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THE WOO-WOO

HOW I SURVIVED ICE HOCKEY, DRUG RAIDS, DEMONS, AND MY CRAZY CHINESE FAMILY

A raw, profane, and funny memoir.

The story of a volatile Chinese-Canadian childhood in a family beset by the “Woo-Woo” of mental illness.

Wong’s debut harrowingly portrays a family who “believed that mental illness, or any psychological disturbance, was caused by demonic possession.” She opens with her diagnosis of actual neurological impairment, migraine-associated vertigo, after she’d escaped to graduate school, “How nice to know that I was officially un-Woo, I thought, though he was diagnosing me with a lifelong disorder which left me confined to bed and frequently unable to read or write.” While appearing affluent, her extended family’s emotional entanglements created a chaotic household for Wong and her siblings. The author captures her father’s jovial cruelty in bleakly hilarious dialogue, as when he instructs her that “crying will turn you into a zombie like Mommy.” Wong’s mother also loomed ominously, refusing to receive appropriate treatment despite numerous instances of destructive rage—trying to light Wong’s foot on fire during an ill-starred family trip, noting, “it’s not like you need both feet, because you don’t move anyway.” This hallucinatory upbringing occurred within a caustically portrayed émigré community. From childhood, Wong’s ecologically damaged Vancouver suburb, where many Asian neighbors manufactured cannabis or methamphetamine in McMansions, seemed conformist, abrasive, and indifferent to criminal behavior. The author describes most characters with a visceral, grotesque sense of body horror, and she doesn’t ignore her own struggles with obesity and other maladies: “Puberty had transformed me into a four-foot-eight, 140-pound goblin.” Wong’s familial entropy culminated in her favorite aunt’s attempted public suicide, on a major bridge during Canada Day, gaining them further notoriety: “ ‘The cops said I was the best bridge jumper ever,’ Beautiful One squealed to me on the phone.” Nonetheless, the author moved toward redemption through understanding, noting of her mother, “she screamed because she was constantly afraid.” Wong confidently creates pungent dialogue and environmental detail. There are issues with pacing, in that the grim narrative progression can seem repetitive or meandering, but on the whole, this is a bracing debut.

A raw, profane, and funny memoir.

Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-55152-736-9

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press

Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

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