The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir

by Wenguang Huang

  At school, we were frequently asked our plans for the future. The correct answer was: “Follow Chairman Mao’s words and be a qualified successor to the Revolution.” We all assumed that a “qualified successor to the Revolution” meant helping poor peasants in the remote desert or mountainous regions. In 1975, the Communist Party was promoting a model student who turned in a blank sheet of paper during an exam, claiming that he was too busy with the Revolution to prepare for his tests. The whole nation was urged to reform the education system, which the Party believed was out of touch with the lives of workers and peasants. At school, we were encouraged to spend less time on our science lessons and more time doing physical labor, such as collecting horse manure on the street or helping peasants pull weeds. Father was deeply troubled by this new political trend and, though he made no protest about what happened at school, he forced us to read our books at home to make up for the time wasted in class. “This country is out of whack,” he said to Mother and, noticing I had heard him, said, “Don’t repeat what I just said to your teacher. Keep up with your studies.”

  Many times he reminded me how his future was stunted by his lack of an academic degree. “I was illiterate until the age of twenty and taught myself how to read and write,” he lamented. He believed that if he had attended senior high or college, life would have been different, even though Mother pointed out with her usual sarcasm that “If you had gone to college, you would have been labeled a bourgeois and locked up in a cowshed somewhere.”

  Father’s favorite phrase in those days was “The water flows downhill and people climb uphill.” He would say, “No matter who is in power, sooner or later they’ll need the well educated to rule the country.” He required me to score high in every subject. He had Mother send gifts, such as extra coupons for oil and sugar, to my head teacher, who assigned me extra readings.

  Despite Father’s insistence that we should do well in our schoolwork, he also realized that we were facing a grim future, especially before I entered the boarding school. If the political policy remained unchanged, my younger sister and I would have to be sent to the countryside after graduating from high school. Each family was only allowed to keep one child in the city, and my elder sister had used up our quota. So, he began encouraging me and my younger sister to learn special skills that would help us survive the harsh working conditions if we were to settle in the rural areas.

  Father had me practice my calligraphy and drawing for hours on end because he believed every village would need calligraphers to copy letters for officials, write posters, or design outdoor bulletin boards. He also had me take acupuncture lessons from Dr. Xu so I could be a barefoot doctor, a farmer who had basic medical and paramedical training at a rural clinic. For my sister, he forced her to learn to play the erhu, a two-stringed violin, hoping that she could join an army or village performance troupe. When she showed neither interest nor talent, Father had Grandma teach her how to cook so she could work in a rural communal kitchen, which was a relatively easy job and offered plenty to eat.

  As a child, I was thin and weak and a constant target of bullies. This embarrassed Father, who had to escort me to school. “Why don’t you fight back,” he fumed after an older boy had beaten me up, leaving me with a bloody nose. So he took me to “Uncle Ren,” who was a master of Chen-style tai chi and would teach me self-defense skills. “Your great-grandfather was both a scholar and a warrior at the imperial court,” he reminded me. “I didn’t have the opportunity to do martial arts. You need to carry on that tradition.”

  I was excited. Bruce Lee meant nothing to most mainland Chinese, but I had seen kung fu fighting and knew the fast moves and kicks would be useful in defending myself against the bullies at school. Father brought me to he house with gifts and he officially took me on as his student. Over the next five years, Uncle Ren would coach me twice a week but tai chi wasn’t at all what I expected. I soon became bored with its slow movements. Uncle Ren said that if I mastered the real essence, I could be an invincible fighter capable of combining both mental and physical power. All I wanted was to beat someone up. Father forced me to practice. I would lie on the floor and doze, jumping up to practice when I heard his approaching footsteps. I gave up when I started at my boarding school because only some old teachers practiced it in the morning and I felt too embarrassed to join their ranks. But by then, the practice had paid off, and I had become quite good at sports.

