The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir

by Wenguang Huang

  I returned to Xi’an in July and spent the summer in a deep funk. I met with a friend who was among the protesters in Beijing when the massacre took place. He and other students had hurled stones and bottles in their futile attempt to block the rumbling tanks near Xidan, a busy shopping district in the city. Quite unexpectedly, some soldiers appeared from a side street on their left and started shooting at them. My friend immediately scrambled into an alley and cowered under a large garbage bin, but a flying bullet hit a young man running behind him; his stomach oozed blood. Fortunately, he and several passersby found a bicycle and wheeled the young man to a nearby hospital, where dozens of other wounded residents were being treated. He did not know if the young man lived or died. For days, my friend had problems sleeping. When I asked about the killings in Tiananmen Square, he did acknowledge that the government was technically correct in claiming that no students were killed in the square when the troops moved in, but he estimated that five to six hundred people were gunned down elsewhere in the city, disputing the exaggerated assertions by the Western media and some of the student leaders who had escaped to the West that “tens of thousands of people had died in Tiananmen Square and in other parts of Beijing.”

  Meanwhile, as part of the government’s efforts to cover up the bloody suppression, the media launched a nationwide propaganda campaign. On television, shots of the burned corpses of soldiers and the debris of damaged trucks and tanks were replayed again and again as evidence against those “hooligans and counterrevolutionaries.” On the streets of Xi’an, loudspeaker trucks broadcast the Party’s latest condemnation of the student leaders who wanted only to cause unrest in China. The propaganda worked. Neighbors and friends, who had been the students’ enthusiastic supporters, began to blame us for disrupting the stability of the country. Even my uncle, who had suffered severe beatings during the Cultural Revolution, embraced the Party’s decision. “You students were no better than the Red Guards,” he lectured. “It was necessary to put down the movement. Otherwise you would have plunged the country into chaos!” It felt like the start of another Mao era. I was angry and I was disappointed. I wrote to an American professor I had met in Shanghai a year before, expressing my desire to leave the country and escape the oppressive political environment. Occasionally, I began practicing meditation, fantasizing about spending the rest of my life in a monastery, free from worldly concerns. But Grandma and memories of Father kept me going and as her health deteriorated, I had little time to think about my future.

  We had feared the worst when Grandma woke the house with a burst of activity. She seemed lucid, recognized me, asked where Father was, and announced: “I’m going to cook for you. Your mother was always so mean to your father. I’m going to show her how to make noodles.” She had grabbed a cutting board and a knife before we could stop her, but my brother and I managed to get her back to her room, though she put up a struggle and tossed and turned for half an hour before she exhausted her strength and fell into a deep sleep. When I checked on her the next morning, she had no idea who I was and had barely enough strength to use the chamber pot. Dr. Gao said that sudden bursts of energy meant she would soon be dead, but again she survived the summer. Each morning, when I woke up, she was there sitting on her bed, blubbering senselessly to herself. I tended to her needs, feeding and bathing her, washing her clothes, cleaning up after her incontinence. I refused to give up, and even as she was struck with fever and was hooked up to IV drips by a friend from the hospital, I rubbed alcohol on her forehead and her back in an attempt to make her comfortable.

  Mother dismissed my effort as pointless. “You are only prolonging Grandma’s suffering,” she argued. “We should let her go.” I ignored her.

  When the fall semester started and it was time for me to return to Shanghai, Mother insisted I go. “It’s critical you go back to clarify your role in the student movement,” she said, and drew on her experiences during the Cultural Revolution. “If you are not there, others could dump all sorts of crimes on you and you will not be able to defend yourself.” Reluctantly, I left Grandma to Mother’s care and departed for Shanghai.

  The government continued to condemn the “counterrevolutionary riots” through editorials in the People’s Daily, and more people were arrested. Our class closed ranks and we protected one another. We were simply ordinary participants and had not engaged in any radical activity. Our teacher vouched for us. We wrote self-criticisms and that, it seemed, was that. We were not what many in the West called “prodemocracy” fighters. We were young and passionate, certainly, but we got involved in the protest movement for the excitement. We had no deep philosophical convictions. For my generation, the brutal crackdown was a rite of passage. Our belief system, based as it was on years of brainwashing, collapsed. We woke up from the illusion that we could change China from within the Communist system. It is not surprising that some of us have become fearless democracy activists. The extensive coverage of the massacre by the western media was good for the Chinese government too, because it realized it could not simply shut out the world and behave as if its actions had no consequences.

  Despite my busy schedule at school, Grandma was never far from my mind. November 30, 1989, was a Wednesday. I was unable to concentrate on my classes. Thoughts of Grandma kept popping into my head; they were happy thoughts. I skipped the afternoon political study session and went downtown to make a long distance call to my sister’s office. A stranger answered her phone: “Your sister is home today. Your grandma has died.”

