Three Chinese dissidents (L-R) Yu Zhijian, Yu Dongyue and Lu Decheng pose beside a photograph of the defaced Chairman Mao portrait, which they threw dye-filled eggs at during the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement, in Washington, June 2, 2009. REUTERS/Jim Young

Twenty years ago, Lu Decheng and two friends did what many of his compatriots considered unthinkable.

They defaced the portrait of Mao Zedong the beloved founder of the Communist regime in China.

On June 4, 1989, Lu Decheng, Yu Zhijian and Yu Dongyue trekked to Beijing along with thousands of students fighting for democracy. The three men marched up to Mao’s portrait that hung on top of Tiananmen Gate, took their paint-filled eggs and hurled them at the image of their former leader. This ultimately sent Decheng and his friends to prison for 16 years.

Now, the defiant act is being remembered in the newly-released Egg on Mao by The Concubine’s Children author Denise Chong.

Chong came back from a 10-year hiatus to tell the story of Lu Decheng and the moments that led up to that pivotal event.

“Tiananmen Square was fading from the public’s mind; even the West quickly forgot about it,” Chong explained over coffee last month. “So the idea was to bring this story out as a reminder of Tiananmen Square 20 years on.”

Chong has explored human rights in her other books. She has received praise for The Concubine’s Children and The Girl in the Picture, which looked at the war in Vietnam. Now, with Egg on Mao added to the list, her constant push to call attention to human rights violations goes on.

“I think that if [the book] can lend a new resonance to human rights in China then that’s good” Chong said. “It isn’t over just because Tiananmen Square is forgotten.”

Egg on Mao looks at the story of an ordinary man, who, during the course of his life had experienced many heartaches at the hands of the communist regime.

From hiding his marriage to the death of his mother and first son, Decheng endured a lot of emotional pain before he committed what was seen by many Chinese as a “horrendous act.’’

“It was sheer dogged hours that I spent with him. I was spending years with him,” Chong said. “You can imagine what he’s confessing.

“The confessions of the marriage, the pregnancy, the attempts by the busybodies to force the abortion. They were emotionally very difficult territory.”

During the year and a half Chong spent interviewing Decheng, she explains that it was, at times, too much for him to handle.

“All those conversations would end before I was ready to have them end,” she explained. “Decheng would be in tears, he would have to get up from the table, he’d lock himself in the bathroom and wouldn’t come out for a long time.”

Decheng painted a vivid portrait for Chong that revealed the hardships he and the rest of China dealt with, the scrutiny he faced as a youth when he didn’t cry at the news of Mao’s death and the emotional pain at the loss of his newborn son.

It was these events that made Decheng wish for a better life under a democratic China, where basic human rights existed -- the events that may have led him to Tiananmen Square with defiance in his heart.

After spending several years in prison for the “crime”, Decheng fled to Canada in 2007.

He now resides in Calgary with his second wife and their child as well as his daughter from his first marriage.

He remains a democracy activist, and is, as Chong describes, “working from the outside in.”

“He realizes his naïveté before, but he hasn’t lost any ounce of his hope,” she said.

As he tirelessly fights for democracy and basic human rights, Decheng longs for the fall of communism in China, and he hopes that he will live to see it. Until then, he will continue to hand out his calling card, which at the bottom reads: “The last Berlin Wall.”