  Often, the teachings I received at home contradicted what I was taught in school. For example, the most important lessons at home were about filial piety, the ultimate expression of which was to take care of Grandma. I was never allowed to disobey Grandma or my parents. In the evenings, when Grandma had to tread her way to the outdoor latrine two blocks away, I was the one to accompany her. During rainy days, she would use a chamber pot and I would clean it for her. When the neighbors noticed, many agreed with Father, commending me for being a filial child. For a while, the chamber pot became a badge of honor for me.

  In my third year at elementary school, we were taught that filial piety was part of the old Confucian philosophy, which needed to be eliminated. “Only Chairman Mao and the Communist Party are your closest relatives,” said our teacher. “If your parents or relatives engage in any counterrevolutionary activities, you should not hesitate in reporting them or publicly denouncing them. It is a true test of your revolutionary will.”

  When I shared with Father what we were being taught, he cautioned me about believing in propaganda. “People might talk that way in public,” he said, “but only the stupid or the fanatic would betray the parents who raise and nurture them. If you betray your parents, you betray yourself and will lose all your friends. Think about it—if you cannot even treat your parents with respect and if you rat on them for political gain, how can you expect your friends to ever trust you?”

  At school, we were taught not to show any mercy to our enemies—landlords and counterrevolutionaries. In our physical education class, we were trained to use a wooden bayonet while shouting, “Kill, kill, and kill.” We were told to retaliate against our enemies with violence, an eye for eye. As a Party member, Father embraced this part of the Communist ideology in public, but he acted differently at home. He lectured me not to harbor any thoughts of harming others. When a friend of Mother’s sought help with a divorce petition, I promised to draft it for her, but Father flew into a rage. He yelled at Mother. “Are you trying to ruin the future of our eldest son? Helping break up a family is not an auspicious thing to do.” Then Father turned to me and said, “Remember, when you do harmful things, you lose the protection of your ancestors.”

  Breaking an entire country away from long-held traditions practically overnight is a complicated business, and nowhere was this more apparent to me than in the contradictions embodied by my father. I grew up amid such contradictions, a fusion of ideologies and faiths.

  7.

  EXPECTATION

  Owning a camera in China in the 1970s was a rare luxury. Families paid big money on special occasions to have their pictures taken at a photographer’s shop. My friend Qinqin owned a Seagull camera, a black oblong box with twin lenses and a viewfinder on the top. Grandma had seldom been photographed and, with Father’s permission, I asked Qinqin to come over on a Sunday and take Grandma’s and our picture. Everyone was ready by the time Qinqin walked in the door. Father had on the blue Mao jacket Mother had tailored for him for the Lunar New Year. Grandma sat in her wicker chair in the yard, dressed in a clean black corduroy shirt and new velvet hat. We children were in our New Year’s best. At Qinqin’s direction, we struck different poses, but Grandma was her focus and she kept up a stream of chatter to relax her while aiming from different angles. Grandma’s face twitched slightly; she was nervous, perhaps a little frightened, but she enjoyed the attention and bravely faced the camera. As Qinqin rewound the film, she whispered to me, “Your Grandma must have been a very attractive wom
an when she was young; you can still tell from her eyes, her skin, and her face.”

  “Really?” I had never thought of Grandma in that way. In my memory she was always old. I turned to look at her, examining her face as if for the first time. Her eyes were watery and sad. “Grandma, were you pretty when you were young?” I asked with the bluntness of my age. She looked a little startled and then blushed and waved the back of her hand at me. “No. I am an ugly old woman.” Father laughed and said to Qinqin, “Grandma was indeed very pretty and attracted many suitors before she married Grandpa.”

  The tale of the faithful widow came back to me. I wondered if younger Grandma had been tempted on a cold winter night when she was alone and her son had gone to sleep. Did she flirt with other men? I caught myself looking at Grandma’s hands for signs that she might have considered severing a finger to suppress her desires and strengthen her resolve like that legendary widow. Her hands looked frail, but there were no missing fingers.

  Not long after the photo session, Grandma told Father that she needed the right set of clothing if she was to face death and told Mother to find a tailor to make her shou-yi. In the 1970s, clothing was standard and unisex: gray, green, or blue Mao jacket and matching pants. Grandma wanted none of that. For her shou-yi, she wanted traditional dress, clothing we associated with movies that depicted the old pre-Communist days. “If I die in modern clothing, my husband and our ancestors won’t be able to recognize me,” she rationalized.

