The Little Red Guard
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The Little Red Guard by Wenguang Huang
A Washington Post Best of 2012 pick"Delightful... a book that brings a corner of modern China alive."-The Wall Street Journal
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 Xian, 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.
Wenguang Huang is a writer, translator, and journalist. He is a regular contributor to Chicago Public Radio, the Chicago Tribune, Fortune.com, and the New York Times. He was a former staff member of the New York Times Beijing desk. His translations have appeared in Asia Literary Review, Harper's magazine, and the Paris Review, and he has received a PEN Translation Fund Award. A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel is his first novel. He is based in Chicago.
Juan Castilla Plaza is a teacher of English. He specializes in English-to-Spanish translations.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781594486555 |
| ISBN 10 | 1594486557 |
| Title | The Little Red Guard |
| Author | Wenguang Huang |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Penguin Putnam Inc |
| Year published | 2013-04-02 |
| Number of pages | 272 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |