The Little Red Guard by Wenguang Huang

This is a dysfunctional family tale, Chinese style.

In the 1970s, when the author was a little boy in the central Chinese city of Xi’an, his grandmother’s death loomed large over his family. The  details of her funeral consumed her. A small woman with a domineering personality, she spent years milking her son and grandchildren’s loyalty to get what she wanted, causing PTSD in young Wenguang in the process.
In part, this the story of the family’s attempts to carry out their matriarch’s wishes, a task made both complex and risky by sweeping policy shifts imposed by Mao's communist government. Burial became illegal in China in 1949, leaving cremation the only permissible way to handle the remains of the dead. Officials ramped up their enforcement of this rule during Huang’s childhood. Still, Grandma insisted on a traditional burial.
So her dutiful son, a Communist Party member whose honor and livelihood could be devastated if he were discovered to be violating a law, roped his wife and children into a series of stealthy maneuvers. The family sneaked seamstresses into their home to craft special burial robes, and schmoozed train conductors and drivers to transport the body. And they lived on a shoestring so they could pay back a massive loan taken out to buy the black-market coffin that Huang slept beside for years in the family’s cramped apartment, causing nightmares for years to come.
The memoir is a fascinating look at unhealthy family dynamics: a wife who resents her husband’s blind devotion to his mother, grandchildren who begrudge their grandmother the sacrifices she forced on them, and a grandmother who blatantly favors her son and eldest grandson. But this tale isn’t just about Huang’s family. Vignettes of scrounging for food when rations were scarce and forcing tears at school when Mao died so no one would question Huang’s allegiance to communism provide insight into the cultural landscape of China in the tumultuous 1970s.