  Surprised by my call, Mother dissuaded me from coming home for the funeral. It would be unwise to leave Shanghai at such a politically sensitive time, she counseled. She put two of Father’s friends on the phone and they said much the same thing. Mother said that Grandma had a peaceful death and that my brother and sisters were there when she died. She had lived to eighty-seven, a good age.

  For more than a decade, my family had prepared for that dreadful moment. Father spent the better part of his life working on the funeral, meticulously planning every stage, including a small secret open-casket wake inside our house for relatives, the transportation of Grandma’s body to Henan, and the organization of a traditional procession outside Grandma’s native village. He had personally designated pallbearers, drivers, grave diggers, and a host whose job was to deliver gifts to the village officials and smooth the way for Grandma’s burial. Mother had purchased a bolt of white linen back in the early 1980s for our mourning costumes. Father specifically included me in every phase of the preparations, claiming frequently that the son and eldest grandson were key players driving the funeral. Sadly, none of us was there.

  Ironically, Mother, who had constantly been accused by Grandma of sabotaging her burial, was left to take charge. Mother decided that, with Father gone and me away, it would be too difficult to get Grandma all the way back to Henan. We could wait until another time, she told me on the phone. I paused. I began to feel sorry for Grandma. For years, Mother claimed that if she had her way, she would bury or cremate Grandma in Xi’an. She certainly triumphed over Grandma. Being hundreds of miles away from home, I felt powerless to change the arrangement. Nonetheless, I was relieved that Mother honored part of Father’s promise by granting Grandma a proper burial in a plot of land that my brother-in-law had secured in his native village outside the city.

  To head off any potential gossip that, given the past acrimony, she had cut corners, Mother delegated her duties to an uncle on Father’s side of the family. A tent went up outside our building. The coffin was retrieved from the warehouse. Friends arrived to help Mother dress Grandma in the outfit that had been made for her fifteen years earlier. A steady stream of people came to pay homage. Mother was asked for token gifts—a piece of Grandma’s quilt or a hairpin—so people could pass on some of her luck and longevity to their children. Two strips of blue cloth from one of Grandma’s old shirts were set aside for my brother and me.

  The fune
ral was deliberately small; the police had been stopping large processions and sending them straight to the crematorium.

  At four o’clock in the morning, three vans and a truck arrived amid pouring rain. The coffin was loaded onto the truck. Mourners quietly boarded the vans without the usual wailing and urn-smashing ritual. The little convoy made good time on the empty streets and a policeman uncle asked the drivers to circle the landmark bell tower in the city center to give Grandma one last look at Xi’an, her home for half a century. The journey took less than two hours and the rain stopped as Grandma was laid to rest in a small cemetery near an abandoned brick factory three miles south of the city. My sister recalls that when a relative tried to hammer nails in the coffin, it took him several tries before he could drive them in. “Grandma doesn’t want to leave because her son and favorite grandson are not here to see her off,” he said to everyone.

  Father joined Grandma. The urn containing Father’s ashes, retrieved earlier from its niche in the crematorium, was buried separately near the bottom left corner of Grandma’s coffin. Father’s location, at the feet of his mother, meant the son would always be at his mother’s service.

  For months I had problems concentrating at school. I felt numb, only dully aware of my surroundings. In senior high school, a friend of mine lost her mother and an elder sister to cancer within six months of each other. I used to visit them every week at the hospital. It was not all altruistic. Misguided teenager that I was, I wanted to wallow in the Shakespearean glamour of her tragedy, and I welcomed the exciting possibilities of reinventing a life without one’s nagging parents. In comparison, I lamented my own life, boring and devoid of any drama—Grandma seemed to live forever and my parents were still in their prime. I didn’t know fate could be so brutal. When death struck my family, I cursed my youthful hubris. The feeling of loss and emptiness was acute and sharp, like the cutting of a kite string, as if my connection with home had simply ceased to exist.

  I did not speak to Mother. I did not speak to my siblings. During winter break, I went back to Xi’an and sat in Grandma’s room. It was apparent that Mother had already moved on. Grandma’s clothes, the bamboo basket that she had used to store all my treats, her walking stick, and her chamber pot were all gone. The mattress that I had bought for Grandma was now covered with a brand-new sheet. In fact, Mother cleaned out the room so thoroughly that I could not find a single thing that was distinctively Grandma’s. I was very tempted to vent my displeasure with what Mother had done, but considering it was my first day at home, I suppressed my urge.

  Father taught me that the dead never abandon the living; the spirits communicate their wishes through dreams. My atheist Communist upbringing and my education in science made me instinctively reject such beliefs as superstitious, even idiotic. But now I found them soothing. That night, I slept on Grandma’s bed, hoping she might come to me in my dreams and we could talk some more. She didn’t.

  The next day, Mother accompanied me on my first visit to Grandma’s tomb, which was in the shape of a small pyramid. We lit some stacks of fake money. “Your grandson is back,” Mother whispered. “Use the money to buy something nice for yourself.”

