Leeches and Lotus Shoes

Lindsay Wong is best known for her 2018 memoir, The Woo-Woo, which exposed the secrets and mental health struggles of her conservative Chinese Canadian family. Although the book won critical and popular acclaim — it was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and a Canada Reads contender — it was met with silence by Wong’s family. Did this fraught hush lead her away from memoir? Is this why she turned to fiction with Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality, a volume of short stories that draws on family lore but is explicitly not autobiographical?

Dedicated to Wong’s ancestors, “who faced terrible and portentous horrors” in China, this collection offers a chilling blend of the mythological and the supernatural. Taken together, the stories evoke a macabre, surreal netherworld governed by terror and haunted by ghosts, demons, and zombies...