“Are you going to be scared at night?” I remember the carpenter asking with a comradely tap of his finger to my nose. Father pulled me over, his hands fondling my hair. “It’s your grandma’s future home. What’s to be afraid of? You are the eldest grandson, the coffin keeper.”
I had been a coffin keeper for sixteen months and I still remember that first night when it loomed large next to my bed. The idea of death, which had hardly existed in my consciousness, suddenly took on a physical shape in my imagination. My mind would be racing; try as I might to think of something else, my thoughts kept returning to Grandma—dead. I witnessed the burial of an old lady in a village outside our residential complex one night. As her relatives wailed like we only heard in the movies, we snuck into the room where the old woman lay in an open casket. With a shaking hand and urged on by my friends, I opened the veil and poked my finger gently into her pale, cold cheek. My friends jumped back, which startled me more than the strangely waxen feeling of her soft skin. She was dead. Later, I told Father about it. “Stay away from funerals and wakes,” he warned. “The spirit of the dead can easily attach to the bodies of children. You might be sick or have nightmares.” I didn’t become sick. Nor did I have nightmares about it. I even went to see the old lady’s funeral three days later. The grandson walked at the front of the procession, carrying a bamboo pole with a long strip of white paper tied to it. I didn’t understand what was written on the paper, but an adult told me the characters were about hopes for a peaceful trip to the other world and a successful reincarnation. If I had to bear that pole at Grandma’s funeral, my teacher would probably never allow me to lead the Little Red Guards.
I tossed and turned in my new little bed, tortured by the knowledge that Grandma would one day lie in that box, as lifeless, pale, and cold as the old lady in the village. She would be gone and nobody would ever be able to see her again. I was shivering even though the night was warm.
What would happen to Grandma after she died? What happened to all of us when we died? Grandma used to tell me stories about how the spirit of a dead person would come back and begin life all over again, as a new person or, if that person were lazy and didn’t help with house chores, as a pig. I didn’t want to be a pig. When I asked my teacher about it, she said it was pure superstition and good children of the Party did not believe such things. When people died, that was it, nothing more, and their bodies would become like a cup of water poured onto parched ground, gone without a trace.
I must have dozed a little because I was woken by Mother’s loud snoring and heard our neighbors, whose house shared a common wall with ours, come back in from their tiny courtyard, still bantering and laughing. Then the night was eerily quiet, and a fall breeze stirred the thick leaves of the fig tree. I was wide-awake. I remembered a story about a young woman who choked on a piece of food, and her family buried her and everyone was very sad. Three days later, a grave robber dug up her coffin in search of valuables, but when he lifted the lid and tossed the body aside, the food caught in her throat popped out, and she gasped, opened her eyes, and sat up. The thief screamed and ran away and swore he would steal only from the living. What if we buried Grandma and she came back to life? She would never be able to lift the heavy lid. How would she ever get out? I got up and went to the living room and snuggled next to Grandma in her bed. Sleep came easily.
As a “Little Red Guard,” I was supposed to defend and fight for Chairman Mao’s revolution, not to guard Grandma’s coffin. Each time I looked at the Little Red Guard scarf that I wore around my neck at school, I felt a pang of guilt. I was even hit with a fleeting thought of reporting it to my teacher. Then, the idea of seeing Father being paraded publicly deterred me. Besides, Grandma could die of a broken heart and nobody would take care of me.
6.
DISCIPLINE
As her eldest grandson and coffin keeper, I represented to Grandma the reward for her sacrifice, and her supreme accomplishment—the Huang family name had carried on to another generation. When relatives or friends came to visit, Grandma would drag me to her side and she would say, “I can now die in peace.” It was as if my two sisters and younger brother, who would often be standing next to me, did not exist. Grandma doted on my elder sister, the firstborn, but she was a girl and “Girls are like water poured out of a pitcher into someone else’s cup.” She would marry and join her husband’s family. My elder sister would say Grandma was “being feudalistic” and as she and my other sister went off in a huff, Grandma would shake a finger at their backs and say, “If they act like this, no men will want to marry them.” My younger brother believed Grandma treated him as little more than my sidekick, and even now, whenever family is concerned, he remembers this. “Why don’t you step up?” he says. “After all, you are the oldest son and the important one.”
