The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir

by Wenguang Huang

  As access to transport became easier, Father began modifying his plan accordingly. He even managed to obtain permission to use one of the company clinic’s two ambulances to transport Grandma’s body. Dr. Yang, whom Mother had befriended years earlier, even suggested moving Grandma as she neared the end so she might die in her own village. He volunteered to come along and make sure she was kept comfortable during the journey, which road improvements had dramatically reduced in duration.

  My older sister was also given a more prominent role, not something I would have expected when the plan was first launched. She had been dating a former classmate for two years. His parents came from a rural village on the outskirts of Xi’an. Mother and Father were opposed; they wanted her to marry into a city family, preferably someone with roots in Henan. It would also be a step down for her, from working at a state-run company to joining him at a small cooperative with far fewer benefits. My sister was a cunning person, a trait of hers I particularly liked because she had more than once been able to get us out of trouble when we were younger. With the help of her boyfriend’s family, she presented Father with a proposal she knew he would find hard to resist: If she were to marry her boyfriend, Grandma would, through family connections, have access to the village cemetery for as long as was needed, so if something went wrong with the Henan plans, Father had a secure fallback position in place. Her relationship was allowed to develop.

  In 1981 came news that threatened to derail Father’s meticulous plans. The local government had earmarked the Huang family cemetery for reclamation and conversion into farmland. Villagers were told to either level the tombs or remove them and their remains to a more remote location before the whole area was bulldozed. Father was against the relocation and said so in a strongly worded letter to Grandpa’s cousin, the village chief, whose reply came via “giggling auntie,” our nickname for the daughter we had helped years earlier. She said her father had fought local officials to preserve Grandpa’s gravesite and had even lain down in front of the tractor sent to level the ground. The village chief saved Grandpa’s grave, but had to bribe some local officials, she said. Father was touched by the village chief’s “heroic act” and he wired money to cover the cost of the bribes.

  The village chief suffered a heart attack in 1985 and Father took the news badly. He was the cornerstone of the plan. Father contacted Grandpa’s other cousin, who assured Father he would carry on the task. I had met him when he came for a visit and he struck me as honest and less glib than the village chief. In return, Father brought his cousin’s seventeen-year-old son to the city to live with us and found him a job.

  Meanwhile, as Grandma approached eighty, her fear of death worsened. When relatives and friends dropped by for visits, Grandma would interrupt the conversation. “I’m so scared,” she would say, followed by a nervous giggle. “I don’t want to leave my grandchildren.” Then, if Mother was not around, she would, in her whispering voice, accuse Mother of conspiring to get rid of her because she had become a burden to the family. Her frequent interruptions put our guests in an awkward position. Initially, some would try to listen and comfort her, but soon they all stopped visiting us.

  Every now and then, if dizzy spells hit her, Grandma would remind us that “I will die any minute now.” We indulged her. Late one night, she woke us up, howling that she was approaching her end. It was two days before the Lunar New Year. Upon her death, she advised Father to wrap her body with a piece of red cloth and temporarily store it inside the coffin. “I don’t want my death to ruin your New Year celebration,” she said. “Besides, your mother has prepared all that New Year’s food and we can’t let it go to waste. You can notify our relatives and handle my funeral afterward.”

  Then she had Father bring me over so she could leave me her last words. I knelt next to her bed, holding her hands tightly. I could see tears flowing across her temples. I sobbed and began to hope that Grandma would reveal some life-changing secrets like those dying revolutionaries in the movies: “You were an orphan. Your biological mother was a revolutionary martyr who was killed by the Nationalists. Grandma is your sole surviving relative!” That would probably explain why Mother spanked me so much. Or perhaps Grandma might leave me some money: “I have hidden some gold bars between the kitchen walls. Dig them out after I die and enjoy yourself. And don’t share it with your annoying sisters.” It seemed highly possible. For years, I had heard stories from relatives that Grandma had brought gold bars from Henan to Xi’an.

  Grandma finally spoke up and I held my breath in anticipation. “You should keep practicing cooking. In this way, you won’t have to suffer at the hands of your wife, like your father does.” My sobbing stopped. I looked to see if Mother was around. Fortunately, she had left to fetch Dr. Gao. Shaking his head with his usual look of disapproval, Father handed Grandma a glass of water. She brushed it away. “A dying person can’t drink water. I might choke and leave this world without giving my last words to everyone.”

  Dr. Gao came in, looking sleepy and impatient. He felt Grandma’s pulse. “Huang Mama, you are not dying. Your pulse is strong and you’ll live to be one hundred.” Grandma smiled. Before Dr. Gao left, he sent Father to pick up some sleeping pills for Grandma at the company clinic. By the time Father returned, Grandma was already snoring.

  14.

  MATRICULATION

  At the height of Father’s preoccupation with Grandma’s burial, he hardly had any time for his children. His political-study meetings kept him late at work and once he was home, he would either be exhausted or entangled in the burial discussions or arguments with Mother. The only time we had his full attention was when we got into trouble in school and the teacher showed up at our door. After the teacher left, we would be punished. Several years in a row, Father skipped my annual parents’ meeting with the excuse: “I know you’ll do better and I needn’t worry about you.”

