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

had really been a laborer. He evaded the question by saying, “I’ll tell you when you grow up.”
    In 1984, Father and I went on a trip together. On the long train ride, he opened up to me about his past. It was like a sequel to his “speak bitterness” session with my class, but more honest, more revealing.
    After the Communist takeover in 1949, Father joined a textile factory. He worked during the day and attended night school. Father would always credit the Communists with giving him the liberating experience of being able to read and write. Within a few years, he read all the major Chinese literary classics, and enjoyed movies and opera. The Party noticed Father’s diligence and he was moved to the government’s cultural bureau.
    Father truly viewed the Party as an elite group of the best in society and he longed to be part of it. To become a member is a long, rigorous process, and to help his application, Father became actively involved in every political campaign. During the Great Leap Forward, when Chairman Mao hatched an ambitious plan to industrialize the nation within a short time, Father and his coworkers spent days and nights at work, with only a few hours of sleep every day. He truly believed that China could produce enough iron and steel to fight the Western economic embargo against Communist China by using only makeshift furnaces. “We were such a large country. If we could beat the United States in Korea, we would surely be successful with industrialization. We were so confident,” he said. At the height of what he called his youthful passion and enthusiasm, he submitted his first application for Party membership. It was 1958.
    “I was young, enthusiastic, outspoken, and reckless,” he said. And, by his tone, he might have added “foolish.” At the beginning of 1959, the local Party secretary encouraged young people to voice criticism against Party officials to help them improve. Father took him at his word and said the Party secretary should be more open to the suggestions of others. He was too “dictatorial.” Father believed the Party secretary sincerely appreciated the criticism and had even noted it down. But for days after, there was coldness in the Party secretary’s attitude toward him, and not long after this, Father was informed that the Party needed him to launch a literacy project in a mountainous village in the northern part of Shaanxi Province. Father knew it was retaliation for his outspokenness. Two months into the assignment, he received a telegram from Grandma, who had fallen down a flight of stairs and seriously injured her legs. He rushed home to care for her and returned to the village after her condition had stabilized. When Father was accused by the Party secretary of putting his family ahead of the revolution, he was sacked.
    Being jobless in 1960 was not a good situation to be in; famine caused by Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward campaign began to spread nationwide. Food rations were cut in urban areas, and Father was stripped of his government food subsidies. Mother’s income was low and the family savings were soon exhausted buying food on the black market. He picked up odd jobs at shoe-repair stands on the street, and on weekends he would bike Grandma out of the city to pick over harvested fields for loose cabbage leaves. The Communist Party hid its mistakes by blaming the famine on drought and Father easily accepted what he was told. Even so, it was a humiliating experience for him and others. “You can’t believe how desperate people became,” he said. A middle-aged man neatly dressed in a Maoist uniform passed him on a bicycle and stopped a little farther on. The man got off his bike, bent down, and picked up something from the ground. Father assumed it was a coin, but as he drew closer, he saw that it was a discarded pear stem. The man put it in his mouth and, sucking on it greedily, slowly peddled away. “People developed edema, and their faces and legs