The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir

by Wenguang Huang

  Grandma was sitting on the couch, waiting for me when I got home the next morning. My siblings were out notifying relatives. Mother was being consoled at a neighbor’s house. Grandma had not been told that Father was dead, but she was having one of her lucid moments and knew something was seriously amiss. I did not want to be the one to tell her and asked a relative to come take her so we could plan Father’s wake. She moaned and struggled as we carried her out to a flatbed tricycle and peddled through the busy streets. At the relative’s house, she grabbed at my hands like a fearful child and begged me not to leave. There is a saying in China, and I think the sentiment is universal if in different words: “It is tragic for the gray-haired to send off the dark-haired.” I shared her grief, but I felt resentment too, because of the way she had manipulated him into spending the better part of his life planning her funeral and it sucked him dry until there was nothing left but his own corpse.

  On reflection, I am appalled at how badly I behaved after Father’s death. I was now the head of the family and determined, as if to punish him for his obsession with tradition, to strip his funeral of all ritual. “He lived like a model Communist Party member,” I said, “and so, according to instructions from the Party, we should proceed to Sanzhao Crematorium and be done with it.” I knew I was being unreasonable, but I was angry. Mother ignored me. “The Party allows people to have traditional wakes and funerals, as long as the deceased is cremated,” she said, and she glared at me. “Your Father would want this. I know him.”

  Relatives and neighbors argued over whether Xi’an or Henan custom should be followed for the wake and I reasserted my authority and declared that, as a Xi’an native myself, we would follow local tradition. The apartment was stripped of all decoration, including Grandma’s antique mirror and a poster of a movie star my sister had put up in the living room, and all the furniture was draped in black. A grainy photograph of Father was placed on a table, with an incense burner and five small plates of fruit and cookies around it. In the picture, which had been taken for his upcoming retirement, his hair looked untidy and his eyes sad, as if he had already foreseen his fate. Someone brought white linen shirts for me and my siblings. I refused to wear mine, but agreed to a long white headband. Relatives and friends came, some sobbing or wailing, and bowed before his portrait and burned a slip of coarse yellow paper in an urn, a symbolic offering to the next world.

  The Party secretary of Father’s company came in, followed by the trade-union chairman. They delivered a big wreath and shook hands with everyone, saying that Father was a good man and a model Party member. I nodded through my cynicism. I was supposed to negotiate with the Party secretary to conclude any unfinished business of Father’s, which included the transfer of my brother from a small textile cooperative to Father’s state-run company. “You are the oldest son,” Mother said when I tried to get out of the duty. “With your father gone, you will be the one to take care of your siblings.” This was difficult for me—at age twenty-four, I did not feel prepared for such a big responsibility and when it came time to speak, all our rehearsal was for nothing. I could only stammer, as I had when I was a child. Mother took over and succeeded in settling Father’s affairs to our advantage. Before the company representatives left, the trade-union chairman requested I say a few words after the Party secretary’s eulogy. As Mother nodded vigorously in agreement, my mind went blank.

  More than two hundred people came to Father’s wake, and wreaths filled the first-floor corridor and spilled outside. “Your father was a good man, laoshi, a filial son.” Every visitor began with those words. Laoshi loosely translates as “genuine and honest.” Mother had often called Father laoshi, but as is typical of so much in Chinese, words have many meanings; when she said laoshi, it meant “weak and incompetent.”

  I didn’t know what to think of Father. I needed to say something, but the words wouldn’t come to me. I had written self-criticisms for classmates, drafted applications for Party membership, penned important speeches for others to deliver. I knew all the political jargon, the right combinations of words that expressed deep regret without sounding insincere or making promises that sounded empty. I could make Party members sound as though Communism had taken root in their very being. For Father, I had nothing. I could blame years of Communist indoctrination for inhibiting the free expression of personal feelings. But I think it was the arrogance of youth. I couldn’t deliver a talk without feeling disdainful for what I considered the trivial life Father had led and without offending the Communist Party which he had faithfully served.

