Obituary: Yu Zhijian died on March 30th
The defiler of Mao’s image in Tiananmen Square was 53
Jun 8th 2017
THE work was some of the trickiest Yu Zhijian and his friends had ever done. First they had to break each egg, 20 of them, neatly over a bowl. Then they had to fill each one with oil paint, dark blue, red or yellow, and glue it back together. Whose lousy scheme was this? he thought. Lousy except for the giant omelette, with spring onions, they were going to devour afterwards? Well, his. He had realised that eggs by themselves were too pale to leave much of a splash. So here he was sticky-fingered in Beijing, working like a snail, when inside he was jumping round like the Monkey King, able to fly 22,000km in one somersault, do magic with every hair of his body, and freeze demons. Ready to overturn China, in fact.
There were three of them, all from Liuyang in Hunan province: himself, his classmate Lu Decheng, a mechanic for the bus company, and Yu Dongyue, no relation, just a poetry-scribbling short-sighted friend, who wrote about art for the local paper. Yu Zhijian was not the eldest, but the tallest and fastest, so with his long legs he tended to take the lead. He taught at a primary school in town until, because he kept griping, he was demoted to one in the countryside. Troublemaker was his middle name. In the Deed with the Eggs he was the one who held people back while the others launched their missiles. A shame; he would have got more on target.
They were all in their 20s in the spring of 1989, unbelievably pumped up with political fervour. Literature had been their passion, again at his instigation, because his head had been spinning since high school with Byron, Shelley, Hemingway, Kant and Nietzsche, as well as the more familiar poets of the Tang dynasty. Before the Deed with the Eggs, revelling in impending doom, he wrote a last letter to his family. It was full of Byron.
At home in Liuyang the friends would crash together at his place and talk literature or philosophy all night. After the death that spring of Hu Yaobang, a reformist former general secretary of the party, the all-nighters switched to politics. They seemed to be the only people in that stuck-in-the-mud town who cared whether China festered in authoritarian corruption or embraced democracy. A bunch of hotheads, waiting for the hour to strike.
It was his idea, using proper ink-stone and ink-brush, to write slogans in Hu’s honour shouting “Democracy! Freedom!” and stick them round a few streets, which made people tut. But at Changsha, the provincial capital, he and his friends found much more sympathy. Bus-drivers refused to take their fares (just as well, since they were broke), and when they hectored the crowds at the railway station more than 3,000 yuan was stuffed in their donations box. That gave them the train fare north to Beijing, where they had never been, and they crammed on, standing almost all the way, to bring the regime down.
The outlaw band
How to do it, though? In that May of 1989 the student-led protests were going strong, but his fire-breathing gang were disdained. They were older, had jobs, came from the provinces; they didn’t fit in. Their extra-long counter-revolutionary banner was called irresponsible by the students, so careful, so stupidly polite, kneeling down to present their petition to the prime minister, like the subjects of a feudal monarch. Yu Zhijian refused to kneel to anyone. No, he would lead a band of outlaws like the bandit-heroes of “Water Margin”, his favourite medieval tale. Too bad there were only three of them, and not 108.
His thoughts turned to the giant portrait of Mao Zedong that had hung since 1949 over Tiananmen Square. There was the source of evil, the bastard despot whose cult had to end before China could remake itself, the man he had blubbed so hard for when he died in 1976, competing with his classmates to see who could wail loudest. The portrait was much too high and heavy to take down. But what symbolism, even art, if they could defile it! Hence the eggs.
On the day they hung up two banners: “Time to end 5,000 years of tyranny! Time to lay the cult of Mao to rest!” Then they hurled the eggs, which mostly fell short, though a blue one cracked Mao’s eyebrow and ran down his nose. At once they were seized by the students, who disowned them and handed them over to the security forces: an act which did not save the students from the massacre later. Yu Zhijian heard the gunfire in the square from his jail cell, like someone sautéeing peas in a pan.
They were all jailed, for almost 12 years in his case, as “rapists of the Great Leader”. Afterwards they fled into exile; he ended up in Indianapolis. With a wife, a son, diabetes and not much money, it was hard to get by. His main job was looking after Yu Dongyue, who had lost his mind in prison. He felt that heartbreak was his fault.
Apart from that, no regrets about the eggs. Just worries that his fervent gesture would fade from minds, and that the spectre of Mao would remain. Sadly, he was right on both counts. He and his friends, “all average nobodies”, were forgotten in exile, his death largely unnoticed and his memories, recounted to the poet Liao Yiwu for a book, untranslated until now. Meanwhile Mao’s portrait, replaced mere hours after the eggs landed and many times since, continues to stare out overChina from the Gate of Heavenly Peace.
This article appeared in the Obituary section of the print edition under the headline “One in the eye for the Chairman”
