Lindsay’s memories of going to college, bad fashion, breaking a girl’s leg with her hockey stick, and trying to make her family like her are just a few of the stories she shares with her readers. Because she looks so completely normal to me. As an overweight, non-bathed child growing up, I often looked at the back jacket of the book at Lindsay’s author picture and thought “Really? That girl was overweight and walked around dirty at one point?”. One of the things Lindsay’s parents told her was to never cry because it shows weakness and that is when the Woo-woo will get you and go into your body. The Woo-woo is being possessed by ghosts that are all around us. The Woo-woo was a thing in her family in which her grandmother, grandfather, mother, and aunt all seemed to either have or be really scared of. Lindsay does state that all events are her version of the story as she remembers it so what really happened could have been a bit skewed. This book was full of stories from her childhood that were simply unreal. Lindsay Wong’s memoir The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family, brought tears to my eyes as I read it. Not in a haha way but in a horrific-how-could-this-story-even-be-a-little-true way. “Maybe you’d only want people to tell you pleasant things about immortality.This book was funny. What is it really like being confined to that liminal space between life and death? And in that space where you’re stripped of both your humanity and mortality, how would you make your existence worth clinging to? She sought an answer to her question by writing about people who came face to face with the unpleasantness of eternal life. “If you lived forever, would you be happy or would you be sad?” she wondered.

Many stories shed light on the marginalization and oppression that communities of colour face but Wong wanted to imagine her people beyond their victimhood she wanted to highlight their ability to survive. She wanted to challenge the often overused and undermining tropes about Asian people, especially women, by portraying them as flawed as they are resilient. Importantly, Wong’s characters are always complex and compelling outside of their roles as parents and children. So, as many writers do, Wong turned her obsession into art. Would she ever be rid of them? Would these horrible personalities ever leave her alone? Wong became obsessed.

Lindsay wong the woo woo