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...