The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir

by Wenguang Huang

  It was a profitable time for English teachers all over China, and Xi’an in particular. The unique attraction of its terra-cotta warriors made it a top destination for foreign tourists, who swarmed the streets. Locals soon realized that English was the key to joining this boom. High school graduates wanting a job in one of the many hotels popping up all over the city needed two things: to be at least five foot ten, an important measure of good looks; and have a basic understanding of English. They could do nothing about the former, but they were prepared to pay whatever it cost for the latter. Even the small vendors selling souvenirs wanted English training so they could say, “Cheap, cheap, ten yuan” for one mini-replica of terra-cotta soldiers. Thousands of college students were eyeing graduate schools in the United States and Europe, and competed for the limited number of exit visas the government allowed. Many government officials and company executives found that English was now a requirement for future promotion. As a result, language schools flourished. Even university professors and lecturers who had long held themselves as among the elite residents of the academic ivory tower could not resist the lure of money and anyone with a language qualification was soon “piggybacking” or moonlighting. As a Fudan graduate, I did not come cheap, and I was in such demand that I constantly missed my Wednesday political-study sessions. More than once I walked into a classroom late and taught for an hour oblivious to the fact that they were not my students.

  Years of Communist education became like the ancient artifacts inside the tombs of China’s emperors in Xi’an—they crumbled into dust if exposed too long to the open air. “Contributing your wisdom and efforts to the country’s modernization drive” for the country was replaced by earning big bucks for oneself and the Party’s influence faded. Like everyone in China, I dutifully followed the country’s new economic mantra—make money and get rich.

  Each payday, I would hand over a wad of cash to Father to lock in the old desk drawer for Grandma’s burial fund. “Didn’t I tell you to study hard and go to college?” Father would lecture my brother. “Without education, you will never make it big.” My brother shot back: “Aren’t you a model worker yourself? Didn’t Chairman Mao say the working class is the vanguard of the Revolution?” Father was at a loss for words. I could tell he was struggling with his belief in the Party. I earned in two months more than he made in a year. The inequality shocked him. Father was not alone in feeling betrayed by the system. He put away the red certificates he had earned over the years. He even took down the old portraits of Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai.

  More and more, the health of Grandma, now eighty-four, occupied Father’s mind. In the autumn of 1986, he put her on the back of his bicycle and pedaled to a hospital after seeing blood in her urine. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, but the doctor said that, given her advanced age, the tumor wasn’t life threatening and the surgery and chemotherapy would only make what was left of her life extremely uncomfortable. His prescription: “Let nature take its course.” We prepared for the worst. Three months went by and nothing happened physically, but we could tell she was losing her mental faculties and it was painful for me to watch this tough yet caring and considerate woman drift in and out of awareness. In those days, none of us had heard of Alzheimer’s. Father described Grandma’s condition in his own unique way. “Life is a cycle,” he said. “Grandma cared for you when you were a baby. Now that she has become an ‘old child,’ it is time to care for her.”

  Grandma had her lucid moments and she seemed to use most of them to either pester Father with her fear of death or obsess about my unmarried status; when would I make her a great-grandmother? When a girl I had grown up with came to visit one afternoon, Grandma found an excuse and joined her on the couch, looking her up and down. After she left, Grandma took my hand and said: “She has a big round face and big eyes. She’s good to marry. She looks like she can have many babies.” I laughed and lied that she was already married. When the girl called again the next day, Grandma refused to let her in. “My grandson is not home,” she said, and slammed the door. “Why did you do that?” I asked her. “If you are not going to marry her, why bother?” she said.

  As her mental condition deteriorated, any semblance of courtesy she had shown Mother in the past vanished. She kept up a stream of complaints, real and imagined: that she was made to sleep on the hard floor, though she had slept peacefully through the night on the new mattress I had bought her, and that Mother had paid a carpenter to prepare a coffin years before because she couldn’t wait for Grandma to die. In her mind, Mother was “heartless” and “mean” and she would rant without provocation to relative and friend and stranger alike. More disturbing was her belief that Mother was trying to steal me, her eldest grandson, last of the Huang line. She would wake at midnight and ask for me. If I was staying at the teacher’s dorm, she would scream and howl, cursing Mother for hiding me away. Neighbors would wake. Mother would be humiliated. Grandma would go back to sleep as if nothing had happened. “It’s easy for you to say,” Mother would protest when I urged her to stay calm. “The whole neighborhood thinks I’m an evil daughter-in-law.”

  In a culture where people never aired their dirty laundry in public, Grandma took her case to every passerby. She would scoop coins from a jar I used for small change and beg neighbors to buy her something to eat because Mother was withholding food from her. Without knowing Grandma’s mental condition, the daughter of a neighbor thought this venerable old woman was being mistreated and reported Mother to the neighborhood committee, which Mother used to chair.

  My elder sister moved Grandma to her apartment to give Mother a break and she behaved herself for the first day or so, but the balcony frightened her and we were summoned to come fetch her. As Mother joined my sister in the kitchen to prepare some lunch, Grandma, who was hovering close by, whispered to me: “Make sure your mother doesn’t steal anything from your sister.” I sighed.