  While I excelled at school without much parental supervision, my younger brother and sister did poorly and frequently received failing grades. Father assigned me and my elder sister to help with their studies but we were too busy with our own extracurricular activities. As a result, they were left on their own. In his teenage years, my younger brother joined a neighborhood gang. Often, when Father came home from work, he would encounter angry parents whose children had been beaten up by my brother. During his high school entrance examination, my brother managed to pass, but he missed the admission cutoff for the best school in the area by only two points. He ended up going to a neighborhood school with a high dropout rate. Without his receiving the proper coaching, his academic record deteriorated further.

  In later years, as Grandma’s situation remained relatively stable, Father started to compensate for his previous inattention, but it was too late. None of my younger siblings achieved the high test scores that would qualify them for college.

  Conversely, I was more fortunate. Following my admission to the Xi’an Foreign Languages School, my parents’ attitude toward me changed dramatically. Since I was only home on weekends, they treated me as if I were an honored guest. The spanking stopped. Mother always cooked special meals for me. Out of jealousy, my siblings began calling me the family’s “endangered species” that needed special care and protection.

  Father felt greatly relieved that his eldest son did not have to suffer in the remote countryside after graduation. School authorities had made it clear to my parents that students would have the opportunity to work as interpreters for senior leaders in Beijing. The promise stoked Father’s hope that I might become somebody who would glorify the family.

  As he prepared me for big things in life, Father urged me to follow all sorts of rules. I should speak slowly and confidently, and always walk with my back straight and eyes forward. “You look like a little old man searching for pennies on the ground,” he said. “That’s not the way a person who does big things walks.” I still walk a little hunched ove
r and with my head down, and I pick up quite a few pennies. It might amuse Father that they are considered lucky in America.

  Starting in 1977, we no longer had to study half a day and then spend the rest of the time doing physical labor at a school-run factory or in the rural areas. Math, chemistry, and physics became popular subjects. Test scores were again about knowledge, rather than the ability to quote Chairman Mao. Our teachers no longer mentioned “settling in the rural areas and being a revolutionary successor.” Our ultimate goal was to pass the test and attend universities. In our English class, we no longer had to learn the awkward English translations of Chairman Mao’s teachings, such as “American imperialists are paper tigers.” Instead, we could read about Snow White from a pirated version of a British textbook.

  I thrived on the changes. At my new school, I excelled in both my science and social-science classes. At the end of each semester, when I handed Father my report card, he felt vindicated that he had always encouraged me to study hard while other parents gave up on their children’s education in the Mao era.

  In 1978, an article about the mathematician Chen Jingrun caught the imagination of Chinese high school students. Chen, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, made a significant contribution to the Goldbach Conjecture, but nobody at school could explain what that was. All we knew was that it was a world-renowned number theory and Chen had gained glory for China. Suddenly everyone wanted to be a mathematician. I was obsessed with math. Agonizing over a particularly complicated math problem before going to bed one night, I managed to solve it in my dreams and decided I must be a genius. I thought of becoming a world-famous mathematician. Father read up on Chen and learned that the math genius had no life outside his work, no social skills, and would often forget to eat and sleep. The government eventually had to intervene and found him a wife to take care of him. Father noticed that I became absentminded, losing my allowance money and misplacing my keys. He decided he did not want me to become a mathematician and when my teacher recommended that I transfer to a school for talented math students, he refused.

  When I was in high school, Father seldom had time to intervene in what books I read, claiming that it was beyond his ability to help me. One day, I began reading the Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber, and I knew he had read it many times. To impress him, I tried to discuss the book with him. A look of horror crossed his face. “That is not a suitable book for you,” he said. The main character was a dissolute dandy, Father explained. On the boy’s first birthday, his father displayed an array of tools—including a pen, which was the mark of the scholar, and a sword, the tool of the warrior—to predict his future. Ignoring everything presented, the character grabbed some face powder and put it in his mouth. His father knew from then on that his son would be a useless good-for-nothing. He wastes his life flirting with girls and lets his family fall apart. “The book could have a bad influence on you,” Father said to me. He warned me that the two things certain to prevent a person from being successful were women and money. “If you are too indulgent and greedy, you will get into big political trouble,” he said.

  Unlike parents and teachers in the West, who encourage children to stand out from the crowd, be confident, unique, and let their invidividuality shine, my parents insisted that I be ting hua or obedient and conforming, because “the gun will shoot the head of the flock.” Speaking from his own experience, Father warned me, “Don’t show off and be overly aggressive at school. Go with the flow. Otherwise, if anything goes wrong, you are likely to be a bigger target.”

