Memoir uses humour to examine mental illness
Lindsay Wong was 22 and had only been living in New York City for four months when she was diagnosed with rare migraine-related vestibulopathy. The intimidating medical term explained Wong’s vertigo, nausea, hallucinations and the “feral wiring” of her brain.
But for the Vancouver-born Columbia University grad student, the diagnosis came as bitter relief. Wong’s disease was incurable, but it also meant she was not possessed by the “Woo-Woo,” or the Chinese ghosts that plague her family.
Wong’s generational history of intertwined mental illness and supernatural beliefs drives her harrowing but sharply funny memoir, The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family, which was just nominated for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, one of the country’s most lucrative literary awards at $60,000.
Here, we are introduced to Wong’s father, Confucius Gentleman, whose harsh “jokes” about his daughter’s stupidity and physical appearance are intended to build up her resilience.
Her mother, Quiet Snow, is terrified of the Woo-Woo that possess Wong’s grandmother, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and who once believed the refrigerator was attacking her.
During a psychotic breakdown in 2008, Wong’s aunt, Beautiful One, shut down Vancouver’s Canada Day celebrations in an eight-hour standoff when she threatened to jump off the Ironworkers Memorial bridge. Later, she would brag to Wong that she was the best bridge jumper in B.C.
“There’s always someone who has seen a ghost, or they are always comparing a psychotic break or anxiety or depression and blaming it on a demon. Mental illness is a huge stigma in Chinese families, especially ours,” Wong says.
Despite the litany of shocking stories, Wong pulls back from the narrative to reveal a deep empathy toward her family. “I wanted to portray everyone as honestly as possible, so hopefully it comes across that no one is being treated as one-dimensional — no one is good or evil,” she says.
Wong’s first attempt at a memoir was during her creative-writing undergraduate studies at the University of British Columbia.
“I was trying to write something very serious,” she says. It wasn’t until much later, at Columbia, that Wong realized it was OK to use humour. She threw away her original words and let her subconscious pour out.