DEFIANCE: Author Denise Chong tells the story of a Chinese man who was imprisoned for defacing the portrait of Chinese dictator Mao Zedong. (Courtesy of Random House Canada)
At this time when the Beijing Olympics and economic growth seem to have gradually replaced our memories of the Chinese regime’s oppressive acts, Canadian author Denise Chong wrote what she calls “the biography of a gesture,” exploring what drove an ordinary man to throw eggs at a portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong in 1989.
Chong recently spoke at the Vancouver Public Library about why she wrote about this story. “I wanted to write a book where I did not even have to use the term until very late in the story,” said Chong, a former senior economic advisor in Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s office and a third-generation Canadian of Chinese descent who grew up in Prince George.
“Could I make it resonant for … not a man on the street in China, but a man on the street in the West? And I came to see what that human part of human rights is. It is the ability to recognize goodness, to defend decency, to demand respect, fairness, but most of all—and this just shook me to my moral core, I have to say—to love.”
The subject of Chong’s new book Egg on Mao is a former Chinese prisoner of conscience and recently-arrived refugee in Calgary named Lu Decheng.
On May 23, 1989, the sixth week of the democracy protest in Tiananmen Square and fourth day of martial law, Lu Decheng, a bus mechanic, and two hometown friends took an overnight train of 15,000 kilometers (9,300 miles) from Hunan province to Beijing to join the students.
In mid-afternoon, intending to mar the entire portrait of Mao permanently and humiliate the regime, the three tossed 20 paint-filled eggs at the giant portrait.
“We did not have a personal conflict with Mao,” said Lu in an interview after arriving in Calgary in 2006. “Mao and I were from the same province. The gesture was not intended toward Mao, but toward the political system. … The Chinese Communist Party has done too much harm to the Chinese people and the portrait was the symbol of the regime’s despotism and totalitarianism.”
At age 25, Lu was sentenced to 16 years of prison, his friend Yu Dongyue, a newspaper editor, was sentenced to 20 years, and elementary school teacher Yu Zhijian was sentenced to life.
BIOGRAPHY OF A GESTURE: Canadian author Denise Chong launched her new book, Egg on Mao, as a reflection on the human part of human rights at the Vancouver Public Library. (Helena Zhu/The Epoch Times)
“I was thinking to myself, and when I say I was thinking to myself, I was sweating thinking this—What leads a person to become and to act as a moral being? I wondered. Is this just part of being human? Is this what we are naturally? Is it learned? Is it inquired? What is it?” said Chong.
Without disclosing her intention of writing a human rights story, Chong snuck into southern China’s Hunan province two years ago. Through interviewing Lu’s acquaintances, who remain anonymous in the story for their protection, Chong explored Lu’s early life, when Lu was raised by a dignified mother who was known to return money she found.
She discovered that Lu was one who could not forget witnessing his patriotic grandmother being bullied by communist soldiers when she resisted the order to weep for Mao’s death. He vowed not to let external factors prevent him from pursuing love and family.
Although Lu escaped and fled on foot through the deep jungles of Burma and Thailand, he was captured by Thai authorities and locked up again for 18 months in a Thai prison at the demand of influential Chinese authorities.
“This book was a very tough book to write,” said Chong, whose earlier books include The Concubine’s Children (1994) and The Girl in the Picture: The Kim Phuc Story (1999).
“I really poured what I could into the book. I thought the subject deserved it—to pour my thoughts about craft into this story. … I knew I was going to start this book the moment after the eggs are thrown and I knew the book was going to end when they started to throw the eggs, because what I wanted to see was how readers could come to a different view of him by the time they had taken his journey.”
Upon arriving in Canada, Lu—the man who threw eggs at Mao—became a legend in dissident circles.
Egg on Mao: The Story of an Ordinary Man Who Defaced an Icon and Unmasked a Dictatorship, by Denise Chong, is published by Random House Canada (2009) and is also available at amazon.com.
