The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir

by Wenguang Huang

  Things changed fast. By the time I left for the United States in 1990, my brother’s girlfriend frequently stayed overnight at our house and the neighbors found nothing in their lifestyle worth gossiping about. Young people did little that surprised them, but for Mother’s generation, it was as if time had stood still. The neighborhood wasn’t short of widows or widowers, but no one remarried, let alone got divorced.

  Apparently Mother and Uncle Ma began seeing each other soon after Father’s death. Mother had started a small grocery store in our building. She craved companionship. Although she was a dutiful member of the neighborhood sewing group that made quilts for brides-to-be, Mother, as a widow, was forbidden to touch bridal gifts for fear of tainting their future luck.

  Uncle Ma’s presence was comforting to Mother. My younger sister reported that Mother began to pay attention to her looks and would wear the nice clothes that Uncle Ma had bought her. Unlike Father, Uncle Ma was a good cook. He would come in to help with her business and do household chores. “We both felt that we had done enough for you children,” Mother told me. “We deserve to have our own life.” They began to go out together in public and were soon married without ceremony, living sometimes in his house, sometimes in ours. During holidays, she would stay at Uncle Ma’s house to prepare a feast for his four children, hoping they would gradually change their minds about her. Then, feeling guilty that she had done nothing for her own children, she rushed home to cook for my siblings.

  “Nobody has treated me with such tenderness and care,” Mother told me. “He prepares breakfast before I get up and buys me clothes.” Her remarks didn’t shock me. Did she ever love Father, or did Father ever love her? “In my generation, we were not like Westerners and we didn’t say ‘I love you’ every day. We just took care of each other and our family.” It was true, and by that measure, I suppose they loved each other in a Chinese way. However, when I probed further about their relationship, she said, “Your father was a filial son and an attentive parent, but he was a lousy husband, even though he was getting better in the last decade of his life.”

  Mother said she had long realized that she would never wrestle Father away from Grandma and found it easier not to fight it in the later years, which is not to say that they didn’t argue when it came to Grandma as well as his meddling in matters of money. Did she ever think of leaving Father in the years when Grandma’s funeral seemed to consume all of his attention? Was she faithful to him? I recall a man whom we referred to as Uncle Wang. At the age of five, I visited Mother at work and noticed that Uncle Wang met up with her every evening. Was he her lover? No. She blushed at the thought. “He was merely a good friend.” During her worst fights with Father, divorce never even crossed her mind.

  When I had thought it all through, I was happy for Mother. Uncle Ma was probably her first true love and I supported their marriage. My siblings did not, and said I was too westernized, that I had forgotten what life was like in China. The early days of her second marriage were certainly difficult. The presence of a new man in our house raised many eyebrows. Relatives and neighbors, even Mother’s older sister, measured her against Grandma, who was a virtuous traditional woman in their eyes for remaining a widow all her life. Father’s niece and aunt stopped visiting. Mother said she knew people talked behind her back, but she walked with her head high. “She chose to give up her life for your father. I want to live my own life.”

  The strong opposition from my younger brother caused Mother the most distress. Following Father’s death, he was transferred to Father’s company, so all the gossip about Mother and Uncle Ma reached his ears. He felt humiliated. He constantly argued with Mother, accusing her of ruining the family name—this when he had a live-in girlfriend. He began drinking heavily, on at least one occasion making a scene at work. My younger sister was called to come get him and, in his ramblings, he vowed, “I’m kicking her out of my life.” Mother endured all this without comment.

  Little by little, relatives accepted her decision and after their initial outrage, my brother and sisters gradually reconciled with Mother. Gossips found other targets. She never got a red certificate, but Mother’s little act of defiance against convention started a small revolution as other widows and widowers began stepping out of their comfort zone and discreetly asking for her advice on dating.

  In 1992, Mother received a phone call from her half brother in Henan. Gong-gong had been killed in a traffic accident. She and Aunt Xiuying rushed home to plan their father’s funeral. They also insisted that Po-po, their biological mother, be buried alongside Gong-gong. Mother, who had kept quiet on the issue all her life, became vocal and threatened to take Gong-gong’s body hostage if their request was not met. Their half brothers and sisters consented. Mother and Aunt Xiuying bought a small coffin, which contained a wooden marker with Po-po’s name on it and three sets of shou-yi. They burned incense, cried, and wailed to summon the spirit of their mother, whose looks they hardly remembered, so she could reunite with Gong-gong. As the two coffins were lowered into the grave, Aunt Xiuying and Mother felt triumphant. Aunt Xiuying’s face beamed. She said she was at peace, even though she would never know who had murdered Po-po. The burial, with the symbolic reunion, brought closure to her fifty-year quest.

  Fate is fickle in all cultures—one week after Mother returned from Gong-gong’s funeral, Uncle Ma was diagnosed with liver cancer. Mother was there for him to the end, as she had been for Father.