My parents reproached Grandma for her open display of favoritism, but they were guilty of the same adherence to Confucian filial hierarchy, where the eldest son outranks any number of daughters who might have been born before him. When the father dies, the eldest son takes charge of the family and its obligations. For Grandma, it was entirely selfish. “If a family has no son, its name ends, and with nobody to tend the ancestral graves and honor their memory, their ghosts will wander forever homeless.”
I was born in 1964, the Year of the Dragon, a traditionally lucky year for having babies. More important, it was the year when the country was recovering from widespread famine; with food no longer a major problem, there was a surge in the birthrate. When the nurse brought me to Father, who had waited almost a whole day for news from the delivery room, he didn’t know what to do. The nurse joked. “Check his toes; make sure he isn’t missing one.” He didn’t get it, but nonetheless he carefully counted my toes and, satisfied they were all there, dashed home to tell Grandma, who was elated and distributed red-dyed boiled eggs to neighbors and relatives as tokens of celebration.
Mother was kept wrapped in winter clothing and not permitted to leave the house for a month, even though it was June. It is still a common practice in China, the belief being that after childbirth a woman should not stress her body with household chores or touch cold water because she is more susceptible to drafts and her pores are open to bacteria. If she contracted any illness during that period, the illness would stay with the woman her entire life. Mother blamed Grandma for many of her later ailments. Grandma burned her feet with boiling water in the first week and became bedridden. Father, who had never cooked in his life, was helpless. Mother had no choice but to abandon her recovery and resume her stressful household duties.
My first test was man yue, when a child is officially presented to a big gathering of family and friends thirty days after the birth. At my man yue, Father fussed over the name, which Chinese believe determines a person’s future. So Father turned to a highly educated old man in our neighborhood who knew the basics of numerology and, after two days of complicated calculations based on the exact time and place of my birth, he came up with two characters, “Wen” and “Guang,” which mean “culturally wide.” I would be a scholar. Father knew the teachings of Confucius: “Those who work with their brains rule those who work with their hands.” Wenguang was also the name of one of Father’s heroes, the twelfth-century warrior-scholar who had fought barbarian invaders on China’s northwestern bor-ders. By choosing that name, Father was going against Communist convention. In the mid-1960s, many parents opted for more progressive names for their sons to express their loyalty to the Party: “Yaojin,” to honor Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward; or “Wenge,” the Cultural Revolution; or “Weihong,” “defending the Red Revolution.”
My status as the eldest grandson meant the world to Grandma but not to Mother who, like many women of her generation, placed the Revolution above their families. Five weeks after I was born, Mother returned to work at a company that manufactured rubber tires and tubes. A member of the company’s Young Women’s Comman
do, a production team that had been recognized by the Party for their high productivity and their taking on equally challenging tasks as men, Mother put in long hours and only came home on the weekends. “There was a stigma against taking time off to care for your own children,” Mother would explain years later about her absence in the early part of my life, citing the story of her team leader who missed her father’s funeral because she would not allow his death to distract her from the revolutionary work.
Without Mother’s presence, Grandma became my surrogate mother and kept me close to her, in much the same way she did with Father. Living space was at a premium and our family, like many city dwellers in China, occupied only two rooms, one of which was reserved for Grandma. I slept with her on a narrow plank bed. She fed me diluted cow’s milk. When I became sick, which happened frequently, Grandma would carry me on her back and wobble her way to a nearby hospital.
