The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family
By Lindsay Wong
Publication Year: 2018
Type: Non-fiction
Genre: memoir
Read on 2021-04-20
★★★☆☆
Unpleasant to read. Wong’s paints her recollections in lurid, sensational, and vindictive grotesqueness. It was exhausting to read these relentlessly unflattering representations of despicable people - Wong’s younger selves included - which the reader has absolutely no reprieve from. This is compounded by the fact that Wong tells all of these stories from within that present, rarely ever sharing a later reflection or takeaway and instead beating us over the head with how disgusting and miserable and crazy she/everyone was in that moment. As a reader, I am left with a portrait of static bitter people trapped in time through the entire duration of the book until the robotic epilogue didacting (as if off-screen) the personal growth of some Wong family members.
Maybe I am also especially critical because a lot of Wong’s life in broad strokes resembles mine. For instance, I found it increasingly irritating the cavalier attitude with which Wong elides her family’s and friends’ apparent wealth, which enabled her to take several spontaneous solo vacations to Hawaii, Europe, the Bahamas, grow up in a self-described “McMansion” in the suburbs, as well as attend UBC and Columbia. This she recounts, gliding over the financials (except to reference the emergency credit card her father gave her which she spends unspecified sums of money on the above and a (IMO) tasteless thank you to “the Bank of Mom and Dad” in the acknowledgements) while simultaneously describing other individuals as “rich” - in comparison to her? also rich? middle-upper class upbringing? I’ve spent most of my adult life grappling with what it means to have class privilege and how to be honest to yourself and others about that, so this especially annoyed me. Wong also glossed COMPLETELY over her own academic achievements to instead hyperbolically describe how fat and stupid and gross she was (and was thought to be by her family) - all while getting into UBC, shortlisting for a Rhode Scholarship, getting into Columbia’s MFA program, and some subtle allusions to being a piano prodigy. It feels very boohoo poor me rather than a fulsome, dimensional picture. That pretty much summarizes my take on this memoir.
