The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir

by Wenguang Huang

  With the onset of the winter, I began missing Grandma. At Christmas, our teacher assigned us the Bible as a work of great literature since many of the books covered in the curriculum contained biblical references. I found the biblical tales fascinating. I attended several Sunday services at an Anglican church and found the Christian idea of the heaven that exists after death to be soothing. If Grandma accepted Christian faith, knowing that she might ascend to such a heaven, she would not be as scared of death as she was then, I thought.

  I stayed with a British couple in Oxford over the holiday. Both the husband and wife were teachers. They were my parents’ age and had two children. There were lively discussions of politics at the dinner table, and the parents allowed their children to express their opinions, something we were not permitted to do at home. In the face of such lively challenges, I think Father would have been too scared to speak. The couple liked to take walks and I went with them. The couple held hands as they walked, occasionally kissing each other affectionately or snuggling in closer for warmth. I thought of my own parents, who had never showed even the smallest sign of intimacy. Marriage was just a work unit for taking care of the old and raising children.

  Even though I had often voiced skepticism about the Communist ideology while I was in China and had avidly read many Chinese government–banned books and magazines written by dissidents overseas at my university library in the UK, I turned nationalistic in the presence of my British classmates and friends. Years of indoctrination by the Party could not easily be undone. At dinners or parties, in any group gathering, I heard myself fiercely defending China and Communism in the face of what I perceived to be the arrogant and prejudiced views of British colonialists. When the daughter of a wealthy British businessman in Hong Kong railed against the decision in 1984 by the British government to return Hong Kong to China in 1997, I forgot Father’s advice and got into a loud argument with her. She had said the ordinary people of Hong Kong, Britain’s last colony, were happy with the status quo. “How would you know what ordinary people in Hong Kong want?” I said. I might have had a glass of wine or two; I was rarely so bold. “You rich capitalists live in rich secluded areas above the masses. What gives you the right to speak on behalf of the ordinary people in Hong Kong?” Some of our fellow students applauded; others remained silent. After the military was sent into Tiananmen Square in June 1989, my earlier nationalistic take on the Hong Kong handover changed; I became concerned about the erosion of civil liberties on the island.

  My views sometimes put me in a difficult position during my stay in the UK. As head of the Communist Youth League, I was designated as leader for our small group, which mostly meant delivering thanks on behalf of our group for any generosity bestowed on us or courtesy extended to us. We all saw ourselves as representatives of China, not as individuals. When a member of our group wanted to return a camera he had bought after trying it out for two weeks, he was so worried that the manager might think badly of the Chinese people that he pretended to be Japanese, even though the sales slip stated he was within his rights under the store’s return policy. When one of our students got drunk and made a fool of himself at a party, the others woke me and insisted that I go get him so he didn’t “embarrass the Chinese people.” I went and apologized on his behalf, but was met with puzzled looks and more than one person said gently, “Hey, he’s just having fun.” I wonder sometimes at the depth of my innocence and how others must have perceived me—as a Communist spy, maybe.

  I was invited by some British friends to see the film 1984, starring John Hurt and Richard Burton. What I saw was another example of western propaganda against Communism and disliked it intensely. When I read George Orwell’s classic twenty years later, I was struck by its enduring significance and—with its having been published in 1949, the year the Communist Party took control of China—its prescient portrayal of totalitarian rule.

  Upon my return to Shanghai in 1985, I wrote a report to the department, and essentially to the Party, praising our host country’s remarkable culture and the abundance of material wealth and advanced technology. At the same time, I criticized the disparity between rich and poor; attributed the large number of punks—the influence of which still resonates—to the decadent bourgeois lifestyle; and used the conflicts in Northern Ireland to justify China’s control of Tibet. I said nothing about the political, social, and cultural freedom, nor did I mention how I longed for the day Chinese television could broadcast programs poking fun at our leaders without someone being jailed or executed.

  Father was thrilled that I didn’t defect and relieved to perceive that my thinking had not been poisoned by my exposure to the West. He was prouder still that I had saved some of my stipend and bought him a Japanese-made color TV, which was not available to ordinary families in China. I gave Grandma a box of Twix chocolates, which she hid for months until they all melted. I bought Mother a sweater, but when she put it on, she noticed a small hole—I had bought it at a Christmas sale—and, embarrassed, I told her to throw it away. She wore it the next day, discreetly covering the hole as she showed it off to friends.

  While I was in the UK, my older sister was married. With the austere Mao era behind us, my parents were adamant that the wedding follow the traditions and customs of Henan, similar to what we would do with Grandma’s funeral. Since my sister protested, citing that she was a Communist Party member and grew up in Xi’an, mother and daughter consented to a compromise. My sister was married in what she described in her letter to me as a mixture of Mao-era simplicity and “strange” old traditions.

