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...
Ruth Panofsky teaches English literature at Toronto Metropolitan University. She recently received the Royal Society of Canada’s Lorne Pierce Medal.
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