The Little Red Guard

In 1973, when Wenguang Huang was seven-years-old, his grandmother became obsessed with her own death. Fearing cremation, she appealed to her family for a promise to bury her after she’d died. This was in Xian, a city in central China, during the Cultural Revolution; a national ban on all traditional Chinese practices was strictly enforced, a ban that included burials. But his grandmother was persistent and, two years later, Huang’s father built her a coffin. He also appointed his eldest son, Wenguang, as coffin keeper, a distinction that meant, among other things, sleeping next to the coffin at night.

Over the next 15 years, the whole family was consumed with planning grandma’s burial, a regular source of friction and woeful contention, with the constant risk of being caught by the authorities. After her death, the family’s memories of her coffin gradually faded. But years later, now living and working in America, Huang came to understand how much the coffin had impacted his life, and shaped the lives of everyone in the family. Lyrical and poignant, witty and heartrending THE LITTLE RED GUARD is the powerful tale of an ordinary family finding their way through turbulence and transition.