  As she became bedridden, we children took over her bathroom needs and washed her clothes. When I hung out the laundry, neighbors would say, “What a filial grandson!” I never heard anyone praise Mother.

  Saddened by Grandma’s mental deterioration, Father started to fine-tune the funeral plan. Before the Lunar New Year in 1988, Father wanted me to visit those relatives and friends involved in Grandma’s funeral. “With Grandma’s situation, it’s important that you and I go together to show that we appreciate their help,” he explained. I had planned a trip with my students and told him, clearly, that I no longer wanted any part of those visits. Before he lost his temper, I had already bolted for the door. When I returned a week later, Father refused to talk to me. I secretly felt lucky to have finally escaped that chore. I did not know it was Father’s last New Year.

  16.

  LOSS

  On New Year’s Eve in 1988, Mother knit red belts for me and Father to wear to keep us safe from disaster. It was the Year of the Dragon, the birth year for both of us. With the previous Dragon Year, 1976, marked by the death of Mao and a devastating earthquake, everyone was unusually nervous.

  In February, Father had turned sixty. My older sister had planned to cook an elaborate dinner and invite close relatives over, but Mother was against the idea, saying it was unlucky to celebrate his longevity while Grandma’s health was increasingly in question. Instead, I took Father to Shanghai after the New Year. He told me that he had enjoyed travel before he was married, though I don’t think he ever went anywhere for pleasure after he began our family. “I had to focus my financial resources on raising you children and preparing for your Grandma’s funeral,” he said.

  In the spring, Father suffered a terrible setback at work. For two years, he had worked on a program to recycle scrap metal from the workshops and saved the company tens of thousands of yuan. The bosses were fulsome in their praise for his initiative and announced Father would get a promotion and raise. Instead, the promotion went to a woman who was a clo
se friend of the Party secretary and the company leadership split the savings among themselves. Father was less concerned about the “theft” than the humiliation.

  “Too many cadres use their positions of influence to enrich themselves at the expense of those they are supposed to serve,” said Father. It was hard to believe those harsh words came from him. He had also begun to act strangely, walking around the house, muttering to himself and outdoing Mother in comparing Communists and the defeated Nationalists: “The Communist Party won China because the Nationalists were too corrupt and had lost the support of ordinary folks. The more we reform, the more we seem to resemble the Nationalists.”

  I attempted to help him snap out of his funk. “The promotion was only worth 6.5 yuan per month. Why fuss over a small amount of money? I can give you some extra cash each month to make up for the loss,” I said. Father took great offense at what he perceived as my arrogant remarks: “You just don’t understand. It’s a matter of principle.” Feeling that my good intention was grossly misunderstood, I muttered the Chinese equivalent of “whatever” and ended the conversation.

  I too was unhappy in my work. I craved a change and pondered my next step. In the summer, while I was working as a tour guide at the Sheraton Hotel in Xi’an, an American left me a paperback to read and I knew what I wanted to do. The book was All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. We had been taught that Richard Nixon was the greatest president of the United States, and to learn that this was not so, that he was corrupt and that he was overthrown by a newspaper, was all deeply unsettling. Despite everything we had been taught, here was a political system in which a pair of reporters could bring down a president. I wanted to try journalism. Fudan University had a graduate-level international journalism program and I took the entrance examination. In April 1988, I received my acceptance letter. I thanked Mother for her red belt.

  Father’s situation, however, continued to decline. He had developed a nonstop cough sometime around May. He never smoked, which I think had something to do with a relative’s addiction to opium. Father had watched him smoke his family into destitution. Mother suggested tuberculosis, which had killed Grandpa and might have lain dormant in Father’s own lungs all this time. He attributed his cough to the thick lead dust that he inhaled at work. The company distributed masks and gloves, but like most of his colleagues, he seldom wore them and sold them to rural hospitals for extra cash. When the coughing kept him up all night long, Father would shake a bottle of herbal syrup, take a sip, and say there was nothing to worry about. After each new bout of coughing, his forehead would be beaded with sweat. He refused to see a medical doctor for fear that it could be cancer. Mother said he had developed a phobia about cancer after several of his colleagues went into the hospital and never came out again. Father’s position was that if he had cancer, he didn’t want to know. Even the word was banned in our house; it became “that disease.”

  “What are you afraid of?” I asked after his coughing brought an abrupt end to our lunch. “So what if you have cancer? Isn’t it good to find out sooner rather than later, so you can get treatment?” Father’s face went red and he started to shake and he asked me to stop. I had been mean, and I regretted my words. He set down his bowl and left the house, presumably to think, because he later asked me to find him a reliable doctor. I switched my classes with another teacher and took him to the hospital.

