Humor may not be the first thing one expects from a memoir centered on burial rites, but Wenguang Huang's "The Little Red Guard," a lively chronicle of an Maoist-era family and its contraband coffin, inspires as many laughs as it does tears. The book opens in 1973, as the nine-year-old Wenguang tries to reconcile the ubiquitous slogans promoting a superstition-free “new society” with a grandmother who is afraid of ghosts. “Only Chairman Mao and the Communist Party are your closest relatives,” Huang is taught in school while his relatives at home also demand filial piety. The incompatible philosophies of Confucianism and communism, which repeatedly rupture the Huang household, also ravaged China at large. “Breaking an entire country away from long-held traditions practically overnight is a complicated business,” Huang writes. Nowhere was this more evident than in the nation-wide shock at the Great Helmsman’s passing: all good comrades shall die one day, the government preached, but Chairman Mao? Surely, he was immortal.