When I was two and a half, my parents were shocked that I had problems talking. Father took me to a doctor, where he was reassured that I was just a late starter. Unconvinced, Grandma began pressuring my parents to have another child, hoping it would be a boy. This was before the government implemented the one-child policy. In those days, Chairman Mao encouraged mothers to give birth to more children, believing that a large population would boost China’s ability to triumph in wars against our enemies in the West. My parents obliged, but to Grandma’s disappointment, the next child was a girl. When I was four, I finally got a younger brother.
Even though my new sister and brother went with Mother to be looked after by her company’s child-care unit, Grandma kept me at home, arguing that the welfare of the eldest grandson was critical to the Huang family and could not be left to the responsibility of strangers. Grandma would share her food with me and kept a stockpile of fruit and cakes brought by visitors in a small bamboo suitcase next to her pillow. She would sneak me a snack from time to time. Such treats were not to be shared with my siblings.
My well-being seemed to be the concern of many elderly Huang relatives. I recall visiting a grandaunt in a village outside Xi’an. She was alarmed by my anemic appearance, reprimanded Father for not taking better care of me, and sent us a goat so that I could have fresh milk every day. Grandma milked the goat every morning and filled two big bowls. In our crowded tenement, the goat caused much trouble for Father, who reasoned that I should be responsible for it since it was for my benefit. During summer breaks, I’d take the goat to the field outside our residential complex every day. The neighborhood took to calling me the “urban shepherd boy.”
Grandma’s doting on me as if I were an only child turned me into something of a brat with a streak of stubbornness. When Father didn’t buy me a pair of shoes that I wanted on Lunar New Year, I yanked the cloth from the table already piled with food for the holiday celebrations, ruining days of work by Mother, who blamed Grandma for turning me into a “little tyrant.”
I soon learned that being the eldest son was not all about adulation. It brought with it strict discipline. When Mother was in her mid-thirties, Father managed to transfer her to his company as an assembly-line supervisor, which meant that suddenly she was around more often. As the mother of four children, she lost her youthful passion about her “revolutionary work” at the factory. Instead, she realized she needed to be more involved in my upbringing and was determined to straighten me out and break Grandma’s hold over my life, starting with my preschool education.
I had problems adjusting to the change. I felt no emotional attachment to my mother at that time. She was to me more a stern relative than an indulgent mother and I feared her, even when she tried to buy me over with snacks and treats. The bond I had with her was not the same as the one I had with Grandma, who Mother came to blame for our alienation. Mother took to punishing me, as if by hurting me she was hurting Grandma. She would scold me if I made a mistake. If Grandma intervened, she would escalate to spanking.
One day, Mother had come home early from her morning shift at the company’s foundry, her face smeared with lead dust. She told me to fetch a basin of warm water. My mind was deeply into a novel I was reading and, after I poured the hot water, I forgot to mix it with cold. Mother scalded her hands and rebuked me. I puckered my nose in defiance while her back was turned, but she caught me and, furious, slapped me across the face. Blood poured from my nose. Grandma jumped up from her corner bed in protest, which only made things worse. Mother grabbed the strap Father used to mete out discipline and began to beat me across the back. I was crying now, clutching her leg, but she kept hitting me so I bit her thigh. Stunned, her vehemence grew and she slapped all the harder. Grandma managed to pull me away, yelling, “Do you know how dangerous it is to hit his face?” Mother screamed back at Grandma. “Did you see what this spoiled brat has done? It’s your fault!” Grandma ignored her and, hunched over me, wiped the blood from my face and staunched my bleeding nose while my sobbing became louder and more dramatic and I began to twitch my arms and legs for added effect. Mother relented, but when Father got in from work, she launched into a verbal attack on Grandma, who remained silent until Mother calmed down and went out on an errand. Then, Grandma began cursing Mother for her reckless beating. Father was put in an impossible position and could only offer a popular expression of the time: “Spanking and scolding are expressions of a parent’s love.”
