Wed or Alive

For Lindsay Wong, a Chinese Canadian author born in Vancouver, the literary distance between Canada and China appears non-existent. With the exception of her young adult novel, her books channel Canadians trying to deal with sometimes menacing vestiges of their Chinese heritage.

Wong’s best-selling The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons, and My Chinese Family, from 2018, follows her traumatic upbringing in a Vancouver household fearful of the woo‑woo: ghosts who visit human beings in their moments of personal turmoil. This folkloric belief grips her entire family, in which haunting becomes a veil for mental illness. As she told the CBC’s Tom Power in 2023, “My family — they’re a traditional Chinese family — they don’t believe in mental illness at all. They think ghosts cause everything from demonic possession, to cancer, to illness. And so growing up, it was very much, you know, ghosts do this, ghosts do that. Be afraid of the woo-woo.”

Her young adult fiction, My Summer of Love and Misfortune, from 2020, is a first-person account of seventeen-year-old Iris Weijun Wang, an only child whose reckless lifestyle at Bradley Gardens Public High School in New Jersey compels her parents to send her to Beijing to spend the summer with her relatives. And Tell Me Pleasant Things About Immortality, with thirteen stories set in ancient and contemporary China as well as North America, blurs the line between ghost and living being: a woman becomes a poltergeist, a family eats three offspring who don’t look good enough before deciding that one is acceptable, and a father is turned into a sofa. In this 2023 collection, horror is omnipresent.

Wong’s first adult novel, Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies, studies the personal and cultural hopes and expectations imposed on Chinese women, including those in Canada. The dominating figure and narrator of many sections is Lo Daiyu Locinda, a twenty-five-year-old single woman who lives with six roommates in a dilapidated house in East Vancouver. Driven to desperation by her pecuniary woes and eager to help her eccentric maternal grandmother and her younger sister, she signs away her life in a contract with Joyful Coffin & Co., which provides matchmaking services in keeping with the ancient tradition of corpse marriages. “If someone had told me I would be married to a corpse by the age of thirty, I would have laughed and said that was just an urban legend that Chinese parents told their children to scare them into heteronormative marriage and carrying on the family line,” she says early in the novel. “If someone had told me that my fate was to end up a broke, desperate, mildly wrinkled (unable to afford Botox) millennial, I would call them a jealous hag auntie and spit into their $15 glass of chardonnay.”

Now under contract to Joyful Coffin, Locinda is escorted from British Columbia to Beijing and the gloomy Zhong caves, where she will be tutored and taught to be a perfect corpse bride — and where her own eventual coffin awaits. “Chinese people believe you should exit the world the same way you sprouted in the womb, except partnered,” explains Locinda, who will be on display for numerous buyers looking for attractive women, ready to enter the afterlife, to marry their dead sons.

Interspersed among her reminiscences of her past life and her current incarceration are accounts of her grandmother Baozhai, a lordly lady whose legacy includes her life in 1920s China, the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong two decades later, and time spent in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where she was “a Villain Hitter, a professional curse-monger who used to work on behalf of the Chinese mob.” Once she asked her young granddaughter to keep a secret: “She peeled her eyes, nose, and lips off like wrapping paper, and Locinda saw it was just painted on, a sheet of thick features, and underneath was a smooth gray skull. She had holes for eyes, a ripe black tongue, and whitened dentures for teeth.” Even as Locinda’s life nears its preordained end, one of her fellow captives continually begs her to send her grandmother a message to use her incantatory powers on his family.

Are these many episodes wickedly comic or horribly frightening? The novel is downright hilarious, yet it is also, in sections, a staggering commentary on hideous scenes of mass destruction and death in the Second World War. Wong’s description of the barbaric tortures and casualties from the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong and the North Point Refugee Camp is shattering. “A girl still clutching her wooden doll refused to let go as she screamed for her mother in the other lineup, who would still live for a year or so, and the sound of the girl’s dying felt unyielding, long after the bayonet punctured her spine,” she writes. “Most of the unlucky ones did not die without hesitation.” The novel’s humour is a necessary fortress against such scenes of carnage.

Often comic, at times tragic, Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies is a searing indictment of all those who fall under the spell of outside forces, unable or steadfastly refusing to be themselves.