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

her way to the outdoor latrine two blocks away, I was the one to accompany her. During rainy days, she would use a chamber pot and I would clean it for her. When the neighbors noticed, many agreed with Father, commending me for being a filial child. For a while, the chamber pot became a badge of honor for me.
    In my third year at elementary school, we were taught that filial piety was part of the old Confucian philosophy, which needed to be eliminated. “Only Chairman Mao and the Communist Party are your closest relatives,” said our teacher. “If your parents or relatives engage in any counterrevolutionary activities, you should not hesitate in reporting them or publicly denouncing them. It is a true test of your revolutionary will.”
    When I shared with Father what we were being taught, he cautioned me about believing in propaganda. “People might talk that way in public,” he said, “but only the stupid or the fanatic would betray the parents who raise and nurture them. If you betray your parents, you betray yourself and will lose all your friends. Think about it—if you cannot even treat your parents with respect and if you rat on them for political gain, how can you expect your friends to ever trust you?”
    At school, we were taught not to show any mercy to our enemies—landlords and counterrevolutionaries. In our physical education class, we were trained to use a wooden bayonet while shouting, “Kill, kill, and kill.” We were told to retaliate against our enemies with violence, an eye for eye. As a Party member, Father embraced this part of the Communist ideology in public, but he acted differently at home. He lectured me not to harbor any thoughts of harming others. When a friend of Mother’s sought help with a divorce petition, I promised to draft it for her, but Father flew into a rage. He yelled at Mother. “Are you trying to ruin the future of our eldest son? Helping break up a family is not an auspicious thing to do.” Then Father turned to me and said, “Remember, when you do harmful things, you lose the protection of your ancestors.”
    Breaking an entire country away from long-held traditions practically overnight is a complicated business, and nowhere was this more apparent to me than in the contradictions embodied by my father. I grew up amid such contradictions, a fusion of ideologies and faiths.

7.
    E XPECTATION
    O wning a camera in China in the 1970s was a rare luxury. Families paid big money on special occasions to have their pictures taken at a photographer’s shop. My friend Qinqin owned a Seagull camera, a black oblong box with twin lenses and a viewfinder on the top. Grandma had seldom been photographed and, with Father’s permission, I asked Qinqin to come over on a Sunday and take Grandma’s and our picture. Everyone was ready by the time Qinqin walked in the door. Father had on the blue Mao jacket Mother had tailored for him for the Lunar New Year. Grandma sat in her wicker chair in the yard, dressed in a clean black corduroy shirt and new velvet hat. We children were in our New Year’s best. At Qinqin’s direction, we struck different poses, but Grandma was her focus and she kept up a stream of chatter to relax her while aiming from different angles. Grandma’s face twitched slightly; she was nervous, perhaps a little frightened, but she enjoyed the attention and bravely faced the camera. As Qinqin rewound the film, she whispered to me, “Your Grandma must have been a very attractive woman when she was young; you can still tell from her eyes, her skin, and her face.”
    “Really?” I had never thought of Grandma in that way. In my memory she was always old. I turned to look at her, examining her face as if for the first time. Her eyes were watery and sad. “Grandma, were you pretty when you were young?” I asked with the bluntness of my age. She looked a little startled and then blushed and waved the back of her hand at me. “No. I am an ugly old woman.” Father