  For most of his life, Father worked without complaint as a warehouse manager, taking pride in being recognized as a model Communist by his company and as a filial son by his neighbors. He married Mother at twenty-eight and raised four children, doing his part to revive the Huang line that was almost wiped out by disease, flood, and war. As the only surviving child, Father took care of Grandma all his life. For years, he was thankful for a stable life untouched by the worst of the political turmoil of his times. But for all his loyalty to the Party, when China was freed from the radical ideological control of Chairman Mao and began slowly to prosper, he and millions of workers, the vanguard of the proletariat who underwrote Communist China, were left behind, confused and disillusioned. He died because his lungs had been scarred by years of exposure to industrial pollutants, his heart broken by the unrealized 6.5-yuan promotion and the depth of corruption that had twisted the ideals of the Party he had supported.

  I struggled with the speech, hoping that the bitterness would evaporate and inspiration would hit me at the last minute.

  The night before the cremation, I was supposed to carry Father’s picture and lead my siblings around the neighborhood, chanting and wailing to call his soul back for a final “reunion” before sending him off to the other world, which I did, but only under protest. At the main crossroads, a relative chalked a circle on the footpath and placed within it stacks of fake money that he set alight while calling Father’s name. “Come back, Zhiyou, your children are here to greet you. We’ll see you off tomorrow morning. Have a peaceful trip. Don’t worry about your mother and your children. They will be well taken care of.” As the flames danced in the air and the autumn wind scattered the ashes, the relative turned to me and said excitedly, “Look at the flames. Your father is here to collect the gifts.” I nodded, but as the crowd began another round of wailing, I wanted to laugh at all this absurd ritual. Fortunately I did not have to carry a bamboo pole with a long strip of white paper tied to it at the procession, which I dreaded doing as a child. For the cremation itself, I was handed the urn containing the ashes of all those yellow slips of paper burned during the wake. I was supposed to smash the urn when the procession reached the crossroads. The urn symbolized the body that had contained Father’s spirit in this life; breaking it would liberate him so he could be reincarnated. The urn broke into many small pieces.

  At the crematorium, I was surprised by the size of the turnout; so many friends and colleagues had come. Father’s body was inside a glass case on the podium. When he was alive, I had never seen his face look so peaceful. An uncle of mine had shaved his beard that morning before we moved him from the morgue but had missed a couple of spots on his left cheek. When the loudspeakers blaring Communist funeral music fell silent, the trade-union chairman asked everyone to bow three times to Father’s body and the Party secretary read from a sheet of paper: “While many people became distracted at work and focused their energy on outside opportunities to make themselves rich, Comrade Huang remained dedicated and found ways for the company to save money . . .” And so on. His speech was long, but it seemed to take but a moment to deliver and then it was my turn to speak. I panicked, nothing came to my mind. A good friend nudged me and whispered, “Just bow and say ‘thank you,’” which I did and kept my eyes on the floor as I walked back from the podium, unable to face the crowd. There was a long silence before the trade-union ch
airman stepped in and announced, “Let’s line up and pay last tribute to Comrade Huang.”

  Mother never allowed me to forget my shame. She would tell me about every funeral she attended: how this eldest son—and she’d pointedly remark that he had never attended university—told stories about his deceased father that made everyone cry; or how a young woman had sung her father’s favorite operatic aria and there was not a dry eye to be seen. Making people cry was her gold standard for a good eulogy. I would roll my eyes in contempt at her tactics, the knife of guilt plunged deep into in my heart.

  One of Mother’s cousins brought two bottles of liquor and two cartons of cigarettes to bribe the crematorium workers to make sure they emptied the furnace without mixing Father’s ashes with those of others, as was common in Xi’an. We placed the remains in a wooden cinerary urn in the shape of an ancient palace. A young female custodian in charge of storage pointed at the rows of beehivelike wooden shelves and picked a niche on the bottom shelf, saying, “It’s good to place it lower. It will make it easier for your father to step out and visit you.” She was so earnest and spoke with such seriousness that I wanted to laugh, but her words were comforting.

  As I opened Father’s drawer at home and sorted through his papers, I made a pile of the considerable correspondence relating to Grandma’s funeral, looking for a clue that might lead me to understand why he had become so obsessed about something his mother would never know had happened. How futile his efforts had been, this superstitious belief that he could somehow reunite Grandma and Grandpa and harness the blessings of our ancestors—where lay the blessing in his premature death?

