The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir by Wenguang Huang Page A

Keep up with your studies.”
    Many times he reminded me how his future was stunted by his lack of an academic degree. “I was illiterate until the age of twenty and taught myself how to read and write,” he lamented. He believed that if he had attended senior high or college, life would have been different, even though Mother pointed out with her usual sarcasm that “If you had gone to college, you would have been labeled a bourgeois and locked up in a cowshed somewhere.”
    Father’s favorite phrase in those days was “The water flows downhill and people climb uphill.” He would say, “No matter who is in power, sooner or later they’ll need the well educated to rule the country.” He required me to score high in every subject. He had Mother send gifts, such as extra coupons for oil and sugar, to my head teacher, who assigned me extra readings.
    Despite Father’s insistence that we should do well in our schoolwork, he also realized that we were facing a grim future, especially before I entered the boarding school. If the political policy remained unchanged, my younger sister and I would have to be sent to the countryside after graduating from high school. Each family was only allowed to keep one child in the city, and my elder sister had used up our quota. So, he began encouraging me and my younger sister to learn special skills that would help us survive the harsh working conditions if we were to settle in the rural areas.
    Father had me practice my calligraphy and drawing for hours on end because he believed every village would need calligraphers to copy letters for officials, write posters, or design outdoor bulletin boards. He also had me take acupuncture lessons from Dr. Xu so I could be a barefoot doctor, a farmer who had basic medical and paramedical training at a rural clinic. For my sister, he forced her to learn to play the
erhu
, a two-stringed violin, hoping that she could join an army or village performance troupe. When she showed neither interest nor talent, Father had Grandma teach her how to cook so she could work in a rural communal kitchen, which was a relatively easy job and offered plenty to eat.
    As a child, I was thin and weak and a constant target of bullies. This embarrassed Father, who had to escort me to school. “Why don’t you fight back,” he fumed after an older boy had beaten me up, leaving me with a bloody nose. So he took me to “Uncle Ren,” who was a master of Chen-style tai chi and would teach me self-defense skills. “Your great-grandfather was both a scholar and a warrior at the imperial court,” he reminded me. “I didn’t have the opportunity to do martial arts. You need to carry on that tradition.”
    I was excited. Bruce Lee meant nothing to most mainland Chinese, but I had seen kung fu fighting and knew the fast moves and kicks would be useful in defending myself against the bullies at school. Father brought me to he house with gifts and he officially took me on as his student. Over the next five years, Uncle Ren would coach me twice a week but tai chi wasn’t at all what I expected. I soon became bored with its slow movements. Uncle Ren said that if I mastered the real essence, I could be an invincible fighter capable of combining both mental and physical power. All I wanted was to beat someone up. Father forced me to practice. I would lie on the floor and doze, jumping up to practice when I heard his approaching footsteps. I gave up when I started at my boarding school because only some old teachers practiced it in the morning and I felt too embarrassed to join their ranks. But by then, the practice had paid off, and I had become quite good at sports.
    Often, the teachings I received at home contradicted what I was taught in school. For example, the most important lessons at home were about filial piety, the ultimate expression of which was to take care of Grandma. I was never allowed to disobey Grandma or my parents. In the evenings, when Grandma had to tread