  Time and again Father advised me to be humble, no matter what I might do in the future, and “walk with tail between legs.” He recounted the story of Zhang Liang, an ancient strategist, who met a gray-haired old man at a river bridge—in most of Father’s stories, the model is always a gray-haired old man—and the old man tossed his shoes onto the ground and ordered Zhang Liang to pick them up for him. Zhang did as he was told. The old man threw the shoes farther away. Zhang wanted to curse him, but his upbringing forbade him, so he fetched the old man’s shoes a second time. The old man noted Zhang’s humility and patience, and told him to be at the same spot the next morning. Zhang was late. The old man was upset and sent him home. Again the old man arranged a meeting, and this time Zhang gained his trust and he gave Zhang a book of military strategies that made him one of the great military strategists in China’s history. The point of the story, Father explained, was to respect others because you never know what special talents they might have.

  In the West, I see how parents lavish praise and encouragement on their children and put pictures of them on their desks. When their children fail, they comfort them and urge them on. This couldn’t be further from my own experience. My parents, like many in China at the time, believed that praise led to arrogance and that criticism encourages children to aim higher. Throughout my school years, my academic performance was among the best in the class. Never once did I hear my parents praise me. Each year, when I brought home my report card showing I had come in first, they would say, “Your class is tiny. There’s nothing special about it. In the real world, there are thousands of smart kids. You have no reason to be arrogant.” When I joined the school basketball team, Father said, “You’d better practice hard because you are too short.” In my teenage years, my mother would compare me to a neighbor’s boy. “He’s tall and good-looking. His mother doesn’t have to worry about his marriage. You are short and ugly. You’d better be talented; otherwise you won’t be able to find a wife.”

  The criticism sunk in; even now I can’t stand to look at myself in the mirror. As a teenager, my foreign language skills made me a bit of a novelty and many of Father’s colleagues wanted to meet me. I dreaded those meetings, afraid I would not be as good as they expected and would disappoint them. I came close to a nervous breakdown whenever I had any type of tests in school; I was sure I wasn’t smart enough to pass.

  My generation grew up in big families with limited resources. Many of us did not even know there was such a thing as birthday parties for children. If my parents happened to remember my birthday, I might get a boiled egg. We never had the luxury of private piano or violin lessons. In high school, I was a singer and a top runner. My parents never bothered to take time off to see me perform onstage or compete in races. Under the one-child policy, which came into force in 1979, children are treated differently now. Parents are overcompensating for what they lacked in their own childhoods. While her daughter was in senior high school, my younger sister, who felt neglected by my parents in her teenage years, gave up many of her social activities and stayed home every night to coach her daughter’s studies. A friend of mine specifically cut short his business trip recently so he could attend his son’s cello recital. I heard him call his son a genius after a rather good performance. In my days, the young man would have been told, “It’s nothing and go practice more.”

  Most of my Chinese friends swear that they will never treat their children the same way we were treated as children. Nonetheless, we never see our parental put-downs as a problem. A Chinese lawyer friend told me that our lessons in humility made us tougher psychologically, a reminder that there is nothing special about us and we need to always work harder. He is a vocal critic of the overly attentive way that parents treat their children in China nowadays. “China is turning into a nation of brats and weaklings,” he said. If Father were alive, he would probably utter similar sentiments.

  In the many ancient stories that Father shared with me, an important measurement of success was the imperial academic examination, the passing of which opened the way for senior posts at the imperial court. In modern times, the imperial examination came in the form of the National University Entrance Examination, an effective and highly competitive merit-based system, through which students of all economic strata could enter college. I eagerly awaited my turn, which came in 1982.

  In ancient times
, scholars needed to memorize the Confucian classics to pass the rigorous tests required to serve at the imperial court. Thanks to Chairman Mao’s anti-Confucius campaign, my classmates and I no longer studied the full Confucian classics, but our test was based on dozens of government-published textbooks on Chinese literature, history, geography, Marxist theory, and math. The emphasis was on rote learning, which discouraged students from being too creative and critical. “Our Party needs more obedient hard workers, not some troublemakers,” Father used to say.

  Since only a small percentage of high school graduates could enter college, our teacher lectured us with the well-known “devoting one Red heart and preparing for two outcomes” mantra, meaning that even if we failed the exam, we could still help with the social modernization program; everyone knew it was a lie. Those who failed would find it hard to land a job in a state-owned enterprise.

  Initially, I didn’t feel any pressure because I always found it easy to commit a textbook to memory and felt confident enough to play truant. In January, six months before the exam, I volunteered every other night to help a friend’s mother who had been hospitalized. My head teacher found out about this after my score had dropped to third place in the class during a mock test. Worried that I wouldn’t be able to gain honor for our school, he contacted Father, blaming him for not giving me enough attention. Father began to monitor me closely. On weekends, Father insisted that I go to study at his office, which was free of the distractions of TV and Mother’s loud conversations. He would lock the door from the outside and then came to “release” me after midnight. In the end, I could recite word for word the definition of the Marxist concept of “surplus labor” and the theories of how Communism was the gravedigger for capitalism, even though I barely understood what they meant. I can still recite the timeline of the American Revolution, from the Boston Tea Party and the battles of Lexington and Concord to the Declaration of Independence and the adoption of the Constitution. I didn’t know how such knowledge would make me a more capable Communist, and the only time I use it is when I am watching Jeopardy!