A sense of purpose

Denise Chong’s Egg on Mao recalls a powerful act of defiance

Egg on Mao is the memoir of Lu Decheng, a story so intricately twisted and rich that it almost defies the idea of plot and seems to unfold as the vagaries of life do.

A spirited bus mechanic in rural China, Lu travelled to the capital during the Tiananmen protests, and with two friends took one of the most symbolically recognized steps of that protest: defacing the iconic portrait of Mao that hung there. The story is about everything that brackets that event: the childhood and marriage that came before, the nine years of imprisonment, solitude and betrayal that came after, the loss of a child and the steadfast love of a wife.

In talking with Chong, I come to see how her purpose is neither purely political nor personal, but an admixture of the two: “On the one hand, you can convey social impact by looking at the large events and social forces, but to get the human impact, the very human side of a … story, you do come down to the intimacy of one person’s life.” She later added, “You’re never going to get the complete picture by a singular event. But it does give you a different perspective and it makes you ask questions.”

She is pushed by a lifelong desire to write, to simply bring to light memories that have never before been given a voice. Chong is captivated by the basic process of communicating itself: “I have stuck to non-fiction, but my concern has been narrative storytelling.” She shies away from making too broad divisions between differing genres of writing, reminding me

that “fiction and non-fiction have the same lofty goals, [but] different in that fictional characters are born from a writer’s pen, but still drawn from real life; and in non-fiction the character is actually born from another person… The same kinds of intentions are there: to round out characters, to convey whatever idea you have as a writer.”

Chong is a writer with full intellectual control over her craft. But more than that, she seems to be one of a small number of writers who really believe that there is a “moral duty to the reader,” that being a writer is a calling to “strive for – you can use beauty or you can use truth, but some kind of resonance.”

As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Oct 22, 2009
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/books/books.aspx?iIDArticle=18520