If you are looking for a book that brings a corner of modern China alive—a book filled with humor, family squabbles and ordinary life in a large city in a one-party state—look no further than "The Little Red Guard." The focus of this delightful family memoir by Wenguang Huang, a Chinese-born writer now based in Chicago, is a simple wooden coffin that a lowly member of the Communist Party, the author's father, had secretly built for his mother in the mid-1970s, as a present for her 73rd birthday. She had been pestering her son for a coffin in preparation for her death, though she showed no sign of dying. The coffin, hidden by a tablecloth and painted with a fresh coat of black lacquer each year, became the family's unwelcome and dangerous guest.
Natural death cannot be controlled by China's Communist Party, but disposing of a body can. Burial is outlawed as a feudal, superstitious practice; cremation is considered modern and officially approved. But as Mr. Huang's grandmother keeps saying, if you end up as a jar of ash or the leftover dust from the bottom of a furnace, there is no way you can join your ancestors and loved ones on the other side in the next life.
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