Writer sets out to smash YA mould
New novel follows firecracker Chinese-American girl as she lands in a world of big secrets
Lindsay Wong’s memoir The Woo-Woo. How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family was a bona fide hit.
The 2018 book collected awards and attention — it was part of CBC’s Canada Reads and a finalist for the Writers’ Trust of Canada Award for Nonfiction — for the Vancouver writer.
All that hullabaloo led Wong and her family to want to take a break.
So in March 2019 the Wongs packed up and headed to Hong Kong, making it the first time her parents had returned to China since immigrating to Canada — separately — in the 1970s.
“Our family had never been back to Hong Kong; we were like the kind of weird immigrants — move to Vancouver and just stay here,” said Wong.
“We’ll never go back to the home country. Why should we? Everything is great here.
“At first I was thinking, ‘Who wants to spend two weeks with their family?’ But it turned out OK,” added Wong. “I got to meet relatives I didn’t know existed. I ate a lot of food. That was the best part of Hong Kong. I bought a lot clothes.”
She also got the idea for her just released young adult (YA) novel My Summer of Love and Misfortune.
The story follows a spoiled, self-centred Chinese-American 17-year-old named Iris as she continuously blows up her life over things like cool clothes and cool kids. Her frustrated parents have had enough and decide Iris needs an eye-opening experience, so they send her to visit family in Beijing. Iris expects this summer holiday trip will be all about food, fashion and fun outings. Instead she lands in a world of big money, big secrets and finally big choices.
For Wong, the chance to make Iris a firecracker, albeit sometimes an annoying firecracker, was something she had wanted to do with an Asian girl character for a long time.
“In any literature that portrays Asians, we seem to always see the females portrayed as meek, good and I wanted to do a character that is the complete opposite of that. So Iris is everyone’s nightmare child,” said Wong, reached at her parents’ Coquitlam home recently.
“In my day job I tutor and I do a lot of college consulting with children who are of Asian decent, and a lot of them are the children of crazy rich Asians.
“They live in penthouses in Vancouver. They are 16 years old but they drive $60,000 cars. So a lot of their antics and attitudes I kind of based Iris on.
I thought this was an interesting archetype.
“I mean, some of the kids I tutor are amazing, but there’s a couple who you can’t get to study and all they are obsessed with are their cars, their phones.”
In her fictional Beijing Iris’s aunt and uncle and her similarly aged female cousin are the one-per-cent crowd.
Everything is five star, even the designer clothes the cousin wears while competing in extreme dog-grooming contests (Google it) come right off the fashion runways of Paris.
“I would do that, too, if I had a lot of dogs and a lot of money. It looks like a fun thing,” Wong said of the colourful, odd and over-the-top activity.
With the new book out and the usual book tour responsibilities grounded by COVID19, the 33-year-old Wong left her roommate-packed house a couple of months ago and moved in with her parents in Coquitlam.
“There are six people that live in the house, not including me, and it was super crowded and my parents have a lot of space,” said Wong, adding two roommates are front-line workers. “I have my own floor at my parents’, so I decided I would sacrifice mental health.”
While she is holed up at her parents’ house, she is writing.
“I used to pay to go on residencies and sit alone and self isolate and just write all day, and now we’re in a forced residency mode,” said Wong.
After the success of The WooWoo — it has been optioned for a movie — Wong said she was ready to branch out.
“You can’t have a career just writing memoirs and it seemed like a natural jump to this, I’ve always really enjoyed YA,” said Wong, who attended graduate school at New York’s Columbia University and taught a Y/A course for UBC’s creative writing program.
A self-professed “grumpy” teenager, Wong was happy to add her voice and culture to the YA landscape, which she said was never really populated by kids who looked like her.
“It used to be all about white girls. I worked in publishing a bit when I was in New York.
“I worked at a YA imprint and it was all pretty much about white people doing their thing,” said Wong, who is happy to be a part of a change that includes the likes of Mindy Kaling’s new teen Netflix series The Half of It.
“I think publishers are becoming more interested in people of colour and their stories...
“I’m hoping that Iris can kind of break out what representation means for a lot of Asian Americans,” said Wong.
“A lot of times they don’t see themselves in books unless they are perfect.”