The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir

by Wenguang Huang

  19.

  INEVITABILITY

  Father made me Grandma’s coffin keeper when I was ten, imbuing the spooky black wooden box with a mythic significance that I could barely grasp. His stories lulled me into believing that Grandma’s coffin and our dedication to Grandma’s burial would bring blessings and protection for the Huang family. Up until Father’s own death, the coffin loomed large in our house and planning for Grandma’s burial consumed our lives. In fact, Grandma’s coffin was such a powerful presence in my life that it became what may be the most important thing that has shaped my character.

  In a big city where the ban on burial was strictly enforced, growing up with a coffin in the house did not give our family the peace and security that Father had promised. We constantly worried about Father’s and our own political futures. In school, where we were taught to stamp out old traditions and customs that impeded the Revolution, the coffin stood as an embarrassing reminder of Grandma’s old-fashioned ways. We seldom invited friends home and like Father, we learned to separate our public and personal lives.

  Father claimed that the coffin and the burial would restore harmony to the Huang family, but instead the wooden box became a constant source of friction and woeful contention among the adults, unwittingly drawing us children into the arguments. Because I always took Grandma’s side, I felt estranged for years from Mother and my two younger siblings who were raised by Mother. Today, the division is still palpable among my siblings, flaring up occasionally when we talk about Mother and Grandma.

  Following Father’s death in 1988, the mere thought of the coffin triggered sadness and resentment in me. I saw the coffin as a curse that led to Father’s untimely end. I felt angry at the absurdity and futility of Father’s efforts, which deprived my siblings and me of many of the pleasures and opportunities of childhood. Even now, my younger brother still resents Father’s neglect as a child. If Father had spent more time coaching him, he said that he would have been admitted to a better senior high school and entered college. His life would have been different from the one he is leading now—managing Father’s former company.

  During my twenties, I dreaded going home, which was loaded with memories of Father and Grandma. I distanced myself from Mother, who, I was afraid, might swallow me in the same way that killed Father. I yearned to live in a faraway place so I could be free and alone. With $60 in my wallet, the maximum amount that I was allowed to convert from Chinese currency, I landed in the United States in February 1990.

  Coming to America enabled me to reinvent myself, living the way I wanted, without the complications of my family. I put myself through graduate school by waiting on tables at a Chinese restaurant and tending lab rats at my university. Like thousands of Chinese students who come to pursue advanced degrees in the United States, I stayed on after graduation, working first as a reporter and then as a public-relations executive. Unlike Father, a die-hard Communist who railed against the land-owning class and embraced the ideal of establishing a classless Communist society, I turned myself into a bona fide capitalist. All the Communist propaganda intended to indoctrinate me seemed to have the opposite effect. Instead of fighting to “liberate the masses from the yokes of capitalism,” I work diligently to make money, enjoying a level of material comfort far beyond Father’s wildest dreams. The frugal gene that I had inherited from Father has enabled me to buy my first house and then acquire more properties, just as my great-grandfather had done more than a century ago.

  Throughout his life, Father trod carefully to shield himself and his family from political turmoil, and he always advised me to stay away from politics. After obtaining my master’s degree in public-affairs journalism, I interned with the Illinois General Assembly, where I gained insights into the ways that democracy works in the United States and developed a deep appreciation for political freedom. Little by little, I’ve overcome my political inhibitions. In my newspaper commentaries, I express my strong support for democratic reforms and human rights in China, especially after my short-term assignment in the mid-1990s with the New York Times in Beijing, where I witnessed the government’s severe suppression of political dissent.

  In the first five years after my arrival in the United States, I sought to cut ties with my past, limiting my contact with family and friends in China. Striving to be an authentic American, I shunned my favorite tofu and noodles and learned to like spaghetti. I tried to imitate National Public Radio announcers in a quest to rid myself of my Chinese accent. I avoided Chinatown as well as the company of other Chinese immigrants. I did such a good job staying out of touch with my culture that I even began to dream in English. While I was on a job in Tibet, I attracted the attention of the local police; my spoken Chinese was so out-of-date that they called me a “full-fledged foreign lackey” during an interrogation.

