Lindsay Wong‘s debut, The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family (Arsenal Pulp Press), is a finalist for the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. The $60,000 prize is given annually for excellence in the category of literary nonfiction, which includes essays, history, biography, memoir, commentary, and criticism.
The Woo-Woo is a darkly comic memoir of her coming of age in a dysfunctional family who blame their woes on ghosts and demons when they should really be on anti-psychotic medication. At once a witty and touching memoir about the Asian immigrant experience and a harrowing and honest depiction of the vagaries of mental illness, The Woo-Woo is a gut-wrenching and beguiling manual for surviving family, and oneself.
The jury—Michael Harris, Donna Bailey Nurse, and Joel Yanofsky—stated: “CanLit is brimming with immigrant stories, but we’ve never had anything quite like Lindsay Wong’s The Woo-Woo. This madcap memoir follows Wong as she comes of age amidst her foul-mouthed, upwardly mobile Asian Canadian family. Although the household is riddled with mental illness, her mother blames their domestic chaos on a bevy of Chinese ghosts. Hilarious anecdotes and slapstick comedy make bearable a shattering account of childhood neglect, emotional abuse, and social ostracism. Wong navigates treacherous emotional waters with such masterful literary skill we are barely aware of the moment our laughter turns to tears.”
Lindsay Wong is a Vancouver-based journalist. She holds a BFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University. Wong has been awarded fellowships and residencies at The Kimmel-Harding Nelson Center in Nebraska City, Caldera Arts in Oregon, and The Studios of Key West, among others. Currently, she is writer-in-residence at The John Howard Society and The Community Arts Council of Vancouver.