When author Lindsay Wong was a twenty-one-year-old MFA student at Columbia University, she finally received a diagnosis for the vertigo/hallucinations/fatigue that had been plaguing her for years: Migraine-Associated Vestibulopathy. I was a freak with terrible, mutinous genes, but at least I was not turning into my permanently sad mother, my suicidal auntie Beautiful One, or my maternal grandmother, Poh-Poh. I couldn't stop giggling because I wasn't what my family termed Woo-Woo: I was only medically damaged – the spirits that have plagued my Chinese family for years be damned. “I felt betrayed in an outsized, abstract way that I could not explain.” It reinforces nasty stereotypes, drags like a soap opera past its prime, and is just a letdown overall. And even then, it must have been a muddled editing process with the sheer amount of poorly written, poorly constructed paragraphs present in these pages. I spotted a few too many typos and editorial mistakes to give it a thumbs-up in that regard. I usually love the stuff that Arsenal produces, but this falls below their standard of work. We miss the character, colour, and class that a solid nonfiction – memoir or not – usually embodies. ![]() The author has an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University – it is a shame to see that this came out of it. Instead, it reflects a crusade of petty, mean revenge. There is sadly nothing resembling any sort of nuance. And it quite simply does not make for good literature. What it does end up being is a slimy, cobbled-together motley of memories/anecdotes. Ultimately, it comes off as wholly insensitive: to mental health, to culture, and to the craft of the memoir. Ostensibly, The Woo-Woo is about one girl’s absurd upbringing and her quirky family. Wong does not give reason as to why she is airing her family grievances in a book – did she grow from it? Learn? Anything? I am also sad to say that it does not contain a likeable narrator – she jumps into her memory with shocking lucidity… and specificity… it makes you wonder what is concocted and what isn’t in this “memoir.” This book reads like an endless number of user-submitted stories to a February issue of Reader’s Digest. “Between my mother’s hysterics and the uncertainty of my illness, I couldn’t help but believe that I had fallen into madness.” ![]() On one hand a witty and touching memoir about the Asian immigrant experience, and on the other 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. And when Lindsay herself starts to experience symptoms of the woo-woo herself, she wonders whether she will suffer the same fate as her family. The eccentricities take a dark turn, however, when her aunt, suffering from a psychotic breakdown, holds the city of Vancouver hostage for eight hours when she threatens to jump off a bridge. From a young age, she witnessed the woo-woo's sinister effects at the age of six, she found herself living in the food court of her suburban mall, which her mother saw as a safe haven because they could hide there from dead people, and on a camping trip, her mother tried to light Lindsay's foot on fire to rid her of the woo-woo. Lindsay Wong grew up with a paranoid schizophrenic grandmother and a mother who was deeply afraid of the "woo-woo"-Chinese ghosts who come to visit in times of personal turmoil. In this jaw-dropping, darkly comedic memoir, a young woman comes of age in a dysfunctional Asian family whose members blamed their woes on ghosts and demons when in fact they should have been on anti-psychotic meds.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |