The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir Read Online Free

grain and livestock and robbed the villagers of their valuables. Without any men, the Huang family was an easy target. “Bandits broke into our house, snatching grain and valuables,” Grandma said. “They used wooden sticks to knock on the floor and walls. If they heard any hollow sound, they would dig a hole to see if we had hidden anything.
    “When a family is in decline, even the animals want to leave,” she said. “We owned ten big horses. Before the Japanese troops arrived, we hid them in a secret garden behind the house. As the troops were passing, the horses started to whinny and the soldiers seized them all.”
    There was little food and the wheat never had a chance to ripen. Peasants picked the fields clean of wheatgrass, which they ground for juice or dried and ate as a powder. The family’s priority was to keep Father nourished, often at the expense of everyone else.
    Soon Grandma realized that the family would face starvation if they stayed put. She decided to take Father and make for a city in Shanxi Province, which meant walking several hundred kilometers on bound feet. Grandma’s sewing skills served her well. During the day, Grandma made clothes for wealthy families; at night, she slept in an abandoned temple with her relatives and fellow villagers. When a wolf snatched away a three-year-old boy playing outside the temple at sunset, and all the adults could find were his bloodstained and tattered clothes, she and Father returned to her home village, which offered no sanctuary. In the spring of 1942, not a single raindrop fell in the region. Starvation was widespread. In the autumn, a plague of locusts ate everything that was left. Grandma said they lived on grass roots and tree bark. Others lived off the recently dead or the passing strangers they trapped, killed, and cooked. Half of the surviving Huang family died, including both her in-laws. Mother took Father, who was now twelve, and fled Henan.
    During the hardest times, Grandma and Father begged on the streets, until they contracted typhoid and lay racked by fever in an old crumbling temple. A woman living nearby saw them when they crawled out to beg and took pity on them, leaving food and drinking water each day for Grandma to find.
    It was Xi’an, the capital city in the neighboring province of Shaanxi, that finally offered Grandma and Father a refuge. The invading Japanese never reached Xi’an. The fertile land and mild climate made a haven for Henan refugees. For a rural woman who had never seen a lightbulb, the big city was baffling. Through fellow villagers, Grandma found work as a maid to the owner of a large jewelry store, Mr. Ren, who needed help looking after the children of his wife and his concubines. Grandma and Father moved into a small one-room house adjacent to a spacious courtyard mansion in the eastern section of the city. Grandma cooked, washed clothes, and nursed Ren’s children. I remember Grandma as a proud woman, and I asked how she handled the transition from sheltered daughter of a wealthy rural family to a maid. “I did it for my son,” she said. “Only a parent would understand.”
    Grandma gained a reputation as a tough and capable woman, but there were limits. When one of Ren’s concubines accused her of stealing a gold ring, Grandma grew angry in her denial, mortified by the attack on her character, and the concubine slapped her so hard she fell unconscious to the ground. Rather than leave, Grandma stood her ground. Three days later, the concubine found the ring, which she had simply misplaced. She never apologized. Whenever Grandma talked about the incident, her bottom lip would tremble. She and Father lived under Ren’s protection for fourteen years, raising five of his children. The job provided an anchor for my teenage father who was eager to start out on his own, working during the day and attending school at night.
    When the Communist government was established in 1949, all their suffering turned out to