  Since the wedding took place on a Sunday and all the neighbors would be present to watch the wedding procession, Mother advised my brother-in-law not to cut corners on gifts to our family and demanded that he borrow a car, a rare luxury in those days, to transport the bride and other relatives to the ceremony. She did not want to lose face in front of our neighbors.

  Tradition dictated that the ceremony take place before noon (afternoon weddings are for second marriages). The groom showed up in his navy blue suit. He had managed to borrow an old beat-up jeep and a bus, and, based on Mother’s instructions, ostensibly carried four types of gifts for the neighbors to see—two bottles of expensive liquor and two cartons of expensive cigarettes for our family, even though Father did not smoke or drink. He also bought a kilo of beef (taking a daughter away is like taking a piece of flesh from the mother) and a kilo of lotus roots (a play on the Chinese wedding phrase “separated but still connected”). My younger siblings blocked the entranceway and hid my sister’s shoes. The groom had to beg his way through with bribes of money in red envelopes. Inside the house, the groom knelt down in front of Grandma and my parents, thanking them for raising my sister. In return, Mother followed a Xi’an tradition by presenting him with four poached eggs in a bowl. The eggs had been mixed with hot peppers, sugar, vinegar, and bitter herbs, representing all the flavors in life—sweet, sour, bitter, and spicy. The groom cringed but swallowed them down, showing that he was willing to take on all the flavors in life with my sister. Then Mother quietly tucked into my sister’s hand a red envelope containing all the money that was supposedly given to the family by the bridegroom, and asked her to keep it as rainy-day cash.

  The groom “snatched” the bride, who was dressed in a red polyester suit, and drove off in the jeep. Friends and relatives were bused to the ceremony, officiated by the Party secretary from my brother-in-law’s company. Bowing to the groom’s parents and company officials, the couple vowed to be a “harmonious revolutionary couple.” His family paid for the wedding banquet that followed.

  By the end of the evening, the newlyweds breathed a sigh of relief that it had all gone smoothly, free of complaints from Grandma and Mother. On their beds, they found peanuts and dates to symbolize “giving birth to both boys and girls early.” With the one-child policy, it was really wishful thinking, but my sister didn’t disappoint. Soon after I returned
home from the UK, she gave birth to a boy.

  Things were changing fast. English was becoming a valuable skill in the new era, not least of all in Xi’an, which began opening to foreign tourists in the late 1970s. Initially, Westerners had to stay at a couple of government-designated hotels, such as the People’s Hotel, a Soviet-style domed building constructed in the 1950s. They were confined to visiting particular designated sites: the terra-cotta warriors; a school filled with “happy” children dancing and singing revolutionary songs; and “friendship stores,” where they could buy silk, rugs, and traditional ceramics, with hefty markups and priced in “foreign exchange certificates.” We children were taught to report any foreigner we saw wandering the backstreets, taking pictures. We were told those Westerners wanted to tell lies about China. Even so, I would secretly hang around the People’s Hotel and try to strike up conversations with tourists to practice my English. Each time I got someone talking, we would be surrounded by curious onlookers, most of whom had never heard this strange language. It wasn’t long before someone reported to the school that a classmate of mine had accepted gifts and asked a Japanese man to buy his father foreign-brand cigarettes at the friendship store. We were banned from the People’s Hotel because we had made the government lose face by begging foreigners to buy cigarettes.

  By the early 1980s, people had grown more comfortable with the presence of foreign tourists. Associating with them was no longer considered dangerous, and they afforded many opportunities for an enterprising local. Father remained prudent, his customary position whenever rules were relaxed in China. “If the policy changes, your connections with foreigners would ruin the political careers of your siblings,” he warned me.

  In the summer of 1985, an English woman who taught at my university wanted to come to Xi’an with me to see how “ordinary people” lived. Father, after much prodding, talked to the company’s Party secretary, who became worried that the relatively poor conditions of our residential complex might tarnish the glorious image of our new socialist China. He recommended I host my teacher at a fancy restaurant downtown, so I lied to him and said the real interest of the teacher was the company because she wanted to learn about socialist production. The Party secretary swallowed this and ordered all the workshops cleaned and walls painted, and hung a big poster at the entrance, saying WELCOME OUR FOREIGN FRIENDS TO OUR FACTORY AND OFFER GUIDANCE. My family was moved, temporarily, to a big apartment in a newly constructed building and one of our new “neighbors,” a chef, dropped by to prepare a sumptuous meal. The Party secretary and a group of people I hardly knew showed my teacher around the company. Out of politeness, she feigned interest and asked many questions; her hosts were delighted.