  I asked Mother if she had instructions from Father about Grandma’s burial. She shook her head. Grandma’s funeral never came up in his final days. “Like your Grandma, Father didn’t want to talk about death,” Mother said. “He didn’t even mention Grandma.” Mother recalled that Father missed home and was very concerned about Grandma when he was first hospitalized. He would walk Mother to the entrance like a little boy and longed to come home with her. Against the doctor’s advice, my sister arranged for a company car to bring Father home for a weekend. As Father rested up, he saw Grandma wobble around in her demented state and grab the food that friends had brought over as if nobody had been present. Father cried, saddened by Grandma’s dementia and his own helplessness. The next morning, he asked to be sent back to the hospital and never mentioned going home again. Before his death, Father mentioned Grandma one more time, saying his mother’s karma was too strong. “I think your father couldn’t understand why cancer would hit him so early. I guess he resented the fact that Grandma had controlled his whole life and after everything he had done, she would outlive him.”

  When a company official visited Mother after the funeral to ask if there was anything the family needed, Mother told him about Father’s wish that Grandma be returned to Henan after she died for a traditional burial. Would the company help transport the coffin? The official thought for a moment and, presumably content that the burial would take place in another province and was beyond the company’s jurisdiction, said, “That shouldn’t be a problem.” He was probably relieved that the company got off so lightly.

  Grandma did not recognize me when I went to fetch her after the funeral. She didn’t seem to recognize anyone, nor did she seem familiar with her surroundings. An elderly neighbor told me that Father must have taken her soul with him. Grandma’s care was left to Mother and my sisters. Father’s death softened Mother’s attitude toward Grandma; my sister said she had heard Mother whisper to Father’s body during the funeral that she would continue to take care of his mother and give her a proper send-off.

  As eldest son, I felt responsible for ensuring that Father’s wishes be carried out, and the weight of that responsibility spilled over to my dreams, in which Father became a regular visitor. I started to pay attention to what they might mean in the real world. One of those vivid dreams started when Father came in to our house and attempted to take Grandma away. I grabbed Grandma’s legs, begging Father to drop her. “Let me take care of her,” I screamed. Father paused for a few seconds and said, “Okay, I will let you have her for one year.” Without hesitation, Mother offered her interpretation: “Your father will be back to get her in a year.”

  17.

  REVOLUTION

  Until 1989, the Qingming Festival in April meant little to us. It is the day when families attend to the tombs and graves of the dead, a venerable and deeply felt practice that even the Party had made no serious attempt to challenge. Father’s passing had imbued the day with new significance. Mother planned a small ceremony at a memorial park near the crematorium. As it was the first time our family had observed the ritual, I took the long train ride home, motivated by the desire to see Grandma rather than by any significant loyalty to Father’s memory.

  My thoughts were about death and its significance as I returned to Shanghai on April 15, which is perhaps why I listened so intently to the radio broadcasts announcing that former Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang had died of a heart attack. I was no fan of Hu’s overexuberant manners, and I was sympathetic to Father’s distress when Hu abruptly invited three thousand young Japanese to visit China in a gesture of goodwill and friendship. The presence of so many Japanese triggered bitter memories of the Chinese suffering at the hands of the Japanese invaders during World War II. Beijing may have wanted rapprochement with Tokyo, but the Party propaganda machine still had a lot to do to convince the country to forget the consequences of Japanese imperialism.

  On the Fudan campus, Hu was seen as a reformist leader who, unlike many of his conservative rivals, advocated a more open government with an independent judiciary and an independent press. That caught my attention; at the time I was wrestling with the meaning and significance of an independent press in a country as large and complicated as China, where individual freedoms were nonexistent. More important, I was told by my fellow students that Hu was free of the taint of corruption and had wanted concerted efforts to rein in inflation, which many attributed to speculation and profiteering by the children of Party officials. The information changed my view of Hu. Personally, I felt very concerned about the direction of the economic reforms.

