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

Chairman Mao’s promise of a new society built on equality and plenty.
    “When I was your age, I couldn’t afford to go to school,” he said. “I was envious of children who could sit in brightly lit classrooms and read books without worrying about food and shelter.” He recalled how close to death he and Grandma were in the abandoned temple as they lay stricken with typhoid. I stole a glance at my teacher and saw the light reflect a tear in the corner of each eye.
    While researching this book, I looked up the 1942 famine. It was true that the Nationalist government, which was preoccupied with war with Japan, acted indifferently, and its rescue efforts were slow in coming. About three million people perished in the famine. However, between 1959 and 1961, the famine caused by Chairman Mao’s radical policies led to the death of an estimated thirty to forty million people. With the Party’s relentless blocking of news and information, there was no way Father could know about it.
    In front of the whole class, Father declared how much better things were for us, how our lives had been changed for the better under Communism, how even his own family of seven could have two bicycles, two Red Flag–brand watches, a sewing machine, and a two-bedroom apartment. He even mentioned a giant mahogany armoire that he had bought for five yuan at a sale organized by the company’s Revolutionary Committee, which had confiscated furniture and other valuables from capitalists and counterrevolutionaries during the Cultural Revolution.
    At the end of Father’s speech, my teacher led a vigorous round of applause. Though my classmates mimicked his Henan accent, Father’s talk made a huge impression.
    When Father told my classmates about his life as a poor peasant in the pre-Communist era, he left out the fact that his family had been wealthy landowners. In Mother’s words, “The Huang family was lucky to have lost all its fortune in the flood, war, and famine. Otherwise, you could have been standing on the stage with a big dunce cap to receive public denunciation rather than lecturing other young people.” Father never mentioned the fact that at the age of eleven, his family had arranged a marriage for him to a sixteen-year-old woman. Child marriage, a sign of old society, had long been outlawed in Communist China. Father’s marriage took place right after Japan had invaded China. Young women in well-to-do families would either marry or smear their faces with soot and dirt to hide their looks so that the Japanese soldiers at the checkpoints would not see them as beautiful young virgins and rape them. A matchmaker fixed up Father with that woman from a nearby village. Grandma, eager to see her son establish a family, consented. A small perfunctory ceremony was held and the woman moved in with the Huang family. A year later, as tales of Japanese brutality against young married women reached the village, Grandma sent Father’s wife home for fear that they wouldn’t be able to protect her properly. The marriage dissolved. In fact, Father had never shared this episode with Mother. I found out about it during a recent trip to his native village, long after he had died.
    More important, Father hardly talked about life in his twenties and thirties. One of his colleagues once hinted that Father used to be a laborer. I couldn’t reconcile myself to the image of Father pulling long wooden carts filled with cooking utensils. In our family album, there was a portrait of a young handsome Father wearing a western-style turtleneck, his hair neatly parted on one side. He said the photo was taken on his twenty-fifth birthday. He looked more like a scholar than a laborer. His body seemed too delicate, his mind too sophisticated. Most laborers at Father’s company were illiterate and wore dirty uniforms and talked crudely, while Father was well versed in Chinese literature and tradition, and was sharp with his abacus. I asked him several times if he