  Mother was alone again. The neighborhood called her kefu, or “husband killer.” Though the family rallied around her, her own health suffered during the emotional turmoil, but I was not prepared for the phone call from my brother-in-law saying I had to come home. I was living in Chicago and had just started my first job. It was a week before the Lunar New Year. He said Mother had an allergic reaction to some medicine she had taken for a cold and had suffered massive internal bleeding. I cursed my misfortune and managed to find a flight, arriving at the hospital, dragging my suitcase behind me. Mother seemed surprised. She was quite lucid and in relatively good spirits despite her surroundings. Her cheeks looked sunken and her former radiance was gone. She sat up and hugged me. I talked to her doctor, who said that while they had the bleeding under control, the prognosis wasn’t good; his diagnosis was late-stage liver cancer, the same cancer that had killed her second husband. She didn’t look like she was dying and I had her transferred to a bigger teaching hospital for a second opinion. “I’m ready to go. I’m going to fight this cancer,” she told me. “When I get out of the hospital, I will start all over.” I teased her. “If you find another husband, make sure he goes through a medical exam first so he doesn’t die on you too fast.” Mother was unaware that her relatives had started preparing her shou-yi, which was somewhat premature because the cancer was operable and she made a complete recovery. When I phoned a year later, my younger sister told me, “Mother is gone.”

  “What? When did she die?” I felt faint, my fingers went icy cold.

  “No! No! She’s married again and has moved into her new husband’s house on Western Street,” my sister said, and we laughed, nervously at first, at my misunderstanding. According to my sister, Mother and several widows in the neighborhood had registered for a new seniors’ dating service set up by the government, which was concerned that, with the disappearance of big families in China, many widows and widowers were living alone without proper care. A nationwide campaign was launched to encourage old people to start a new family and, as a member of the street committee and having remarried, Mother took the lead, which is how she came to meet Uncle Shen, a retired accountant from Shanghai ten years’ her senior.

  At Qingming, Mother and my siblings carefully maintained the graves of Father and Grandma. For the tenth year of Grandma’s death, Mother burned a wardrobe of colorful paper clothing, television sets, a car, and a refrigerator—an expensive offering. Mother always seemed to trip and fall now when she visited th
e cemetery, scratching her elbows or legs. “That old lady,” Mother said. “She hated me when she was alive and she still won’t forgive me now that she’s in the other world.” My younger sister said privately, “Grandma is probably cursing her for remarrying so fast.”

  Mother visited me twice in the United States, telling my siblings that she wanted to reconnect with me emotionally. Growing up, I had never heard Mother say how much she missed me or loved me. Age had softened her. One day, I came back from a three-day trip and found her waiting for me at the door, just like Grandma did when I was little. When I asked how she was, she replied, “The food had no taste without your being here.” I cringed at her endearing remarks but, little by little, I came to accept her love. Time had also allowed me to become more detached from my feelings for Grandma and I could be more objective and understanding of Mother. We grew closer, and as an expression of love, she cooked, serving up her delicious dumplings and winning the adoration of my American friends. Upon her return to China, I called her weekly, giving her updates on my life and hearing her latest gossip about our old neighbors and occasional complaints about my siblings.

  In 2005, Mother was alone for the third time in her life. Uncle Shen was hospitalized with Parkinson’s disease and when his children finally showed up, it was to squeeze money out of him and insult Mother in front of the other patients. Disappointed by their greed, and by her husband’s silence when they insulted her, Mother filed for divorce although she still had strong feelings for him.

  I’d been thinking about applying for a green card for Mother so she could come live with me in Chicago. Didn’t Father say filial piety attracted good luck? Mother declined—she had heard about how expensive it was to see a doctor in the United States. “I don’t want to be a burden,” she said. I suggested she live with my brother, who had just divorced, but she brushed that aside too. “I want your brother to find a wife soon.”

  When we met in Shanghai in September, she told me she was seeing Father and Grandma in her dreams; they were moving into a new building without stairs on a small hill. A month later, she said, sounding nervous: “Do you remember my dream? We received notice from the village that the cemetery is being moved.” A university in Xi’an had bought the land and planned to build a new campus. The city was expanding fast and the dead must make way for the living. Father said that disturbing the dead invited untold disaster. Even the Red Guards trod cautiously around ancestral tombs. But the village was offered a lot of money and traditions were no obstacle to progress in the new China. “It was only a matter of time,” Mother said. She said a new site had already been found, on a hill farther down the highway. In November, she had my siblings refurbish the gravestones before the winter snows and gifted everyone who was involved in the project with her homemade dumplings. “Now I can relax,” she said.

  My younger sister called soon after: “Mother has had a stroke.” She had fallen from her bed and, unable to move, had lain on the cold floor for two days before a neighbor found her. When we spoke on the phone, she sounded lucid and said she’d lost the use of her right side but was otherwise okay. She asked me to come earlier than I’d planned.

  She was in intensive care by the time I got there. She could no longer see or speak. Her kidneys were failing and the doctor said that Mother could die soon without dialysis. I whispered in her ear and asked if she wanted to go through the dialysis. She shook her head and tightened her grip on my hand, tears streaming from her eyes. Seeing that she was giving up, I said, “Ma, let go now. Don’t worry about my siblings. I’ll take care of them. Just let go.”

