The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir

by Wenguang Huang

  Word spread fast in the village of Father’s return and soon he was surrounded by long-lost relatives. His most important contacts were Grandpa’s two cousins, one of whom was the village chief. Father wanted to see Grandpa’s tomb, which took them a while to locate. After much scouring amid knee-deep grass, the village chief identified what appeared to be an unmarked grave and declared it to be Grandpa’s. He had his children draw a detailed map and reaffirmed his promise to have it properly tended and to personally oversee arrangements for the burial of Grandma.

  We were skeptical. All written records had been lost to wars and floods. How could he be sure that the unmarked grave was really Grandpa’s? Father was impatient. “Let’s have a little faith,” he said. “Faith” is not a word Father used very often, and I think that, deep down, he shared our doubts, but he chose to believe.

  Father had incurred an obligation by asking the village chief to watch over Grandpa’s grave, though the enormity of that obligation was not readily apparent until a letter from the chief arrived the following spring, announcing that his son-in-law had been offered a job in our city and that his daughter would soon join her husband here. She was having some problems getting settled and the chief asked Father to help find his daughter a place to stay and a job to tide her over. Before Father could respond, the daughter was at our door. She was a peasant girl, who giggled a lot and spoke with a heavy Henan accent; some of her words had the same twang as Grandma’s. My elder sister volunteered to make room for the new auntie by staying at the house of one of her friends. Father found her a temporary job, loading and unloading cooking utensils at his warehouse.

  Fortunately, her husband found a dorm for the both of them and she was gone in a month. This auntie was just the first of many new aunties and uncles. How far did our family extend? Some came as tourists and used our house as a free hotel, some to request financial help, others to look for a job in the city. They thought Father was some big shot. My siblings and I grew weary of the constant disruption in our lives and made no attempt at courtesy. Father scolded me for being snobbish and ungrateful. “These are nice, honest people,” he lectured. “Don’t look down on them. They have put in a lot of effort to help keep Grandpa’s grave.”

  Initially, Mother tried, greeting our relatives warmly and always cooking a big noodle meal, but the strain began to show and when three men claiming to be our relatives showed up at the door late one summer night, she’d had enough. Claiming to have a headache, she went out to join her friends, leaving my sister to make supper for our guests. Father took out some bedding and let them sleep in his office at work, hoping that, as farmers, they would be up early and be gone before his colleagues arrived. Sure enough, they were outside the house at six o’clock the next morning, waiting for their breakfast. A neighbor, aware of our situation, joked: “Your hotel business has been quite good lately.”

  Grandma used to complain whenever Mother’s relatives came to stay, muttering that Mother had given away too much money and gifts. “Most of the Huang family members died off and we hardly have anyone,” Grandma said. Now that contact had been made with Grandpa’s relatives, the tide had turned, and Mother took a jab at Father: “Didn’t you say all of your Huang family members died during the famine?” Words were exchanged, voices were raised, and Father retreated to the courtyard.

  But Mother wasn’t finished and brought up her threats again. “Who would have known that we have to go through so much trouble to get your mother to Henan,” she said, and turned to Grandma, who was sitting in her wicker chair under the pear tree. “I feel very tempted to just find a burial place outside Xi’an. You’ve been here for years, and this is where your grandchildren live.”

  Grandma barked: “I don’t want to talk about death now. Even if I die, I don’t want to be buried in this place; it’s not my home!” Then, giving Mother a withering look, she came up with a new line against Mother: “I know how you are. If you could have your way, you wouldn’t hesitate to wrap me up in a piece of cheap straw sheet and dump me in a furnace or on the side of the road.”

  Mother suppressed her anger and said to Father, “I feel very much at home here. It’s a new society now. We can’t follow every old rule.”

  Father disagreed. “All fallen leaves return to the tree roots,” he said. “No matter how far you travel away from home, you have to go back.”

  “Fine,” Mother said. “Go ahead and take your mother home. I’m not going to help!” And then she left to seek consolation among her friends in the neighborhood.

  Despite Mother’s claims, we children knew that she and Father never treated Xi’an as home. They made no effort to lose their accent or change what they ate. Their friends came from the same region of Henan, and whenever Mother met a woman who spoke with the accent of her hometown, she was welcomed in our house. Father even insisted that my siblings and I should marry people of Henan descent when we grew up. Occasionally, I even heard Father tell his friends that he and Mother would want to move back to our ancestral home after retirement, even though they had nothing there and hardly knew anyone except some distant relatives. That conversation flashes in my mind each time I hear some of my Chinese-American friends say that they never feel at home even though they have been in the United States for years. Some are saving money and plan to move back to their “homeland” after retirement.

  After Mother left, Grandma blubbered to Father, “If you don’t want to send me home after I die, maybe you should take me to our village while I’m still alive. I’ll rent a room in our native village and will probably live longer without this evil woman around me.” Then, she broke down. “I’m so afraid of death.”

  Part Two

  13.

  THAW

  Chairman Mao was dead, and his successor, Hua Guofeng, began to clean house in October 1976, starting with the “counterrevolutionary clique” led by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, and three other radical Communist leaders. Known as the “Gang of Four,” they were charged with conspiring against the Party and put under arrest.

