THE LITTLE RED GUARD

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

What would you do if granting your mother's final wish honoring the woman who sacrificed everything for your survival meant putting the rest of your family's safety and security in jeopardy, and compromising your own children's future? What if the wisdom of a lifetime could not be passed down from one generation to the next, because society had been completely upended every couple of decades and change had become the only constant? This is the world of China during the 20th century, and it is the world described in THE LITTLE RED GUARD. This is a memoir that delivers history through a distinctly personal lens. It is the story of three generations living under one roof in central China largely during the Cultural Revolution. Here you have the full sweep of history, and decades of change, around a single dinner table. There's the author's grandmother, who grew up in a feudal society based on Confucianism, his parents, who bought into the promise of communism and try their best to abide by its rules, and the author himself, who, along with his siblings, becomes a part of the Tianamen Square generation that will be swept up in another calamitous change. Nowhere was this clash of cultures and generations more apparent in the Huang householdthan in the family's struggle to honor Wenguang's grandmother's last wish to be buried in her ancestral homeland in a traditional funeral. During the Cultural Revolution, such practices had been outlawed in favor of swift, orderly cremation, and any family making traditional preparations did so at great risk. So, beginning years before his grandmother's death, Wenguang's family struggled to make these preparations in secret, having a coffin built in their yard because they couldn't risk buying one in their small house, Wenguang, as theoldest son, was made to sleep next to the coffin every night while his grandmother was still alive. This ordeal gave the family a common purpose and made them very close but the secrets and sacrifice it required also caused tremendous tension. Wenguang renders this sometimes with familiar humor the revered Grandmother is, you guessed it, an outspoken mother-in-law and sometimes with uncommon tenderness.