Um caixao na revolucao cultural chinesa - Wenguang Huang

Coming of Age In Mao's China

Michael Fathers

The Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2012

The Little Red Guard

By Wenguang Huang
(Riverhead, 262 pages, $25.95)

Death cannot be controlled by the party, but disposing of a body can. 

So the author's father built a coffin in secret at his mother's request.

If you are looking for a book that brings a corner of modern China alive—a book filled with humor, family squabbles and ordinary life in a large city in a one-party state—look no further than "The Little Red Guard." The focus of this delightful family memoir by Wenguang Huang, a Chinese-born writer now based in Chicago, is a simple wooden coffin that a lowly member of the Communist Party, the author's father, had secretly built for his mother in the mid-1970s, as a present for her 73rd birthday. She had been pestering her son for a coffin in preparation for her death, though she showed no sign of dying. The coffin, hidden by a tablecloth and painted with a fresh coat of black lacquer each year, became the family's unwelcome and dangerous guest.

Natural death cannot be controlled by China's Communist Party, but disposing of a body can. Burial is outlawed as a feudal, superstitious practice; cremation is considered modern and officially approved. But as Mr. Huang's grandmother keeps saying, if you end up as a jar of ash or the leftover dust from the bottom of a furnace, there is no way you can join your ancestors and loved ones on the other side in the next life.

Grandma Huang, ruling over her son, his short-tempered wife and their four children, emerges as one of the more memorable figures of modern memoir. Her parents, as we learn, were rich landowners. As was the custom, her feet were bound at the age of 6. Her husband and most of his family, also rich landowners, died when a tuberculosis epidemic swept through central China in the 1930s. Their farmland was flooded by the Yellow River, their livestock was taken by the invading Japanese and famine turned them into beggars.

Come 1949 and the communist victory, Grandma Huang and her young son were given the exalted status of "poor peasants." Their suffering, the author writes, turned out to be a blessing. Automatically they became members of the "true proletariat," and the opportunities of the new society were open to them and members of their family—a job in a factory, an education, housing, food rations, status.

The author of this memoir, the son of Grandma Huang's son, describes his father as a "poster child of the revolution." His photo was pinned on the factory notice board year after year as a model worker and later as a model Communist Party member. At one point Grandma Huang observes that, when the author's father was invited to his son's school to speak, it was a lucky thing that the family had lost its fortune before the revolution. "Otherwise," she said, "you could have been standing on the stage with a big dunce's cap to receive public denunciations."

When the violent, anti-bourgeois Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s arrived in Xian, the city in central China where the Huang family lived, Grandma Huang showed kindness toward its victims. She protected the children of her former landlord, a once prosperous jeweler. He was dragged away by the student Red Guards, paraded through the streets and vilified as an enemy of the people. Around this time, the title Little Red Guard was given to the author, the eldest son of the family, by his teachers because as a youngster he was a model pupil.

In public, the Huangs were a model family. In private they were constantly bickering—grandmother versus daughter-in-law, husband versus wife, younger son and daughter versus elder son and daughter. Grandma Huang's son, much to his wife's anger, set aside their puny savings for the expected costs of his mother's funeral. These included payments to distant relatives and minor officials to secretly transport her corpse in the coffin to neighboring Henan Province, where she was born. The coffin cost a small banquet of delicacies and the best rice wine for the carpenters who built it inside the Huang's two-roomed house over a weekend. Apart from Grandma, the family can't stop worrying that the illegally made coffin will undermine their revolutionary credentials, bring shame on them and lead to their downfall.

Oddly, "The Little Red Guard" is a very American book. The humor and the angst it contains are built around a dysfunctional family living in cramped accommodations in a big city. There are echoes of J.D. Salinger and his stories of the Glass family in New York. The usual run of Chinese memoirs, understandably, describe suffering, persecution and the fight to survive. The Huang family, because of its proletarian status, escaped the worst effects of Mao Zedong's policies, making their ordeals less dire though no less instructive.

When economic reform and the seductive breeze of political liberalization come to China in the 1980s, the author's cautious father tells his children that if they want to succeed they should be discreet. He urges his son, who is at Shanghai's Fudan University, not to waste his time on useless foreign books. When the son first reads Shakespeare, he thinks that the expression "to be or not to be" is taken from Confucius. His father tells him that asking for too much freedom can land you in jail. "If you are not careful the government could crush you like a bug." Not long after this warning, the student democracy movement was smashed apart at Tiananmen Square, though Mr. Huang's father did not live to see it.

In the end, it is the father who suffers as his world collapses. Toward the end of his life he was told by the Party that he was to be rewarded for devising a money-saving program at his state factory with promotion and a better wage. Instead the promotion went to the girlfriend of the local Party secretary, and the firm's bosses split his wage rise among themselves. Embittered and exhausted, he died of a heart attack in 1988, ahead of his mother. Thirteen months later Grandma Huang died. She never made it home to Henan Province, but lay in her coffin with the ashes of her son at her feet. Her funeral procession of three vans and a truck set off at 4 a.m. through Xian city to avoid the police to a burial site beside an abandoned brick factory.

Mr. Fathers is co-author of "Tiananmen: The Rape of Peking," an account of China's 1989 democracy movement.