  Pneumonia was the initial diagnosis and he was relieved. He was given a course of antibiotics. I was relieved too and went back to school. A week later, his condition hadn’t improved and I took him back to the hospital. Further tests revealed cancer cells in his lungs. I took him to three different hospitals, desperately hoping the first diagnosis had been a mistake. The results were the same, as was the prognosis—advanced stage, no point in surgery. Localized chemotherapy might put off the inevitable, but it would not be pleasant. We tried to hide the diagnosis from him, but he learned the truth when he overheard the doctor discussing his case with an intern. Father’s whole world crumbled around him. Within weeks, his face took on a grayish hue and he grew terribly thin from the chemo. I couldn’t bear to see him suffer and turned to nontraditional medicine in hope of finding a cure, taking overnight trains here and there to consult with herbal doctors, after which we boiled herbs and mixed powders. We transferred Father to a more prestigious hospital in the hope of finding better doctors. We tried everything that friends suggested or had heard was effective. Mother even wrapped a toad in white linen and placed it over his lungs—the toad was supposed to suck the poison from his lungs. I had a morbid fear of toads and, under any other circumstance, would have thought the idea idiotic. Father’s health did not improve. Looking at photos of me from that time, I appear thin, skeletal. I forgot to eat and barely slept. At some point, my university gave me an award for “model teacher,” but I didn’t hear them call on me to stand as I had fallen asleep.

  Father’s absence made Grandma anxious and she clutched my hands the moment I returned from the hospital, asking if Father was still alive. Five minutes later, she would clutch my hands and repeat the question, as if I had just come home and not already carefully told her what I thought she should know.

  In September, it was time for me to begin my graduate studies in Shanghai. I thought I should stay because the doctors did not sound at all confident about Father’s prognosis, but he told me to go. “Your future is more important,” he said. “Your success will help with the fortunes of our family.” He snuck home the night I left to see me off. That night he also gave Mother the key to the desk drawer where he kept all his savings and papers.

  It was an exciting time to be in journalism. The media was attempting to move away from its traditional role as the Party’s mouthpiece to that of watchdog. Our university invited an Australian journalist to teach my class and we had speakers from well-known newspapers run by reformists. But I couldn’t focus. Father’s illness weighed heavily on my mind. I stayed in contact as best I could, monitoring the progress of this or that course of treatment, but the prognosis never changed.

  One night, I woke up from a nightmare about losing a tooth, which my dorm mate suggested signified death in the family. His interpretation kept me awake all night long. I called Father the next morning and he sounded fine. He was trying more alternative therapies. Our conversation was cut short by the arrival of a group of Christians who wanted to pray for his recovery. He said Mother had asked them over. Many of the old women in the neighborhood had begun attending church services after the Party relaxed its restrictions on religion. “But you’re a Communist,” I teased. “Didn’t Karl Marx say religion is spiritual opium to fool the people?” He replied, “If it helps me recover, I’m willing to take opium.”

  Three days later, a telegram was handed to me in the middle of an international conference—HURRY HOME. YOUR FATHER IS DYING. I caught the overnight train and was met at the station by a friend of Father’s, who had borrowed the company jeep. He said that Father’s heart had been weak since the previous day and that Father had begged the doctors to keep him alive until I arrived, glancing at the clock every few minutes and asking, “Is he here yet?” We drove fast, swerving in and out of traffic. I was breathless when I reached the ICU. Father was on oxygen. Numerous tubes ran into and out of his emaciated body. His hair was a dull, lank gray, long and unkempt. He recognized me and, as I sat beside him, he gasped through his oxygen mask. “The treatment doesn’t work. See if your friends can find a better hospital.” Those were his last words. Three hours later, he was in a coma. The doctor said that Father might struggle on for another day or two, but it was unlikely he would regain consciousness. He asked whether I would consent to withdrawing treatment rather than prolonging his suffering. Thinking how desperate Father wanted to live until he saw me, I struggled and waited for another day, hoping for a miracle to happen. As I sat down by him and saw his laborious breathing, I decided to take up the doctor
’s offer. I didn’t tell Mother of my decision, but warned her that Father would probably pass soon, maybe the following morning. “We must gather the family to see him off,” she said. “It is unlucky for a person to leave alone.” She talked as if we were sending Father on a trip to Beijing, and I became irritated by her talk of ritual and tradition. Mostly, I did not want a bunch of relatives crying and howling by his bed. I sent her home to make her preparations. My brother-in-law stayed and joined me in my vigil. After the doctor unplugged the tubes, I was racked with guilt until, overwhelmed by my thoughts, I sought out the doctor and pleaded with him to keep trying. But it was already too late; Father’s breathing quickened, his body twitched and fell still, the muscles of his face relaxed into the calmness of untroubled sleep.

  Father passed away on October 31, 1988, which I later found out was Halloween in America. As I wiped his cold, naked body clean, I sobbed. My brother-in-law was with me and pulled me aside and reminded me that it was taboo to shed tears on the body of a loved one, saying, “If he carries your tears to the other world, sadness will accompany him.” I was not a villager and deferred to his greater knowledge of tradition. Regaining my composure, we dressed him in the new clothes Mother had bought for him, gray trousers and a simple navy blue Mao jacket, which was appropriate for a Party member. To prevent us from taking his body home, two male nurses were notified immediately to take Father’s body to the hospital morgue from where we could collect it when arrangements had been made for his cremation. I stood in a daze, watching them push the stretcher toward the elevator door, the sound of the squeaking wheels echoing in the long, empty corridor. “He doesn’t want to go, he’s struggling to stay,” my brother-in-law murmured.