Review | ‘Egg on Mao’ recounts Tiananmen Square protest

By JUSTIN MOYER

The Washington Post

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Andy Warhol would have appreciated the gesture: On May 23, 1989, as student protests raged, Lu Decheng and two other men hurled 30 paint-filled eggs at the immense portrait of Mao Zedong that dominates Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

But in Deng Xiaopeng’s China, poli-art stunts weren’t mere blog fodder: The gag stranded Lu in prison for almost a decade, cost him his wife and daughter and led to his eventual defection to Canada.

In “Egg on Mao,” Denise Chong, author of “The Girl in the Picture,” a biography of the burned villager in Nick Ut’s iconic Vietnam War photo, focuses on another small character in a big story to unearth startling truths about Chinese democracy.

A radicalized auto mechanic from Hunan who flouted China’s marriage laws and one-child policy, Lu traveled more than 600 miles to Tiananmen only to be spurned by insular student demonstrators, then trumped their ineffective sit-ins and hunger strikes by hurling eggs.

Lu’s action changed nothing — other nations’ on-again, off-again interest in Chinese human rights has allowed Mao’s authoritarian political culture to survive three decades after his death. Still, in a world of compromise and half-measures, it’s refreshing to read about Lu’s ill-conceived but thoroughly punk-rock gesture of defiance.

Egg on Mao: The Story of an Ordinary Man Who Defaced an Icon and Unmasked a Dictatorship, by Denise Chong (249 pages; Counterpoint; $26)

Posted on Sat, Oct. 31, 2009 10:15 PM

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