Book Review on 'The Little Red Guard'

choi

Michael Fathers, Coming of Age In Mao's China. Death cannot be controlled by the party, but disposing of a body can. So the author's father built a coffin in secret at his mother's request. Wall Street Journal, Apr 30, 2012.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB ... 50293906310780.html
(book review on Wenguang Huang, The Little Red Guard; A family memoir. Riverhead, 2012)


(a) In this review, "his" mostly refers to author's father, but occasionally, to the author. What stumped me was this sentence in paragraph 1:

"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.

Here, "his" refers to the father.
(b) The review says, "Grandma Huang, ruling over her son, his short-tempered wife and their four children, emerges as one of the more memorable figures of modern memoir."

rule (vi): "to exercise supreme authority"
www.m-w.com

If the "over" is dropped, the meaning remains the same.
(c) At the end of the review is this introduction: "Mr Fathers is co-author of 'Tiananmen: The Rape of Peking,' an account of China's 1989 democracy movement.

(i) Michael Fathers and Andrew Higgins, Tiananmen; The rape of Peking. The Independent in association with Doubleday, 1989.
(ii) Michael Fathers, News Tiananmen Ten Years On: `I wept for the people, betrayed by their leaders.' The Independent, June 4, 1999.
http://www.independent.co.uk/new ... eaders-1097997.html

(A) APC: armored personnel carrier
(B)
* blub (vi): "chiefly British: BLUBBER"
* blubber (vi; Middle English blubren to make a bubbling sound): "to weep noisily"

Please note: blubber (n; Middle English bluber bubble, foam, probably of imitative origin):
"the fat of whales and other large marine mammals"

(iii) The Independent
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Independent
(created in 1986 by three former journalists at The Daily Telegraph; Headquarters London)