Using original Chinese names for her family translated into English, such as “Confucius Gentleman” and “Beautiful One,” Wong emphasizes that her family’s dysfunctional character is born from intertwined mental illness and cultural belief in the supernatural. However, Wong brightly reassures the reader, Janet Jackson suffers from the same condition. Her parents insist her fundamental evil has left her possessed by the “woo-woo.” But a neurologist reassures her that she suffers from permanent vertigo-and may never read or write again, losing the one tool buying her freedom. She loses consciousness in a subway station and wakes to find nobody has helped her. When Wong breaks free of her family to attend Columbia University, dizziness, vomiting, and giddy laughter immediately overcome her first day in New York. The author’s humour almost cushions readers from the dark reality-but not enough for comfort. She describes herself as a monster on every other page, pausing often to reflect on what she wishes she’d done, from asserting herself to protecting her estranged siblings. Wong is angry: at her family, at her classmates, but, primarily, at herself for her inability to fit in. Her prose is consequently unbalancing in its furious speed and tenor. Without peers to balance her, the author lives completely in her own head. Neither fully Asian nor fully Canadian, the child of immigrants in “Hongcouver,” she lives in a mountain McMansion surrounded by meth labs and weed farms, but few other children. Similarly, her manic-depressive aunt tries to jump off a bridge on Canada Day so she can be the “best bridge jumper in B.C.”īut in The Woo-Woo, ghosts aren’t physical-they’re symptoms of a fear of dispossession.

The author grows up with a mother who believes their family is possessed by the “woo-woo”-Chinese ghosts-and a schizophrenic grandmother who mentally relives the Sino-Japanese War everyday. From her mother setting her on fire to ward off demonic possession to consistent emotional abuse, the author shows firsthand how hard it is to outrun generational trauma.

The darkly comedic story tackles the normalization of mental illness through the author’s immediate family. Wong’s memoir The Woo-Woo weaves superstition into her daily life, leaving nothing to the imagination. Lindsay Wong grew up believing that “crying will turn you into a zombie.” Over the next 304 pages of abuse and arguments, she doesn’t cry once.

Lindsay wong the woo woo