other valuables from capitalists and counterrevolutionaries during the Cultural Revolution.

  At the end of Father’s speech, my teacher led a vigorous round of applause. Though my classmates mimicked his Henan accent, Father’s talk made a huge impression.

  When Father told my classmates about his life as a poor peasant in the pre-Communist era, he left out the fact that his family had been wealthy landowners. In Mother’s words, “The Huang family was lucky to have lost all its fortune in the flood, war, and famine. Otherwise, you could have been standing on the stage with a big dunce cap to receive public denunciation rather than lecturing other young people.” Father never mentioned the fact that at th
e age of eleven, his family had arranged a marriage for him to a sixteen-year-old woman. Child marriage, a sign of old society, had long been outlawed in Communist China. Father’s marriage took place right after Japan had invaded China. Young women in well-to-do families would either marry or smear their faces with soot and dirt to hide their looks so that the Japanese soldiers at the checkpoints would not see them as beautiful young virgins and rape them. A matchmaker fixed up Father with that woman from a nearby village. Grandma, eager to see her son establish a family, consented. A small perfunctory ceremony was held and the woman moved in with the Huang family. A year later, as tales of Japanese brutality against young married women reached the village, Grandma sent Father’s wife home for fear that they wouldn’t be able to protect her properly. The marriage dissolved. In fact, Father had never shared this episode with Mother. I found out about it during a recent trip to his native village, long after he had died.

  More important, Father hardly talked about life in his twenties and thirties. One of his colleagues once hinted that Father used to be a laborer. I couldn’t reconcile myself to the image of Father pulling long wooden carts filled with cooking utensils. In our family album, there was a portrait of a young handsome Father wearing a western-style turtleneck, his hair neatly parted on one side. He said the photo was taken on his twenty-fifth birthday. He looked more like a scholar than a laborer. His body seemed too delicate, his mind too sophisticated. Most laborers at Father’s company were illiterate and wore dirty uniforms and talked crudely, while Father was well versed in Chinese literature and tradition, and was sharp with his abacus. I asked him several times if he had really been a laborer. He evaded the question by saying, “I’ll tell you when you grow up.”

  In 1984, Father and I went on a trip together. On the long train ride, he opened up to me about his past. It was like a sequel to his “speak bitterness” session with my class, but more honest, more revealing.

  After the Communist takeover in 1949, Father joined a textile factory. He worked during the day and attended night school. Father would always credit the Communists with giving him the liberating experience of being able to read and write. Within a few years, he read all the major Chinese literary classics, and enjoyed movies and opera. The Party noticed Father’s diligence and he was moved to the government’s cultural bureau.

  Father truly viewed the Party as an elite group of the best in society and he longed to be part of it. To become a member is a long, rigorous process, and to help his application, Father became actively involved in every political campaign. During the Great Leap Forward, when Chairman Mao hatched an ambitious plan to industrialize the nation within a short time, Father and his coworkers spent days and nights at work, with only a few hours of sleep every day. He truly believed that China could produce enough iron and steel to fight the Western economic embargo against Communist China by using only makeshift furnaces. “We were such a large country. If we could beat the United States in Korea, we would surely be successful with industrialization. We were so confident,” he said. At the height of what he called his youthful passion and enthusiasm, he submitted his first application for Party membership. It was 1958.

  “I was young, enthusiastic, outspoken, and reckless,” he said. And, by his tone, he might have added “foolish.” At the beginning of 1959, the local Party secretary encouraged young people to voice criticism against Party officials to help them improve. Father took him at his word and said the Party secretary should be more open to the suggestions of others. He was too “dictatorial.” Father believed the Party secretary sincerely appreciated the criticism and had even noted it down. But for days after, there was coldness in the Party secretary’s attitude toward him, and not long after this, Father was informed that the Party needed him to launch a literacy project in a mountainous village in the northern part of Shaanxi Province. Father knew it was retaliation for his outspokenness. Two months into the assignment, he received a telegram from Grandma, who had fallen down a flight of stairs and seriously injured her legs. He rushed home to care for her and returned to the village after her condition had stabilized. When Father was accused by the Party secretary of putting his family ahead of the revolution, he was sacked.