  As smoke spiraled into the gray winter sky, Mother swept the ashes while trying to justify her decision. “I don’t think Grandma would mind being close to her grandchildren. Now that she is close by, we can easily hop on a bus and pay tribute to her during holidays.” Seeing that I didn’t answer, she said, “Oh, well, if you don’t like it, you can still move Grandma back to her hometown after the traditional three-year mourning period.” I wasn’t sure. Like she said, Grandma might be happy here, with Father at her side.

  In January of 1990, I spent my first Lunar New Year without Father and Grandma. On New Year’s Day, I suddenly found myself without anything to do. I used to hate going with Father on those visits to uncles and aunties who had promised to help with Grandma’s funeral. Now I wished that Father was here to take me, even though it meant that we had to stay out late and miss the New Year’s concert on TV.

  18.

  INDEPENDENCE

  Mother was alone now. My sisters had married. My brother was busy with his girlfriend and I was busy with my studies in Shanghai. As the eldest son, my foremost Confucian obligation was to care for my mother, but I had my career to think about and did not intend to move back to Xi’an, where Mother planned to spend the rest of her life. In addition, following Grandma’s death, I still felt alienated from Mother. I think nothing scared me more than the thought of following Father’s path and having Mother by my side for the rest of her life and even after death. “Don’t worry, I’m not your Grandma,” she reassured me. “I have my pension and I have my friends. I’m not going to be a burden to any of you.” She was a fiercely independent woman, but I still felt guilty, probably because of how disappointed I imagined Father would be after the years he had spent trying to instill in me a sense of filial obligation.

  At the end of 1989, thanks to the American professor, I was accepted to a graduate program at a university in Illinois. After camping out in front of the American consulate in Shanghai for a whole night, I received my visa from a journalist-turned-consul, who was thrilled that I intended to pursue journalism in a free country. When it was time to tell Mother about my planned trip to America in February 1990, I didn’t know if she would allow me to leave. But she did.

  Barely a year after I arrived in the United States, I received a rushed telephone call from my younger sister. “Mother has a boyfriend,” she said. I could almost hear her calculating the astronomical cost of the call down to the second in those days before the Internet. “It’s Uncle Ma,” she said. “I’ll write more in a letter.” Then she hung up.

  Uncle Ma was an apprentice with Father in the early 1950s and, having grown up in the same province, they were “sworn brothers,” but over the years their friendship cooled. He had an important position inside the city government, and Father used to call him a snob and an opportunist. We heard that Uncle Ma had divorced, married again, and lost his new wife to cancer. He came to Father’s funeral and began stopping by now and then to inquire after Grandma’s health, but I was unaware of any interest on Mother’s part because she would try to avoid him during such visits, leaving me to entertain Uncle Ma while she dashed off on some forgotten errand. “A widow could easily become the target of vicious gossip,” she said. I thought she was being “feudalistic.”

  My older sister discovered the truth when she went to visit Mother at the hospital after a minor surgery and found her bed empty. The nurse said a man had taken her home. My sister called my brother, who said Mother wasn’t there. She phoned around; someone suggested that she try Uncle Ma. “I’m taking care of her here for a couple of days,” he said, in what my sister remarked was “measured casualness.” There was an uproar among the children of both families.

  “Father is turning in his grave,” my older sister said to Mother. “For a person your age, it’s shameless.” That was too much for Mother; tough as she was, she cried. My sister regretted her words but not her opposition to the relationship so soon after Father’s death. Uncle Ma’s children thought Mother was after their father’s money and refused to talk to her, let alone acknowledge her.

  Nowadays, the government openly applauds the union of a widow and a widower as practical, and Mother’s moving in with Uncle Ma would cause scarcely a ripple in an increasingly tolerant China. In 1990 it was still scandalous—probably not enough for Mother to be vilified at a Mao-era public denunciation meeting for being a “broken shoe”—a morally loose woman—but it was juicy fodder for neighborhood gossips.

  Women face a paradox in China. Chairman Mao said, “Women hold up half the sky.” They worked side by side with men in the factories and fields, and Mao called for the elimination of traditional moral values that contributed to inequality, but Confucianism has deep roots in China and it often was taken
to extremes. I remember that a young married couple was caught kissing in a secluded corner of a Xi’an park in the late 1970s. Security guards detained them, charged them with lewd conduct, and notified their companies before releasing them. Change came, but it arrived slowly. In 1983, after China had opened up to the West, a well-known actor was sentenced to four years in prison after neighbors reported that he had attended a private dance party at a friend’s home and had engaged in premarital sex with a young woman. In my faculty at Fudan University, our political counselor was tipped off that a sophomore was sneaking his girlfriend into his dorm when his roommates were out at the movies. The counselor caught them and both students were publicly denounced at our monthly all-student meeting; after graduation, they were assigned jobs in remote locations far from each other.