  Mother liked the new apartment and refused to move out until the company found us a bigger place to live. The company’s housing committee rejected her request, but Mother wouldn’t give in. Noticing that several neighbors had been assigned new apartments after wining and dining key housing committee members, Mother chose to follow suit, but Father was reluctant to participate, saying that he didn’t drink and wouldn’t know how to entertain those officials, most of whom were big drinkers. Mother recommended I sit at the table to assist Father. On Mother’s insistence, he acquiesced and promised to invite his supervisor and the housing officials over a week after the Lunar New Year. Mother spent a bundle on liquor and meat. The table was set and Father came back with six guests—all of whom were his friends, and none had anything to do with housing. Mother’s face turned ashen. “I tried inviting my boss and other company officials, but no one was available. I didn’t want your efforts to be wasted,” Father explained after Mother had pulled him into the kitchen. “Besides, all these friends have promised to help with the funeral plan.” Mother almost screamed at him. “All you remember is your mother’s funeral. I guess we’ll be stuck living in a pigsty for the rest of our lives.”

  Seeing that she could not rely on Father’s support, she set out on her own, pestering individual housing committee members every week until they avoided her like the plague. Her relentless maneuvering paid off and, in the spring of 1985, we were assigned a two-bedroom unit on the first level of a different building with indoor plumbing. Grandma’s chamber pot, once borne with a degree of honor to the communal latrine each night, was ditched, but there was no place for her coffin. Father, who had remained neutral during Mother’s housing campaign, redeemed himself by moving the coffin to a discreet corner of one of the company warehouses, shielded from view by stacks of bricks. Grandma applauded the idea, saying that she did not have to be reminded of her funeral every day.

  In 1986, I graduated from the university and became an employee of the government, which reasoned that, having paid for our education, it was entitled to assign graduates jobs until it got back its investment. Before graduation, I was approached about working as an assistant in foreign affairs for an important Communist leader. If I did well, it would put me on the fast track for a career in politics. I telephoned Father and he responded without even a pause. “No,” he said. “If that Communist leader falls from his position, your future will also be ruined.” He had me turn down the assignment and that left me with only one option, which was to return to Xi’an to teach at a local university. Father’s stance cost him: The children of several colleagues landed more glamorous jobs in Beijing and he lost his bragging rights, but he liked that I was home.

  Xi’an was a bastion of conservative ideas—many of Mao’s veteran revolutionaries held power there—and it surprised me that, in 1986, it was among the first in the inland regions to embrace the economic and political change that was sweeping the nation. People became obsessed with zuo sheng yi, “doing business,” or as Father translated it, “speculation and profiteering.” In his eyes, it was the black market dressed up in gray. Mother regaled me with tales of neighbors who had made fortunes engaging in new capitalistic ventures: The second son of Mr. Hou had gone to the southern city of Guangzhou and brought back several hundred color TVs and refrigerators, which he sold to retail stores in Xi’an. His mother now wore twenty-four-karat gold and boasted about her son all the time. Father interrupted: “If everyone is selling stuff, who’s manufacturing it?” Mother ignored him. Father’s niece sold dumplings and noodles in the Red Lantern District—a vibrant night market that sprang up selling all sorts of Xi’an specialty foods—and made more money at night than she did working her hotel day job. “Your father is so stubborn and incompetent,” Mother complained. “He won’t do anything.”

  Like Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika in Russia, China introduced market reforms in the mid-1980s by first easing price controls on food and vegetables. The measures led to many problems. “You go out in the morning and the tomatoes are twenty fen a kilo,” Mother said. “You go back in the afternoon, the price is thirty fen. What kind of system is this?” She reminded Father that the Communists used to condemn the unbridled inflation of Nationalist rule in the 1940s. Who is creating inflation now? Father told her not to complain, but I could tell he shared her sentiment.

  Everyone was doing business because Deng Xiaoping said, “Getting rich is glorious”—everyone that is, except my brother. A former classmate of mine quit his job at Father’s company, went to the coastal cities to purchase trendy clothes, and resold them at a clothing market downtown. He asked my brother—he had a flair for such things—to go into business with him, but Father intervened, threatening to disown him. “Don’t try to embarrass the family. You don’t know how lucky you are to have that job with an iron rice bowl. Those swindlers will be caught sooner or later.” My brother became a top manager at Father’s company in the late 1990s, but the iron rice bowl was broken and the company went bankrupt after state subsidies were withdrawn. He runs a small spin-off company salvaged from the rice-bowl wreckage, but he still blames Father for ruining his chance to be his own man.

  Father was entering his phase of complacency; he could breathe a little easier
now that his four children were making their own lives. My younger sister worked as an archivist after graduating from night college; my elder sister excelled in her job; I was a teacher and raking in money moonlighting as an English tutor; my brother, though often the target of Father’s frowns, was at least working.

  I accepted my fate and eased into my new job at a teacher’s university. Most of my students had grown up in the rural areas in the northwest and had seldom ventured out of their province. They looked up to me—someone who had studied in Shanghai and the UK—as their window to the world. In my Introduction to the English Literature class, I talked to a roomful of more than seventy students about Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, and even George Orwell. For my Western Culture class, I showed them the tapes of Hollywood movies such as The Godfather and played the recordings of Beethoven’s symphonies. The department’s Party secretary said I was straying from preprepared teaching material and switched me to introductory English language teaching, but my students staged a ministrike and got me back.