  In the next two weeks, Mother’s kidneys unexpectedly recovered. “Your mother is excited about your arrival and her body responds to it,” the doctor said. But the recovery was brief. She fell into a coma. I began to be tortured by what I had previously whispered in her ear. Did I say the right thing? Would her recovery have lasted if I had encouraged her to fight for her life?

  Night after night, I stayed at her bedside, hoping I could undo what I had said and bring her back to life. My sister even visited Father’s grave, praying that he could persuade her to delay her arrival in the other world. A month passed and her condition neither improved nor deteriorated.

  When I was back in the United States, my regret over what I had said to Mother was compounded by the image of her lying on the floor after her stroke, helpless and alone. I used to be shocked by the stories about the bodies of seniors in America found rotting in their own homes weeks after their deaths, unnoticed until the smell became too inconvenient to ignore. In China, we heard such stories in school, which were used as examples of how alienated people were in the West from family and friends, how selfish and uncaring these so-called modern societies were. “It is different in China. Children are our protection in old age,” my parents’ generation used to say. It was hard to believe that the same story happened in my own family.

  For several weeks, before calling the hospital I would dial Mother’s home phone every day, letting it ring and ring, wishing that she would pick up and that all that had happened would be merely a dream. There were no miracles. The stroke was an irreversible truth. I would call my brother and he would hold the cell phone next to Mother’s ear. I played Buddhist music, read books, and told her stories, hoping she could hear.

  One day in December, I woke from a vivid dream. Mother had sat up in her bed, hugged me, and uttered three sentences: “I’ve paid all your debts”; “You’ve done enough for me”; and “I don’t live far away from you.” I flew home again for the second time. My plane landed in Xi’an on Christmas Eve. My car got caught in the downtown crowds; teenagers clogged the streets, dressed up in colorful costumes and holding balloons. When had Christmas become a big holiday in China? It felt more like a Halloween night in the United States. The festive atmosphere stopped at the hospital gate. The patient ward, next to the hospital morgue, was eerily quiet. Mother lay in her bed, a grin on her face. Thinking she was happy to see me, I stepped forward to hold her hands and noticed that the grin was frozen. Occasionally she would yawn or open her eyes for a few seconds, but with no sense of her surroundings.

  Every dawn, loud spooky sounds of firecrackers and howling pierced the old morning air. “Relatives are coming to the morgue to get the deceased for cremation,” said my brother. “They are lighting the firecrackers to send off the spirit.” Even if the soul departed the body only just before cremation, I knew for sure that Mother’s soul had left long ago even though she was still breathing.

  I wanted to end what I considered to be Mother’s suffering. Many Chinese doctors got huge commissions from pharmaceutical companies for prescribing all sorts of expensive medicine to keep patients alive. I recommended terminating all of Mother’s treatment. My decision met strong opposition from my brother and younger sister, whom I suspect felt guilty for not keeping a closer watch on Mother and letting her live alone. They wouldn’t let her go. When I insisted, they said I was brainwashed by western thinking. “You are becoming heartless, like those Americans. They put their parents in nursing homes. They talk about unplugging life support when old people are still breathing. This is China and you can’t get away with it.” In addition, they attributed my “inhuman” decision about Mother to the lingering influence of Grandma.

  Mother’s relatives came to my support and my siblings backed down. On the afternoon of December 31, the doctor stopped medication and Mother died, surrounded by as many relatives as my sister could muster. “Mother would like a big send-off,” my sister said, and we made sure the wake was a grand event with an orchestra to play her favorite Henan operas. This cost my brother half a month’s salary, which was ironic, as he had probably never bought her a ticket to an opera when she was alive. As Father liked to say, “You can be cheap with the living, but spare no expense for the dead.”

  At Father’s wake seventeen years earlier, I had disliked funeral costumes and rituals. When
it was time to mourn Mother’s passing, I found comfort in the traditional rituals, and I put on full mourning garb, burned fake paper money, roamed the neighborhood calling her soul back, and smashed a pottery urn to pray for her reincarnation. I willingly took the podium at her funeral, sharing memories and lauding her role in my upbringing. I told stories of how in the 1970s she traveled to faraway places after work to comb the harvested fields for leftover corn to supplement our food ration and how she stayed by Father’s hospital bed daily throughout his illness. Many people shed tears during my speech, and I think Mother’s vanity was satisfied.

  One of Mother’s friends suggested that we take her ashes to Henan and bury her with Gong-gong and Po-po. “A woman who married many times should be buried with her parents,” she said. “If she is left alone in the next world, all her previous husbands will fight over her.”

  Fortunately, when Mother was alive, my younger sister discussed the issue of burial with her and Mother had made it clear that she wanted to join Father in his grave. “I think she wanted to remain part of the Huang family,” my sister said. On the third anniversary of her death—in 2008—Mother’s urn was buried on the hillside next to Father and Grandma. Now that they did not have the coffin to bicker over, I hoped Grandma and Mother would overcome their past differences and live peacefully together.