  In the 1990s, I fell in love with a young woman of Jewish and Dutch descent. I moved in with her, believing that I could start a real American family, free from the shadows of Grandma’s coffin as well as interferences from Mother and other relatives. To my surprise, Mother never objected to the relationship, especially after she had heard that American women do not demand a large sum of money from the families of their partners at the time of engagement or marriage. Mother simply asked, “Does she like Chinese food? Does she speak our language?” When I answered no to both of her questions, she paused and then said, “When you have kids, I won’t be able to take care of them for you.” I pretended to be disappointed, but deep down I was relieved. Father had endured the constant sniping of both his mother and his wife all his life. I vowed to never let that happen to me. Unfortunately, the relationship with my girlfriend ended after two years, right before Mother was ready to send a pair of her old earrings to welcome her into our family.

  For a while I seemed to have succeeded in not being Father and in carving out a life that bore no resemblance to his. My past became a distant memory.

  However, the past has proved to be as difficult to lose as my Chinese accent. A Russian-born professor told me that he had managed to lose most of his accent when he was young, but as he got older it began creeping back. For me, the suppressed memories of my past are not so much creeping back as goose-stepping in great columns to rival National Day on Tiananmen Square, especially after Mother’s death in 2005. I find myself being hit by memories of my parents, sometimes with such intensity that I have to stop what I’m doing and let them play out in my mind. I sometimes wake up from vivid dreams of conversations with them, as if they were alive. Sadness and guilt envelop me.

  Time has given me new insights into the absurdities of human circumstances. This recognition has allowed me to reevaluate the past family conflicts over Grandma’s coffin with the mellowness that comes with middle age. My harsh feelings toward Father’s obsession have gradually softened and I have started to understand him more. I now see the coffin, which embodied his devotion to Grandma, as a cohesive force, binding the whole family together in the Mao era, giving us a common purpose, hope, and the comfort we sorely needed. A traditional burial for Grandma was something tangible we could do to express our gratitude to Grandma for sacrificing her life for the Huang family. Most important, Grandma’s burial enabled Father to preserve a link with the past even as the Party sought to erase it.

  I have also come to terms with the limitations and futility of my attempts to do everything that would make me different from Father. I am becoming more and more like him. On visits to Xi’an, neighbors and friends will comment on how much I have started to resemble Father. I am told I even walk, and sound, like him. In the mirror, I catch glimpses of genetic inevitability—the nose, the lines on my face, and the look in my eyes. When deciding on life’s many choices, I have started to detect his invisible hand guiding me.

  As a young person, I rejected Father’s lectures on Confucian values and shunned my responsibilities as the eldest son. But, unconsciously, I have started to fo
llow his teachings. I quote Father constantly in my articles and talks, and have started to cherish my role as a caring brother in the lives of my siblings and their children. I spent days organizing my younger brother’s wedding and put my share of pressure on him to have a child.

  Meanwhile, following their recent relocation, Grandma, Father, and Mother are now resting peacefully on a hillside, overlooking the city. Every Qingming Festival, my brother and sisters gather in the cemetery, lighting incense sticks and burning fake paper money. Afterward, my elder sister will call me with a report, claiming that she had specifically asked for Grandma’s blessing on my behalf. When Grandma and Mother were alive, my sister was notorious for skipping holiday visits. Interestingly enough, she now attends the grave sweeping ceremony faithfully and with gifts too—fruits, cakes, and stacks of paper cut in the shape of women’s clothing, which she burns while chanting, “Hope they fit you well and keep you warm.” I also visit the tomb each time I go back to Xi’an. In 2008, when we gathered in the cemetery on the twentieth anniversary of Father’s passing, I felt that we could finally put Father’s saga to rest and move on with our lives.

