The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir by Wenguang Huang

sisters slept and have Mother lock the door. I would wail as the strap came down on my buttocks, five, ten, twenty times. Grandma would bang on the door, begging Father to stop. When he was done, Father would say to her quietly, “You are spoiling him.” Grandma told me: “Tell your dad you are wrong and will do better next time.”
    Father would be quite calm after punishments. If Mother was present, they would force me to kneel for at least an hour to reflect on my mistakes. Then, Father would recite the litany of transgressions since my last spanking: the theft of a small bottle of liquor from a drawer to pay off a bully at school; the destruction of two watermelons I had been sent to fetch on my bike, which I crashed into a ditch after trying to ride hands free; and so on. Mother would lecture me on how well behaved our neighbors’ children were at home. I would nod and pretend to seek their forgiveness, though I just wanted to stand up and have it done with. One time, feeling particularly stubborn, I refused to admit wrongdoing and ended up kneeling on the cold floor for three hours.
    My parents were proud of their methods. At a parent-teacher meeting, when my teacher praised me for scoring the highest in all subjects, Father, who had never coached me in my studies, responded, “He’s not that smart; it’s the result of good discipline.”
    Whether that was true or not, Father did instill in me a sense of responsibility for the family, constantly reminding me of my obligations to honor the family name. Having learned from his own life experience that one could only advance within the system of the Communist Party, Father strongly encouraged me to be active in politics.
    For me, Communist indoctrination began early. When American preschoolers were reading Dr. Seuss or watching
Sesame Street
, we were memorizing Chairman Mao, starting with his simpler quotations and graduating to whole essays by elementary school. Thanks to visits to Mother’s factory, my revolutionary vocabulary was extensive because I asked what this or that character meant until I could easily read banners— DOWN WITH THE COUNTERREVOLUTIONARIES AND RIGHTISTS and THE WORKING CLASS IS THE LEADER OF THE REVOLUTION. When I became the first to recite the three famous essays by Chairman Mao in first grade, I was made class leader.
    Throughout my elementary and high school years, I was head of the Little Red Guards and the Communist Youth League. However, when I spent too much time in political activities, joining adults in promoting the Party’s policies on the street, or spending days preparing the school’s bulletin board, Father became worried. “Political opportunities pass like clouds,” he advised. “The important thing is to learn a real skill, which will sustain and benefit you all your life.”
    At school, we were frequently asked our plans for the future. The correct answer was: “Follow Chairman Mao’s words and be a qualified successor to the Revolution.” We all assumed that a “qualified successor to the Revolution” meant helping poor peasants in the remote desert or mountainous regions. In 1975, the Communist Party was promoting a model student who turned in a blank sheet of paper during an exam, claiming that he was too busy with the Revolution to prepare for his tests. The whole nation was urged to reform the education system, which the Party believed was out of touch with the lives of workers and peasants. At school, we were encouraged to spend less time on our science lessons and more time doing physical labor, such as collecting horse manure on the street or helping peasants pull weeds. Father was deeply troubled by this new political trend and, though he made no protest about what happened at school, he forced us to read our books at home to make up for the time wasted in class. “This country is out of whack,” he said to Mother and, noticing I had heard him, said, “Don’t repeat what I just said to your teacher.