The Little Red Guard by Wenguang Huang (Book Review)

The Little Red Guard

By Wenguang Huang

272 pages

Penguin Group, April 2012

family memoirs/history/Chinese/biography

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Another Review… 

My Rating: ★★★★ 1/2

Amazon.com | BN.com

My Review: The author tells a pretty unbelievable story and I suppose that is what makes this true story all the more fascinating to me. Up until this book I knew very little of the Chinese culture during Mao’s reign and once he was gone. I’ve known that China was a communist country and that communism wasn’t a good thing. When it came to government structures I was aware of the distinct differences between our “Western” culture and that of China’s. But this book gave me a first hand account of it through the lives of what many might consider to represent a typical Chinese family.

Aside from his telling about his father who worked tirelessly to abide by his mother’s wishes, this was just as much a coming of age story for Wenguang. The title and the description lead you to believe this story is simply about a family trying to figure out how they would get away with burying the grandmother without getting caught and suffering permanent punishment. This is not the entire story at all. In fact it’s a small part. To me the coffin is a red herring for the true purpose of this book. The author needed to tell this story for his grandmother who was too concerned with reuniting with her husband back in their home town where he was fortunate enough to be buried before the ban on burial came into effect. For his father who he firmly believes died much too soon (of cancer) because he was overwrought with doing his mothers wishes of being buried and not cremated. His own mother who resented the relationship her older husband had with his mother, feeling like he sacrificed for his own mother but would never do the same for her. And in telling their story he ends up telling us his own story. 

Having lost both my grandmother and my grandfather I can relate to what he was going through all too well. It reminded me how anyone, no matter where we come from, take our choices for granted, feel and die the same as anyone else. This was truly a book that was better than I ever imagined. I learned so much about a new culture and was reawakened to my own at the same time.

Summary: Three generations of a family living under one roof reflect the dramatic transformations of an entire society in this memoir of life in 20th century China

When Wenguang Huang was nine years old, his grandmother became obsessed with her own death. Fearing cremation, she extracted from her family the promise to bury her after she died. This was in Xi’an, a city in central China, in the 1970s, when a national ban on all traditional Chinese practices, including burials, was strictly enforced. But Huang’s grandmother was persistent, and two years later, his father built her a coffin. He also appointed his older son, Wenguang, as coffin keeper, a distinction that meant, among other things, sleeping next to the coffin at night.

Over the next fifteen years, the whole family was consumed with planning Grandma’s burial, a regular source of friction and contention, with the constant risk of being caught by the authorities. Many years after her death, the family’s memories of her coffin still loom large. Huang, now living and working in America, has come to realize how much the concern over the coffin has affected his upbringing and shaped the lives of everyone in the family. Lyrical and poignant, funny and heartrending, The Little Red Guard is the powerful tale of an ordinary family finding their way through turbulence and transition.