  In July 2009, a Skype message from my brother changed everything. “Please call right away! I have news on Grandpa’s grave,” wrote my brother. The son of Grandpa’s cousin, now a peanut grower, had reported that a private company was buying the cemetery land from Grandpa’s native village and a notice had just been distributed announcing that those wishing to recover the remains of the deceased should do so; unclaimed remains would be tossed away. The peanut grower said the village was planning to build a new cemetery and a space would be secured for Grandpa among the other deceased of the Huang family. If we were still interested in bringing Grandma home, there would be a good opportunity to do it when the developer was excavating Grandpa’s tomb, and we could bury Grandma and Grandpa together in the new spot.

  The news revived my interest and for months I found it hard to get out of my mind. Father had groomed me for years as Grandma’s coffin keeper, but I wasn’t even home when she died. Maybe moving the grave would give me an opportunity to make up for Grandma. I began to toy with the thought that perhaps with my brother’s help we could complete Father’s journey by moving the remains of Grandma and my parents next to Grandpa in their native land. In doing so, a relative of mine warned that I needed to prepare three small coffins or urns and organize a reinterment ceremony. As complicated as it was, I was willing to jump through hoops to get it done.

  My idea ignited some heated discussions among my siblings, reminding me of the many dinnertime squabbles over Grandma’s coffin between my parents. Surprisingly, my elder sister, who grew up under Grandma’s care, took Mother’s former stance and strongly argued against the move. She said she liked the proximity of Grandma’s grave. “Even though they’ve been dead for years, I still feel they are part of my life and visiting the graves is part of my annual routine.” My younger sister, who had grown attached to Father in his later years, took my side. As for my younger brother, he repeated a phrase that he had been saying bitterly over the past four decades: “You are the eldest grandson. My views don’t count and I don’t care one way or another.” However, he did propose that we could probably bring Grandpa’s bones to Xi’an, but the peanut grower ruled against it. “It is always the practice for the woman to join the man, not the other way around.”

  With the fate of Grandpa’s grave pending, I often called home to discuss the best course of action with my siblings. Sometimes, the arguments became so intense that we shouted at each other on Skype and then hung up, vowing never to talk to each other again. Then, with new information coming from Henan, we restarted our discussion. Between the arguments, threats, and cajoling, there was lots of reminiscing about our childhood days. My sisters filled me in with more anecdotes about Grandma and our parents from those years when I was away at school. In a strange way, I was back with my family again. The arguments brought us closer. In addition, revisiting the circumstances leading to Grandma’s coffin enabled me to reconnect with our family’s past.

  In January of 2010, I decided to visit Father’s native village in Henan and see for myself the alleged location of Grandpa’s grave.

  I reached Henan on a snowy November morning. The road was icy, with the bare branches of poplar trees standing lonely in what would be fields full of crops in a few months. The Yellow River, China’s second-longest river, resembled dark chocolate with white frosting—brownish water flowing without a ripple between high banks blanketed with crusty snow. Come the melt, the river would turn wild, capable of swallowing hundreds of villages as it had in the 1940s.

  It was pitch dark by the time we arrived at the home of Grandpa’s cousin. The whole family had turned out. The cousin had a high, oval-shaped face and melancholy eyes that made me think of Father. I felt the strong urge to reach out to him, as if holding his hands would connect me to Father in the netherworld. A stroke had slurred his speech and he frequently choked up with tears as we talked about the years of correspondence between him and Father about Grandma and her coffin. I imagined Father in this very room years ago; the airy, cavernous farmhouse still had a dirt floor, a coal-burning stove in the middle of the room, sacks of what seemed to be wheat piled up in one corner, a few pieces of old furniture shrouded with dust, and a toilet hole in the ground outside in a far corner of the courtyard. The stage was the same; most of the original cast in this drama was dead; but the curtain had yet to come down.

