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)
(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.