  My older sister chided her and said, “Grandma is too bourgeois! She wants to look pretty to impress Grandpa.”

  Grandma blushed and, as she often did with my sister, who, like me, had a special place in Grandma’s heart, told her to go away.

  Her demand for death clothes surprised me. Father said that Grandma used to be very meticulous about her looks when she was young, but I remember her wearing only one outfit—a baggy blue shirt with plate buttons down the left side, an ugly pair of pantaloons, and white knee socks. Her gray hair was always combed into a tight bun at the back. I doubt she ever looked at herself in a mirror. I would often point out food stains on her shirt, and she would wave me off with the back of her hand and say, “I’m an old woman; I don’t care.” When my eldest sister fussed over clothes, Grandma would scold her for being vain. “It’s bad for a girl to care more about her looks than her house chores. No one will want to marry you.”

  As she considered death, I suppose she was feeling the stirrings of hope that she would see her husband again and they would be reunited in a new cycle of life, for surely he too had been alone all this time. I think Grandma wanted to be ready for their special meeting, dressed nicely for her husband.

  Mother, who had been a reluctant participant in our coffin scheme, warmed to Grandma’s request that she take charge of preparing her afterlife wardrobe. Mother lined up an army of friends to help. Frankly, I felt somewhat stunned by Mother’s enthusiasm and I said so. “As a woman, I can understand your grandma’s wish,” Mother replied. “In our rural village, no matter how poor a woman was, she would dress nicely for two occasions, her wedding and her funeral.”

  Word of mouth led Mother to two women old enough to have seen and even worn those elegant old-style dresses of the 1930s and 1940s, and on their recommendation, she sought out a woman who was a recent arrival from Henan whose husband drove a rickshaw in Xi’an. Children in the neighborhood nicknamed her “Aunt Deaf” because she was hard of hearing. Aunt Deaf knew how to make the shou-yi, though Mother had to promise her husband that they would be discreet and that she wouldn’t get into any trouble. She brought with her another elderly woman—“my assistant,” she shouted rather unnecessarily. Mother prepared the women nice lunches and for three days they worked behind the closed door of my parents’ bedroom. I could hear the clanking of the sewing machine, the snipping of scissors, and Aunt Deaf’s shouted instructions to this woman or that. When I peeked through the window, I saw strips and pieces of blue, orange, and yellow fabric strewn about the bed and various women wearing an arm or a leg of something as others pinned and fussed.

  While people always used even numbers for weddings, symbolizing happiness for the couple, Mother said funerals required odd numbers, so that death hit only one person. On the third afternoon, Grandma was presented with her three sets of shou-yi, one for summer, one for winter, and one for spring or fall. The centerpiece was a blue silk cheongsam-style dress trimmed with orange linen. Instead of embroidery, a yellow paper phoenix was glued on each side of the dress. Aunt Deaf held up a silk top and a cotton-padded winter coat of matching blues with paper birds on the front. There was a black hat with flowers and a pair of tiny handmade pointed shoes, even a knitted yellow quilt. All were held out for Grandma’s scrutiny, who examined each item as it was presented, and then went through them again, more slowly, examining every detail. Grandma grabbed Aunt Deaf’s hands and thanked her over and over, saying how lucky she was to be able to wear such beautiful clothes after her death. I did not tell her that I had seen traditional Chinese dresses in old movies and compared with them, Grandma’s shou-yi looked fake, exaggerated, and spooky.

  With her coffin and shou-yi properly stored away, Grandma was at ease and able to think of death as merely another part of life. For me, it was the beginning of a nightmare. I no longer invited friends home because I didn’t want my teacher to find out what we supposedly good Communists had done. And I especially didn’t want to give my classmates more ammunition for their arsenal of jokes about Grandma.