  The cousin held in his trembling hands a piece of paper, which he gave to me. “Directions to your Grandpa’s grave,” he said. “We’ve been guarding it for years for your father; no one’s family cemetery is secure now. They’ve already converted our family cemetery into farmland and who knows what’s going to happen next.”

  The map marked the gravesite with precise coordinates. I had always harbored suspicions that Grandpa’s two cousins were taking advantage of Father and there was no grave. A map wasn’t hard proof, but I was relieved enough to think that it all might be true. Over cups of hot, locally grown chrysanthemum tea, we passed the night talking about the past glories of the Huang family. The cousin in his younger days must have been as good a storyteller as Father, which to me made his stroke seem all the more cruel. He told me that my great-great-grandfather was a warrior and an educated military officer in the imperial court. He was a sharp crossbow shooter, like William Tell, and could shoot through a poplar leaf from a hundred feet away. He was credited in the 1860s for capturing the leader of the “long-haired rebels,” the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom movement, who fought the Qing Dynasty. This great-great-grandfather acquired several hundred acres of prime farmland along the Yellow River, hiring more than twenty tenants, and the Huang family fortune continued to expand for years after the death of my great-great-grandfather. By the time Grandpa and Grandma were married, this part of the region was called the Huang Estate.

  The night was chilly and quiet. As I bundled up in a dusty quilt to sleep, I felt like running a black-and-white movie through my mind. I thought of the stories Grandma and Father had shared with me—the TB epidemic that killed nearly all of the male members of the Huang clan, the flood that stranded them on a tree for three days, the arranged marriage between my eleven-year-old Father and a sixteen-year-old girl, and the big white horses that had been snatched away by the invading Japanese. I stared at the high ceiling, saddened by the tribulations of the Huang family but excited to be “home.”

  The village looked prosperous in the morning sun. Most families had built big red-brick houses. Peanuts and herbs did well in the sandy soil and incomes were good. Over the years, the village had been moved several times due to flooding, but the Huang cemetery was apparently still where it had always been, outside Chenjiagou Village, home to Chen-style tai chi, and proud of it.

  Grandpa’s tomb lay across the street from the China Tai Chi Museum. “Many people here have heard about yo
ur father’s work to preserve your grandpa’s tomb,” the peanut grower bragged. “Under Chairman Mao, several of our relatives here fought hard to keep the grave marker when the village converted it into farmland. We all waited for your grandma to come back and join her husband, but your father never brought her home.” He seemed disappointed that Father had failed to keep his promise; death was apparently not an acceptable excuse for not honoring a family commitment.

  The peanut grower unfolded the map and, using an electricity pole as his reference point, took forty-two steps to his right, and twenty-five steps forward. “This should be it,” he shouted.

  Having heard about the gravesite all my life, I didn’t know what to think at that moment. I hoped Father’s spirit was watching. I joined the peanut grower in the snow and looked around us. “Wasn’t it supposed to be located on the back of a dragon near the Yellow River? I don’t see any water.” The peanut grower laughed: “Yes, a branch of the Yellow River used to meander around the village and the legendary dragon resided there, but the Yellow River has changed direction many times over the years and is now to the south.” That made sense, and I thought the open view auspicious enough.

  We dug a hole in the snow, lit the fake paper money the peanut grower had purchased in the village. I knelt, kowtowed three times to my long-dead grandpa, whose presence I had known all through my life. It felt deeply comforting.

  Back in Chicago, I waited anxiously for news from Henan while pondering a permanent solution for Grandma’s remains. Then, on a business trip to Henan six months later, my younger brother stopped by Grandpa’s tomb to pay tribute. What he encountered was nothing like what he had expected from the pictures I had sent them—the idyllic cemetery and its surrounding farmland had been cordoned off by barbed wire. A construction crew was pouring concrete into the foundation for a new traditional-style building, which locals said would be a tai chi center for foreign and Chinese tourists who trek to the village in search of authentic tai chi training.