The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

which sounds grander than it was; he was more a warehouse keeper. He worked for a state-run company that manufactured cast-iron cookware and industrial water pipes. There was coal and lead dust everywhere in the factory, and it spread to the trees and rooftops. Workers coming out of the workshops looked like coal miners, their faces and hands smeared with soot from the cast-iron molds. Father only needed to visit the workshops once a day to check up on the quantities of cooking utensils. His face and overalls were clean. I used to visit his office after school and do my homework there. He always seemed to be hunched over in the backs of trucks, checking the quantity of cooking utensils loaded against the quantity ordered and tallying it against incoming and outgoing shipments. Often, the lines of trucks lasted all day, and once they were gone, he had to reconcile the books. He never complained.
    When my political-study teacher was looking for a speaker who could talk about the “bitterness” of life before the revolution and how much better things were in the new socialist society, I volunteered Father. I had heard him talk about those years, though I was still nervous because any gaffes would be magnified by my classmates and used to torment me. I was afraid that, like Grandma, he might blame the hardships on the vengeful ghost.
    Father was well prepared. A manager at his company’s propaganda department drafted a script that made it clear which regime to condemn and which to praise. The teacher said afterward that Father’s story was just what she wanted.
    This was how Father described his early years. He was born on December 16, 1928, according to the Chinese lunar calendar. He told us how, at an early age, he lost his father and other relatives to the TB epidemic. He pointed out that rural folks did not have access to education and were ignorant of modern medicine, relying on shamans and incense instead. China’s backward public-health system lacked the basic capacity to stem the epidemic.
    According to Father, his home village relied on a rich region of loess, good for wheat and peanuts, but flood and drought brought much sorrow. It was the 1942 famine that turned him into a fervent supporter of the Communists. He was fourteen, and the drought had created a severe food shortage. Local officials continued to levy their taxes, and grain reserves and livestock were sold to satisfy their demands. The famine and the ensuing locust plague killed more than three million people, aided by the Japanese invasion of Henan and the looting and burning of villages and the rape of women. In many places, peasants collaborated with the Japanese invaders because they were so fed up with the corrupt Nationalist government. Father and Grandma joined the other famine refugees walking west. The dead and dying were everywhere. Father didn’t tell of the gangs who killed and ate lone strangers on the road, but he did mention that a family, no longer strong enough to push their two boys and a girl ahead of them in a wheelbarrow, lifted their daughter out and left her by the road. They begged Grandma to take her, as a maid or a daughter, but her sole responsibility was Father and she walked on. Tears welled up in his eyes as he told how the little girl had been left to die.
    “At this point, one would assume that government officials would realize the extent of the emergency and would rush in with food supplies to help the refugees,” Father said to my class. “But no, the corrupt Nationalists were too busy helping themselves to what was left before running away from the Japanese, and then they went looting, too. It was hopeless,” Father said. “Without Chairman Mao and the Party, we would still be eating tree bark.” There was a degree of stiffness to Father’s delivery of that line and I could tell the part was written by the propaganda manager. Having lived through humiliating poverty in his childhood, Father said he embraced