Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Summary and Reviews of The Little Red Guard by Wenguang Huang

The Little Red Guard by Wenguang Huang

The Little Red Guard

A Family Memoir

by Wenguang Huang
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (6):
  • Readers' Rating (2):
  • First Published:
  • Apr 26, 2012, 272 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Apr 2013, 272 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Book Summary

Three generations of a family living under one roof reflect the dramatic transformations of an entire society in this memoir of life in 20th century China.

When Wenguang Huang was nine years old, his grandmother became obsessed with her own death. Fearing cremation, she extracted from her family the promise to bury her after she died. This was in Xi'an, a city in central China, in the 1970s, when a national ban on all traditional Chinese practices, including burials, was strictly enforced. But Huang's grandmother was persistent, and two years later, his father built her a coffin. He also appointed his older son, Wenguang, as coffin keeper, a distinction that meant, among other things, sleeping next to the coffin at night.

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. Many years after her death, the family's memories of her coffin still loom large. Huang, now living and working in America, has come to realize how much the concern over the coffin has affected his upbringing and shaped the lives of everyone in the family.

Lyrical and poignant, funny and heartrending, The Little Red Guard is the powerful tale of an ordinary family finding their way through turbulence and transition.

1 .
Demands

At the age of ten, I slept next to a coffin that Father had made for Grandma's seventy-third birthday. He forbade us from calling it a "coffin" and insisted that we refer to it as shou mu, which means something like "longevity wood." To me, it seemed a strange name for the box in which we'd bury Grandma, but it served a practical purpose. It was less spooky to share my room with a "longevity wood" than with a big black coffin.

In 1973, Grandma had turned seventy-one, or seventy-two by the Chinese counting in which you are already one at birth. All of a sudden, she became obsessed with death and was scared. My sister, Wenxia, and I still remember the night when Grandma first broached the topic. Over dinner, Mother had launched into her usual tirade over household chores. She had visited a neighbor's house the night before and seen how their eldest son willingly pitched in to wash dishes after dinner. "He polished the stove squeaky clean," Mother said, ...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

There are few who will fail to recognize themselves (or their teenagers) in the rebellious, know-it-all young man Huang regretfully claims to have been.... The Little Red Guard is fast-paced and engaging and will appeal to fiction and non-fiction readers alike. The book provides ample themes for discussion and would be an excellent choice as a book group selection...continued

Full Review (632 words)

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today.

(Reviewed by Kim Kovacs).

Media Reviews

O, The Oprah Magazine
A memoir centered on a coffin? Yes, and it works.

Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Huang's coming-of-age story eloquently describes his family coping with change and how, in a turbulent time, he made sense of the world.

Booklist
[Huang's] description of life under Mao will come as a revelation to readers.

Kirkus Reviews
A trenchantly observed story that depicts the clash of traditional and modern Chinese culture with a powerful combination of sensitivity and mordant irony.

Library Journal
Yet another interesting way to look at China, something readers crave.

Author Blurb Ha Jin, author of Waiting
The Little Red Guard is a remarkable memoir. Wenguang Huang gave it an ingenious dramatic structure, which reveals the tensions and emotional struggles within his family. At the psychological level, the story has universal resonance that is beyond history and culture. Huang tells it with extraordinary candor, acuity, and the cruel irony of life. As a result, the story is full of gravity, absurdity, and grief.

Author Blurb Philip Gourevitch, author of The Ballad of Abu Ghraib and We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
The Little Red Guard - his first book - establishes Wenguang Huang as a master storyteller. Vividly engaging and often surprising, this memoir of coming of age in an ordinary Chinese family amid the social and political wreckage of Mao's Cultural Revolution is uncommonly wise and deeply moving.

Reader Reviews

Louise J

A Memoir & History Lesson in One!
The story was well-written, interesting, funny, interspersed with the political state of China at the time. A story and history lesson all-in-one. Excellent read.
Diane S.

The Little Red Guard
Wen is a very likable and easy to relate to narrator. Living with a grandmother, who is from a time when they still bound woman's feet, he and is family try to navigate between the old customs and the new ways after Mao's cultural revolution. Burial ...   Read More

Write your own review!

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book



The Young Pioneers

Memoirist Wenguang Huang was once a member of China's communist youth organization, which, during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), was known as The Little Red Guard. The group was originally formed by the Communist Party of China in 1949 as The Youth and Children of China Movement, but in 1953, it was renamed The Young Pioneers - the name the organization reverted to after the Cultural Revolution ended.

Most Chinese children become members of the Young Pioneers by the end of their grade school years; in 2002 it was estimated that over 130 million youths belonged to the organization. Those between the ages of 6 and 14 are eligible to join, after which time they may choose to advance to the Communist Youth League of China.

A red ...

This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked The Little Red Guard, try these:

  • Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden jacket

    Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden

    by Zhuqing Li

    Published 2023

    About this book

    Sisters separated by war forge new identities as they are forced to choose between family, nation, and their own independence.

  • 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows jacket

    1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows

    by Ai Weiwei

    Published 2022

    About this book

    In his widely anticipated memoir, "one of the most important artists working in the world today" (Financial Times) tells a century-long epic tale of China through the story of his own extraordinary life and the legacy of his father, the nation's most celebrated poet.

We have 10 read-alikes for The Little Red Guard, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
  • Book Jacket: The Women
    The Women
    by Kristin Hannah
    Kristin Hannah's latest historical epic, The Women, is a story of how a war shaped a generation ...
  • Book Jacket: The Wide Wide Sea
    The Wide Wide Sea
    by Hampton Sides
    By 1775, 48-year-old Captain James Cook had completed two highly successful voyages of discovery and...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

Children are not the people of tomorrow, but people today.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now