  Mother acted as if she had known all along that Mao’s wife was a bad person. “She wore that black scarf and looked so distracted at Chairman Mao’s funeral,” she said. “I knew there was something going on.” Father told her, “Don’t get too smart with your observation; she is the enemy now, but what’s going to happen tomorrow? She might come back as empress. The only thing certain about Chinese politics is that nothing is certain. You can be an honored guest today and locked up as a criminal tomorrow.”

  Father knew from experience to be cautious, but soon enough the catastrophes of the Cultural Revolution were blamed on Mao’s wife and her clique, and it was as if Chairman Mao had slept through those dreadful years, unaware of and therefore blameless for the radical policies that had ruined China’s economy and caused the deaths of millions of innocent people. The Party tried to right wrongs; with the fall of the Gang of Four, many former enemies became our comrades again, and those former counterrevolutionaries and capitalists turned out to have been good Communists all along. In my former elementary school, there was a counterrevolutionary, whose job was to do carpentry and repairs. We used to mock him all the time until, overnight, he became the school principal. We were told he had been a victim of the Gang of Four. The greatest surprise came when the verdict against Liu Shaoqi, the former president of China, was overturned. I grew up shouting “Down with Liu Shaoqi” or “Liu Shaoqi is a traitor and the biggest advocate of capitalism in China.” Liu was beaten and imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. He died a prisoner in Henan Province in 1969. In an incredible backflip, the Party told us in 1980 that Liu was really a remarkable Marxist and a great proletariat revolutionary. A great funeral was arranged, attended by all the senior leaders. Chinese politics is confusing most of the time, more so for a teenager, but even I could tell that China was changing for the better.

  Even more shocking to m
e was the time when I came home one day and noticed that a gigantic statue of Chairman Mao had disappeared from a three-meter-high pedestal near the eastern entrance of Father’s factory. Workers had taken the statue down and sent it away to be smashed. The Party had decided to end Chairman Mao’s cult of personality and urged people to liberate their thinking. Not long after, I saw dozens of trucks parked outside Father’s warehouse. The trucks were loaded with different sizes and shapes of buttons with images of Chairman Mao, which we faithfully wore on our chests every day, collecting and trading them like today’s Pokémon cards. Barely three years after Chairman Mao’s death, the government in Xi’an urged residents to dump the metal badges at a downtown recycling center and then shipped them over to Father’s factory so workers could melt and recycle them to make cooking utensils and sewage pipes. According to a recent news report, China produced eight billion Chairman Mao badges in fifty thousand designs between 1966 and 1971. Before they were tossed into the furnace, Father carefully picked several unique designs from the pile and brought them home as collectibles, putting them in the drawer where he used to store all of his books banned by Mao.

  For me, the most obvious sign of change was the relaxation of the food rationing system. The black market, where Father went secretly to buy sweet potatoes and wheat, became the “free market”—peasants everywhere peddled fresh vegetables, wheat, and pork. The communes were being disbanded and farmers could lease land and grow crops of their choice. So long as they fulfilled government quotas, they could sell the surplus at the market. It was good news for us; Father no longer had to worry about getting caught buying food so we might eat. White steamed buns, a symbol of China’s happy socialist life, became a regular feature on our table.

  Life also became more colorful. Old-time revolutionary propaganda movies depicting brave Communists fighting the cowardly Nationalists or defeating the evil Japanese invaders disappeared. Films from the 1950s with love themes and Hong Kong kung fu flicks attracted large crowds at the formerly deserted movie theaters. In 1978, the sweet voice of Deng Lijun, a Taiwanese singer, conquered the whole country; and I can liken her impact on China to that of Elvis Presley’s on America. My classmates and I, who had been fed strident revolutionary songs such as “Socialism Is Good” and “I Love My Motherland” since childhood, fell under Deng’s sappy spell—“The Moon Represents My Heart” and “Don’t Pick the Roadside Wildflowers.” A classmate’s brother smuggled in a reel-to-reel tape from Hong Kong. Through my English-language teacher, I borrowed a large boxlike Grundig tape recorder from the school language lab with the excuse that we were practicing our spoken English and we gathered in our dorm. Despite the initial shushing, the volume was turned up, louder and louder, until it reached the ears of the deputy principal, who did not approve of using school equipment to listen to “unhealthy music.” My English teacher bore the brunt of the blame. Beyond our school walls, people were jailed for dancing to Deng Lijun’s songs, which only increased her allure, and the government finally gave up.

  The 1970s may have been about to end in the West, but the decade of fashion faux pas had barely begun in China and bell-bottom pants and long hair had invaded. For us, it came in the form of the musician daughter of our English teacher, who, as we exercised in the playground during our physical education class, walked past on a visit to her mother. All heads turned to her navy blue bell-bottom pants, which accentuated her figure in a way few Chinese boys could imagine. Soon several seniors at our school began wearing bell-bottoms and we all gave up haircuts. Our principal urged students to boycott the bourgeois lifestyle, threatening to take a pair of scissors to our long hair and wide pant legs if we did not correct our behavior. By the time I managed to beg Mother to make me more fashionable trousers, bell-bottoms were so common that I’d lost interest.