  I did tell someone, but that was under duress. There was a boy with whom I used to play games after school. We started a contest to see who could hit a far-off target with a brick. Whoever lost would pay the winner ten fen. I lost, but all that was left from what Father had given me wasn’t enough to settle the bet. The boy threatened to go to Mother and demand full payment of my debt. I tried all sorts of tricks to get him to let me off, but he was too clever, so I offered to show him a coffin. We snuck into the house while Grandma was busy preparing dinner and crept into my parents’ room. I removed the covering sheets with a dusty flourish and he looked at it, unimpressed. He told me to open it so he could see inside, but he was still unimpressed. I think he expected something scarier than the two sacks of flour Father had stored there. I was desperate and brought out the suitcase containing Grandma’s neatly folded and carefully bundled shou-yi. He giggled and forced me to put them on. After I had put on the blouse, he laughed and yelled, “Your Grandma is a scary feudalistic ghost” and ran out of the house.

  The shou-yi was scattered on my parents’ bed, the coffin lid was half open, and when I tried to close it, I stepped on and rumpled the blue silk cheongsam. The folds were too complicated for me, so I rolled everything up and stuffed it back in the suitcase. Grandma found out and told my parents that night. Father was furious and the subsequent spanking was particularly painful. This time, Grandma didn’t come to my rescue.

  To my worries was added that of the boy’s reporting me to our teacher. He never did, but he confirmed to a couple of other boys that my Grandma really was a freaky ghost and they stopped playing with me for a while, perhaps frightened by the fact that I slept next to a coffin.

  Even though my parents reminded us again and again to keep quiet about Grandma’s coffin and shou-yi, Mother set a poor example. The coffin and the beautiful set of shrouds at home became too much for her and she began to brag about our new family asset to her friends. Several came unannounced and were breathless with anticipation, as if they were about to see some rare artwork. Mother would urge them not to tell anyone, even though she was the one who was telling the whole neighborhood. Then she would bring out the little outfits and, as a bonus, uncover the shiny black coffin. Visitors would say, “What a filial son your husband is. Your mother-in-law is so fortunate to have you.” Mother, long considered Grandma’s nemesis, bathed in the compliments.

  The casket and shou-yi were the
most public, and riskiest, part of Father’s preparations, and he managed those without detection. He was again elected a model Communist Party member, and at work he was diligent in his duties to the Party. At night, under the bare twenty-watt lightbulb hanging over the dinner table, he and Mother pressed forward with their arrangements, working through various scenarios, each with a litany of problems and solutions.

  There were several potential plans for Grandma’s burial, depending on the season in which she died, and Father drew up a list of problems and possible solutions for each. According to village custom, a person who has left and dies elsewhere becomes a wandering ghost and his or her body cannot be brought back for later burial. One solution was that, if she fell seriously ill, we could take her by train and bus and let her die in the village surrounded by relatives, who could also be enlisted in the plan. “What if Grandma lingers on for months?” Mother posited. “We wouldn’t be able to take time off and stay there with her, would we?” The cost would also be prohibitive because, as everyone knew Father lived in a big city, he would be expected to hold a big ceremony over several days. Father struck it out as an option and concentrated on what to do if she died in Xi’an.

  If Grandma passed away in winter, early spring, or late fall, we would find someone who had access to a truck, the idea being to get Grandma’s body to her home village as quickly and inconspicuously as possible. It was a twenty-hour drive over rutted, muddy roads. Father and I would accompany the body. We would set up a tent outside the village, invite surviving relatives for a simple wake, and bury Grandma in the family plot. Father’s company had six or seven vehicles at its disposal and it might be possible to secure the use of one of them. If not, we could wrap the coffin and slip it onto a freight train. If there was no freight train that day, we would ditch the coffin, bundle up Grandma in a quilt, and board the next passenger train for Henan with a lie that she was gravely ill. By stuffing the quilt with ice, we figured we could make the six-hour trip without arousing suspicion, though there were strict laws against carrying corpses on passenger trains. We would need reliable friends working for the railway department because, if discovered, Grandma’s body would be dumped at the next station for immediate cremation there and we would be punished and publicly condemned.