The Little Red Guard, Wenguang Huang
The Little Red Guard, Wenguang Huang
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The Little Red Guard
A Family Memoir

Author: Wenguang Huang

Narrator: Adam Verner

Unabridged: 7 hr 6 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/07/2012

Synopsis

In 1973, when Wenguang Huang was eight, his grandmother became obsessed with her own death. Fearing cremation, she appealed to her family to promise to bury her after she'd died. This was in Xi'an, a city in central China, at a time when a national ban on all traditional Chinese practices, including burials, was strictly enforced. But his grandmother was persistent, and two years later, Huang's father built her a coffin. Over the next fifteen years, the whole family was consumed with planning Grandma's burial, a regular source of friction and contention, with the constant risk of being caught by the authorities. Years later, Huang came to understand how much the coffin had influenced his upbringing and shaped the lives of everyone in the family.

About Wenguang Huang

Wenguang Huang is a Chicago-based writer and translator. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper's, the Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, and the Asia Literary Review. Huang is the English translator of The Corpse Walker, God Is Red, and Woman from Shanghai. He grew up in northern China.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Suzanne on June 09, 2012

This was a very different kind of Chinese memoir than most I have read. It was more like a psychological portrait of a family. At the center of the book is the grandmother's wish to be buried in her ancestoral graveyard in her home town. This provides a touchstone for the book, as at first this goal......more

Goodreads review by Pang on April 04, 2014

I miss me family :'( This book focused on the author's life, his parents and his grandmother, particularly around the time the grandmother was preparing for her death. No, she wasn't dying in the beginning; she just wanted to be prepared for the inevitable. All she wanted was to be buried next to her......more

Goodreads review by Chad on May 10, 2012

This is a really excellent and fascinating book--and I'm not just saying that because I spent a week with Wen in a palace in Austria. Nor am I saying that because Wen may just well be the most genuine and kind person I've ever met in my life. No, his story of growing up in China in the 70s and 80s,......more

Goodreads review by ✿ lemon ✿ on January 04, 2019

“You can be cheap with the living, but spare no expense for the dead” (my fave quote) This is the first book that I finished in 2019, and I’m glad. I absolutely love this memoir, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. It was so well written, I could not put it down when I started reading it. I highly......more

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