  At that time, China was moving deeper into its economic transition, but runaway inflation sent waves of panic across the country. Rice, flour, and even big electrical appliances became scarce as people turned their increasingly worthless paper money into tangible assets. When goods ran out and prices soared higher, the children and relatives of senior Party officials were blamed for abusing their power and manipulating the marketplace. “All the money we saved over the past twenty years for Grandma’s funeral is probably not enough to buy a color TV now,” said Father, when he was in the hospital. He sighed a long sigh, one of futility and helplessness. It is a sigh etched in my mind. Memory of Father’s reaction compelled me to join the demonstrations.

  There was revolution in the air in the weeks following Hu’s death, and the government was unprepared for the protest movement that coalesced in cities around the country. At Fudan University, students stopped attending classes, and demonstrations and rallies, many seemingly spontaneous, brought daily life to a standstill. From my perch on a high window overlooking the crowds in downtown Shanghai, it looked and felt like a revolution, and I was gripped with the urge to join those at the front, but Father’s words sounded clearly in my head: “Don’t be a show-off; the gun will shoot the head of the flock.” I refrained, even though part of me could not help feeling disappointed at my cowardice. In May, a graduate student in the law department came to me with a white headband and asked me to join a hunger strike. He had grown up in Xi’an’s rural hinterland and had never struck me as a firebrand. I declined. When I brought him water and a blanket out of concern for his health and safety, I could not find him among the hunger strikers. That evening, I spotted him at the student cafeteria. “I
was so hungry. I’m not going to lose my health for those bastards in the government.” He was back among the hunger strikers the next morning. Though there were clearly many issues that needed to be addressed, ordinary people gradually lost interest as the government in Shanghai scared them with scenarios of food supply interruptions if chaos occurred. Students like me continued to draw inspiration from the experiences of former Red Guards, who described traveling all over the country in the name of spreading the Revolution. I got caught up in the excitement and traveled to Beijing, where the focus was the vast Tiananmen Square, which was filled with people from out of town since most of the local students were experiencing “protest fatigue” after camping out for nearly a month and had returned to campus. I stayed with friends and heard about all the inside bickering within the student leadership ranks. Nobody seemed to have a clear direction. Disillusioned, I left Beijing on June 1 and returned to Shanghai with the idea that we might be able to generate new momentum by following Chairman Mao’s path and mobilizing workers on strike.

  As children, we were fed stories about how much the army loved the people and how much the Party cared for us. Though we expected the government to retaliate, and were confused about why it had not done so, none of us had foreseen the events of June 4, 1989, when the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on the people it was supposed to protect. News of the crackdown reached Shanghai. We were in shock. Father used to describe me as “a young cub who hasn’t tasted the fear of death.” That was exactly true. We took to the streets carrying lanterns to symbolize the darkness into which China had been plunged. I wore a white headband and we held banners denouncing the Communist Party’s brutality. Bus drivers abandoned their vehicles, blocking roads to disrupt the advance of any military forces that might be sent into Shanghai. Since the Party imposed a news blackout for the next three days, ordinary citizens had no idea that many students and residents in Beijing had been killed by government troops. My classmates and I turned to our portable shortwave radios and learned from the BBC and Voice of America what had truly happened in Beijing. One of my teachers, an Australian, gave me a copy of Hong Kong’s English-language newspaper, which carried pictures of wounded protesters soaked in blood on the streets of Beijing, and we made copies and papered the streets around the university to expose the government brutality. I climbed atop a bus and called on workers to strike. I was aware I might later be punished for my actions, but nothing happened. Perhaps no one heard me, perhaps no one thought my actions serious enough to bother reporting. I was not among the “counterrevolutionaries” rounded up in mid-June as the government launched its nationwide crackdown on dissent. Two organizers from my department were arrested. Fearing that I could be a target if I stayed, I hid a cache of pictures and pamphlets and left the city to visit a friend in the mountainous Shaanxi region, traveling by boat and bus to avoid police patrolling the trains. I thought I was safe when, at the train station where I was supposed to meet my friend, I was stopped by uniformed railway police, who seized my luggage and marched me to a nearby office. My legs were shaking; it was hard to breathe; and I was worried I might pee my pants. I heard loud laughter—it was my friend; the uniformed police were students of his and they were all amused at the success of their little joke. “I thought you were a tough revolutionary,” he said. “I guess I was wrong.”