Denise Chong reads excerpts from her book, Egg on Mao.

Canadian author Denise Chong spoke about her most recent book Egg on Mao at the Annandale campus on the afternoon of April 8.

Her book follows the life of one of three persons, who during the Tiananmen Square student sit-in in Beijing, China in 1989, threw eggs filled with paint at the giant portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong in the Square. They were subsequently arrested, termed vandals and counter-revolutionary reactionaries, and sentenced to various terms in prison, from 16 years to life.

In speaking about her book, Chong related how she came to research and write it over the course of three years. She also read three excerpts from the volume.

Chong first began thinking of this book in 2006 when an editor came to her about the recent arrival of Lu Decheng, who was one of the perpetrators who had recently been granted political asylum in Canada. She, along with many other journalists, interviewed Lu in Toronto.

Chong became interested in writing the book and mulled over what type of book it should be. Though interested in human rights, she decided not to make direct mention of that subject.

She asked herself what is a moral being and what causes one to act. A moral act included one of defiance in trying to attain certain rights for the general good and the good of the country, such as freedom and democracy in Communist China, with grave repercussions possible. She decided to relate Lu’s life to see how he arrived at his moral act, also relating the repercussions of that act.

In her research, Chong interviewed Lu for days at a time and visited China in 2007, including visits to Beijing and Lu’s home town of Liuyang in the Hunan province.

During her visit to China, she took pains not to be caught doing research on her Tiananmen Square book, a forbidden topic in that country. She was continually alert to possibly being followed and carried no cell phone, which could have been traced to find her whereabouts.

She also had a story to fall back upon if questioned since she was also doing research on another topic, for which she had documentation available.

Chong’s book begins after the three had thrown all their eggs at the Mao portrait and ends with the throwing of the eggs. In between, the chapters alternate between the history of Lu’s family through several generations, his life before traveling to Tiananmen Square and much of his life after the eggs were thrown, including his time in prison. These chapters are interesting, giving a depiction of life in rural Communist China and of Lu’s life in prison and afterwards (the prison life being not quite as onerous as one might suspect for a political prisoner).

Before the egg throwing, Lu was a bus mechanic in the hinterlands far from Beijing. He had limited education and was not a member of the intelligentsia but was still interested in personal and political freedom.

Chong answered questions after her talk.  Several of the questions related to whether she was actually being followed during her China visit. She stated that she was not sure but nothing overt had occurred. She was also asked whether she had suffered any repercussions about the book’s publication, in which she had not.

Chong has written two previous books, the family memoir The Concubine’s Children (1994), a Canadian bestseller, and The Girl in the Picture (2000), about a napalmed girl in Vietnam after the war.

Egg on Mao is available at book stores and online with a retail price of $26. The book may also be found at nearby libraries.

By: Arch Scurlock

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