The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family

It's well-written, compelling, and convincing. It's also amazing how things can look so different on one level, and yet on the level of mechanics and outcomes completely the same; my Baptist WASP suburban Toronto family had no ice hockey, drug raids, or Chinese Woo-Woo, but there were demons, and a hatred of and opposition to psychology/psychiatry and getting help, and a lot of cruelty, and very similar scars and damage coming out from it. Go figure.

If your parents were less than loving and supportive, be warned: this could be a challenging read.

Dark, sometimes too dark; funny as hell, you'll feel horrible by laughing and then, you'll laugh some more. Lindsay Wong will hold your hand (and your head) and make you look at her insane but tender and loving family. A gem of a memoir!

First: not enough hockey. Or at least, hockey makes a brief and violent appearance (of course!) but then it disappears. I'd have liked to see it mentioned again, if only to update whether it had any appeal of any kind ever again.

Second: both weirder and not as weird as I anticipated. The demons turn out to be ghosts but not in the way I'm used to thinking of them. The drug raids are very strange, but serve well as humorous anecdotes: unexpected details really go against stereotypes.

Third: see? my parenting isn't that bad. Actually, maybe it is that bad. Maybe there's a memoir coming about how weird it was to grow up with me.

Mostly I think my problem is I kind of expected it to be the stuff of sitcom, you know, zany. It's not zany. show more It's sad and distressing, which is really not how I had planned to focus my Halloween reading. Although to be fair, I suppose bad parenting really is horrific.

I can't wait to see what the next book is about, though.

Library copy show less

I read this book because it was short-listed for Canada Reads. It is a memoir, in which the author talks about her Chinese-Canadian family. The family believes every bad thing that happens to them (big or small) is the result of ghosts. In fact, it appears that the family has a history of mental illness.

I found the book hard to relate to. Most of the family went by translations of their traditional Chinese names, so we get characters such as "Aunt Beautiful One". I found this made it more difficult for me to remember that this is a true story. Immigrant stories tend to deal with flight from one place and/or learning to fit in to a new culture. Rarely do we get a glimpse into other issues, such as mental illness. In that way, this is an show more important book, which serves to show that we can suffer similar challenges no matter how or when we got here. show less

Memoir of a young woman of Chinese descent coming of age in Vancouver in the 1990s/2000s. The "Woo Woo" refers to demons, which her family references as the cause of psychosis experienced by certain family members. The author manages to inject humour into the story, but still provides an honest account of her life.

Lindsay Wong takes us on a dark but often humourous roller-coaster ride through her childhood and adolescence growing up in a Chinese-Canadian family plagued with "the woo-woo" in Hongcouver. Definitely a page-turning memoir.