  Being jobless in 1960 was not a good situation to be in; famine caused by Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward campaign began to spread nationwide. Food rations were cut in urban areas, and Father was stripped of his government food subsidies. Mother’s income was low and the family savings were soon exhausted buying food on the black market. He picked up odd jobs at shoe-repair stands on the street, and on weekends he would bike Grandma out of the city to pick over harvested fields for loose cabbage leaves. The Communist Party hid its mistakes by blaming the famine on drought and Father easily accepted what he was told. Even so, it was a humiliating experience for him and others. “You can’t believe how desperate people became,” he said. A middle-aged man neatly dressed in a Maoist uniform passed him on a bicycle and stopped a little farther on. The man got off his bike, bent down, and picked up something from the ground. Father assumed it was a coin, but as he drew closer, he saw that it was a discarded pear stem. The man put it in his mouth and, sucking on it greedily, slowly peddled away. “People developed edema, and their faces and legs were all swollen. Some fell to the ground and died,” he said.

  In 1964, a friend had helped secure him a job at a cookware company. It was a laborer’s job, loading and unloading cast-iron cooking utensils and pulling a huge wooden cart. This was after I was born. He didn’t think he was strong enough to handle the tough work, but with two children and a mother to support, he had no real choice.

  The sacking and his experience as an unemployed young person in the subsequent famine of 1960 diminished Father’s belief in the Party and damaged his confidence. “I learned a valuable lesson about keeping my mouth shut,” Father said. Fortunately, he got off lightly. Though Father lost his job for his act of criticism, it wasn’t classified as a political case. In addition, the offended Party secretary was ousted at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, when Chairman Mao mobilized millions of young people, known as the Red Guards, to attack government officials and intellectuals and seize power from those whom Mao believed had strayed from the path of Communism. Several years later, Father’s name was cleared and he received a small sum of money as compensation for lost wages. He was asked to return to his job in the cultural bureau, but he no longer understood what was happening in that sphere and felt safer as a worker.

  Father’s affability and his diligence served him well at his new job. He soon moved up to be in charge of the company’s warehouse. At the height of the Cultural Revolution, Father was a spectator rather than a participant. He showed up at work every day and tried to maintain amicable relations with all sides as the company’s employees split into factions, each accusing the other of betraying Communist principle as they fought for control of the company. Father’s proletariat background and his low status as an ordinary worker shielded him from assault as he sat back and watched verbal warfare turn physical. Each faction took over a building and started shooting at the other with handmade guns. No one did any work.

  In 1969, the situation in Xi’an settled down, political lines became somewhat more stable and work resumed. Father’s fortunes seemed to be taking a turn for the better. Around that time, Chairman Mao pushed to purify the ranks of the Communist Party by recruiting ordinary workers and peasants. The attention of the Party leadership fell on Father. I like to think it was because he did nothing in times of political turmoil and made few enemies. He was asked to apply for Party membership. Mother opposed the move, worrying that he could be burned again. Father was hopeful. Membership was good for his career and the children. Father drafted an application essay about his past sufferings under the Nationalist regime, his gratitude to Chairman Mao and the Party, how he viewed the Party as the vanguard of the working class, and how he felt inspired to serve the Part
y. Since he never liked his own handwriting, he had me copy the statements neatly on a brand-new template that he had gotten from the company’s Party Organization Department. After laboring over them for hours, I showed them to Father. He examined them and shook his head. “Your handwriting doesn’t look sophisticated enough,” he said. Eventually, he enlisted the help of the company’s newscaster whose shrill voice could be heard on the loudspeaker, reading editorials from the Communist Party newspaper every day at lunch.

  Soon an official at the propaganda department tipped off Father that the leadership was considering his application. The Party assigned him a sponsor, who would conduct a talk with Father to gauge his political thinking every month and point out areas for improvement. Nine months after Father submitted his application, two Party officials were dispatched to conduct background checks at Father’s native village. Letters were sent to former employers and neighborhood committees soliciting feedback. The dangled promise of Party membership was coming within reach.

  One day, a company official took him aside and explained there had been a “hiccup” in the process. The company had received an anonymous letter from a neighbor who accused Father of selling shoes on the black market during the famine in 1961. It was a serious allegation. Using the black market was an illegal capitalistic practice. Father explained that he had worked for a time with a shoe repairman after he was fired from his former employer, but he never sold shoes on the black market.