  My younger brother didn’t care for bell-bottoms, but he changed his hairstyle every other week. Father—who used to take us to a barber for a buzz cut twice a month when we were kids and claimed that long hair caused headaches—called my brother a hooligan. When my brother proposed opening his own hair salon after graduating high school to supplement the family income and help save for Grandma’s funeral, Father flew into a rage. “We spent all this money and effort to protect our good feng shui so you could be blessed with a big future,” he said. “What a waste; can’t you think of an honorable and decent profession instead of running a business?” Merchants are ranked among the lowest of the low in Confucian thinking.

  Father didn’t like the cultural trends of the new era, but he was grateful that traditional Chinese opera had returned after a decade of being silenced. He dug out from his drawer a small homemade radio with a big battery box hanging loose from its back. The radio had been made for him by a friend in the mid-1960s and he would put the radio to his ear after work and listen through the static to the traditional operas. He seemed deaf to the static from his radio, but it increasingly annoyed Mother, and to avoid conflict he reluctantly took money from Grandma’s funeral fund and bought a coveted Red Lantern radio, which cost him the equivalent of two months’ salary. It was a big wooden box, with a colorful silklike fabric on the front. I liked that it could pick up shortwave frequencies. I soon found Voice of America’s English news program, secretly popular among many students at my school. It was through it that I first heard about the murder of John Lennon and the silent vigils around the world in his memory. I could not fathom why Westerners mourned the death of a pop star as if he were a head of state like Chairman Mao. Listening to foreign broadcasts was still politically questionable. Father would only allow me to listen to Voice of America under his supervision. He had a carpenter build a lock box on the only electric outlet in our house.

  Soon radio was replaced by TV, which was becoming more accessible in 1978, and even families poorer than we were had a set, but Father refused to buy one, even though he would sometimes slip next door to watch Beijing or Henan operas at our neighbor’s house. “Let’s wait until better models come out and prices come down,” he would say. “We can’t squander money on luxury products. We need to prepare for Grandma’s funeral.” Mr. Yu, Father’s company’s sales director, had the biggest TV in the residential complex and large crowds would gather in his living room and sit in the windows to watch popular shows. When the American TV show Man from Atlantis reached China’s airwaves, my younger brother was one of its many die-hard fans. On the night of the show, he would excuse himself from his homework saying he had to use the public latrine and return thirty minutes later, his jacket covered in dust from Mr. Yu’s window. In the end, Father relented and bought an odd-looking discount set. When he wasn’t home, he kept the electrical outlet locked.

  As the big character slogans on the walls—REFORMING OLD TRADITIONS AND CUSTOMS—faded away, some traditional practices crept back into our lives, sometimes spectacularly and from quite unexpected quarters. In our residential complex lived Mr. Zhou, a floor sweeper at Father’s company who scavenged dumpsters and landfills for paper and scrap metal. He had four children, all of them girls. When we heard firecrackers coming from his house, a huge crowd gathered. Zhou’s eldest daughter was getting married to a neighbor’s boy and the whisper was that he had gotten her pregnant, hence the hastily arranged wedding. Mr. Zhou silenced the gossips when the bride emerged from inside a red sedan chair carried by two relatives. I had only seen such things in movies about evil landlords who abducted beautiful girls from poor peasant families. The crowd gasped; old women covered their mouths in surprise. The bride wore a traditional red coat with plaited buttons down the middle. Her sisters walked behind the sedan, carrying red silk quilts embroidered with a phoenix and dragon. When the bride’s parents stepped into view, the crowd roared. Zhou, with his hair brushed neatly on one side and dressed in neatly pressed gray polyester pants and a tailored blue Mao jacket, was the personification of pride. “Never underestimate the power of a garbage collector,” Mother said. “He must have a fortune
stashed away.”

  What would the Party secretary say about this revival of traditional wedding practices? “Things have changed,” Father said. “The Party has realized that not all traditions are bad.” He was right. Nothing happened to Zhou, who continued to sweep floors and rummage through rubbish.

  Like weddings, traditional funerals, once scorned as a wasteful practice of a misguided past, became commonplace in the rural areas. In major cities such as Xi’an, burial was still banned, but enforcement was patchy in the suburbs. If one had the means to secure a piece of land, one had the means to bend the rules. In 1980, when a granduncle passed away, Father felt that as a Party member it would be inappropriate for him to attend because the funeral would be followed by a secret burial. Mother and I did go, and when the coffin was hoisted into the hearse, a group of women, Mother among them, cried and wailed—Mother was loud and very much in demand for relatives’ funerals—as two dozen children dressed in white linen, including me, knelt in three lines. Firecrackers were lit, signaling the start of a procession that involved a dozen or so cars and trucks loaded with hundreds of wreaths and paper offerings of perfectly scaled gold bars to be burned so the deceased would not arrive in the other world empty-handed. To avoid the police, the procession stuck to side streets and fake money was scattered in its path for the ghost guards so they would allow easy passage. I hadn’t realized the other world was as corrupt as the one in which I lived.