With spankings like that, my fear of Mother worsened. As a child, I had for a while developed a stutter, which disappeared at the age of five. However, when I was around Mother, my stuttering came back. More embarrassing, I started to wet the bed, a habit that drew constant scolding from Mother. I was often too scared to get up in the morning, trying to dry up the wet spot with my body heat, silently praying that Mother wouldn’t notice the stain. “The older you grow, the more useless you’ve become,” she would yell at me. For a period of several months, my bed-wetting happened so frequently that even Grandma became annoyed and stopped shielding me from Mother’s spankings.
Thinking of those spankings still triggers bitterness in me today, though Mother and I did manage to grow closer over the years. In those days, I hated her and secretly wished that Chairman Mao would send her far away from home so she would come home only once a year. In this way, she would miss me and thus treat me nicely. I vowed never to marry so I wouldn’t have to put up with a woman like her.
Like many parents in the neighborhood, Father was also a firm believer in the effectiveness of corporal punishment. Spankings from Father were not frequent, but neither were they sparing. When he did it, he meant it. He used an elasticized strap with hooks at each end. Its original function was as a door closer to preserve heat in the winter. Father would keep a mental tally of my misdemeanors with the diligence of an accountant, and when he decided it was time to settle up, I would be taken into the inner bedroom and ordered to turn around and get ready for my punishment. If I resisted, he would seize me and push my head down on the bed. In the third grade, my test scores had slipped to the low nineties instead of the expected one hundreds and that was enough to tip the ledger against me. Father would unhook the strap from the door and tell me to follow him. I would begin to sob, hoping that Grandma would stop him. He would grab me and drag me into the room where my sisters slept and have Mother lock the door. I would wail as the strap came down on my buttocks, five, ten, twenty times. Grandma would bang on the door, begging Father to stop. When he was done, Father would say to her quietly, “You are spoiling him.” Grandma told me: “Tell your dad you are wrong and will do better next time.”
Father would be quite calm after punishments. If Mother was present, they would force me to kneel for at least an hour to reflect on my mistakes. Then, Father would recite the litany of transgressions since my last spanking: the theft of a small bottle of liquor from a drawer to pay off a bully at school; the destruction of two watermelons I had been sent to fetch on my bike, which I crashed into a ditch after trying to ride hands f
ree; and so on. Mother would lecture me on how well behaved our neighbors’ children were at home. I would nod and pretend to seek their forgiveness, though I just wanted to stand up and have it done with. One time, feeling particularly stubborn, I refused to admit wrongdoing and ended up kneeling on the cold floor for three hours.
My parents were proud of their methods. At a parent-teacher meeting, when my teacher praised me for scoring the highest in all subjects, Father, who had never coached me in my studies, responded, “He’s not that smart; it’s the result of good discipline.”
Whether that was true or not, Father did instill in me a sense of responsibility for the family, constantly reminding me of my obligations to honor the family name. Having learned from his own life experience that one could only advance within the system of the Communist Party, Father strongly encouraged me to be active in politics.
For me, Communist indoctrination began early. When American preschoolers were reading Dr. Seuss or watching Sesame Street, we were memorizing Chairman Mao, starting with his simpler quotations and graduating to whole essays by elementary school. Thanks to visits to Mother’s factory, my revolutionary vocabulary was extensive because I asked what this or that character meant until I could easily read banners—DOWN WITH THE COUNTERREVOLUTIONARIES AND RIGHTISTS and THE WORKING CLASS IS THE LEADER OF THE REVOLUTION. When I became the first to recite the three famous essays by Chairman Mao in first grade, I was made class leader.
Throughout my elementary and high school years, I was head of the Little Red Guards and the Communist Youth League. However, when I spent too much time in political activities, joining adults in promoting the Party’s policies on the street, or spending days preparing the school’s bulletin board, Father became worried. “Political opportunities pass like clouds,” he advised. “The important thing is to learn a real skill, which will sustain and benefit you all your life.”
The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir Page 6
