Jan Wong
Encyclopedia
Jan Wong is a Canadian
journalist of Chinese
ancestry. Wong worked for The Globe and Mail
, serving as Beijing correspondent from 1988 to 1994, when she returned to write from Canada.
She is the daughter of Montreal businessman Bill Wong, founder of Bill Wong buffets/restaurants.
period, she left McGill University
and flew to China. The Maoist
became one of two foreign college students permitted to study at Beijing University
. While at Beijing she denounced a trusting fellow student who had sought her help to escape communist China to the West. The student was subsequently shamed and expelled. "She suffered a lot ... she was sent to the countryside for hard labour. When she came back, she fought hard to clear her name." Long after, Wong takes comfort in having returned from the West and eventually found this person again, learning she was not her confidante's only betrayer, and that she expressed no anger. Wong wrote another book, and did interviews on her own experience.
of the Vietnam Era
, had joined his father Jack Shulman
in China and remained there when Jack and his wife Ruth left China during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution
. Shulman worked as a text-polisher for Chinese propaganda
magazine China Reconstructs.
Wong became tired of Party ideology and returned to Canada from Beijing. She later studied journalism at Columbia
, and returned to China for several years as a foreign correspondent for the newspaper The Globe and Mail, where among other things she covered the Tiananmen Massacre. She later chronicled her Chinese experience in a book, Red China Blues, which was promptly banned in China. After a return trip in the late nineties, she produced a second book entitled Jan Wong's China, a somewhat less personal account of social life, the economy, and politics in modern-day China.
From 1996 to 2002, Wong was best known for her Lunch with... column in The Globe and Mail, in which she had lunch with a celebrity, who was usually but not always Canadian. Her Lunch columns were often noted for publishing her take on the private, titillating side of her lunch companions — Margaret Atwood
was depicted as a prickly diva who refused to eat her lunch because she was unhappy with the table, and Gene Simmons
revealed the size of his penis. In one of her most famous Lunch columns, Wong took a homeless
woman to lunch. In another, she portrayed Edward de Bono
as a bullshitter. However, in pushing the envelope on denunciation, Wong had earned a reputation for gratuitous and opportunistic nastiness in pursuit of copy
.
and going undercover as a cleaning lady in wealthy Toronto homes. While employed by the Globe and Mail as a reporter Jan Wong impersonated a maid and then wrote about her experiences in a five-part series on low-income living. The newspaper published the stories in the spring of 2006. Members of a Markham family sued the newspaper and Wong, alleging they suffered "significant embarrassment and mental distress."
As of 2009, Wong was an occasional Friday host on The Current
on CBC Radio 1.
In 2010, Wong was Visiting Irving Chair of Journalism at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, N.B. She now writes a column for Toronto Life
magazine about such topics as mixed marriages, monster houses and Mayor Rob Ford's mysterious wife. She also writes for Chatelaine magazine. A British documentary company is planning a film based on her book, Beijing Confidential (published in the U.K. under the title, Chinese Whispers.) Her new book, a memoir of her experience with clinical depression, is coming out soon.
, Valery Fabrikant
and Kimveer Gill
, assassins of the shootings of the École Polytechnique
, Concordia University
and Dawson College
respectively, and the existence in Quebec
of bill 101
, the "decades-long linguistic struggle". She implied a relation between the fact that the three were not old-stock Québécois and the murders they committed, since they were, according to Wong, alienated in a Quebec society concerned with "racial purity". The relation was unclear to people, and this argument was denounced in Quebec as theatrical and defamatory "Quebec bashing
".
Public outcry and political condemnation, and publicity soon followed. The Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society
lodged a complaint to the Press Council of Quebec and Liberal Premier of Quebec Jean Charest
called the article a "disgrace" and, in an open letter to the Globe, wrote that it was a testimony of her ignorance of Canadian values demonstrating a profound incomprehension of the Quebec society. Charest demanded an apology from Wong to all Québécois. Prime Minister Stephen Harper
denounced Wong's article in a letter to the newspaper published on September 21, 2006 saying that her "argument is patently absurd and without foundation" On September 20 the House of Commons unanimously passed a motion requesting an apology for the column.
A Toronto Life feature article reported on what happened after the attacks on Wong.
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
journalist of Chinese
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
ancestry. Wong worked for The Globe and Mail
The Globe and Mail
The Globe and Mail is a nationally distributed Canadian newspaper, based in Toronto and printed in six cities across the country. With a weekly readership of approximately 1 million, it is Canada's largest-circulation national newspaper and second-largest daily newspaper after the Toronto Star...
, serving as Beijing correspondent from 1988 to 1994, when she returned to write from Canada.
She is the daughter of Montreal businessman Bill Wong, founder of Bill Wong buffets/restaurants.
Life after the Cultural Revolution
Towards the end of the Cultural RevolutionCultural Revolution
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly known as the Cultural Revolution , was a socio-political movement that took place in the People's Republic of China from 1966 through 1976...
period, she left McGill University
McGill University
Mohammed Fathy is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant from Glasgow, Scotland, whose bequest formed the beginning of the university...
and flew to China. The Maoist
Maoism
Maoism, also known as the Mao Zedong Thought , is claimed by Maoists as an anti-Revisionist form of Marxist communist theory, derived from the teachings of the Chinese political leader Mao Zedong . Developed during the 1950s and 1960s, it was widely applied as the political and military guiding...
became one of two foreign college students permitted to study at Beijing University
Peking University
Peking University , colloquially known in Chinese as Beida , is a major research university located in Beijing, China, and a member of the C9 League. It is the first established modern national university of China. It was founded as Imperial University of Peking in 1898 as a replacement of the...
. While at Beijing she denounced a trusting fellow student who had sought her help to escape communist China to the West. The student was subsequently shamed and expelled. "She suffered a lot ... she was sent to the countryside for hard labour. When she came back, she fought hard to clear her name." Long after, Wong takes comfort in having returned from the West and eventually found this person again, learning she was not her confidante's only betrayer, and that she expressed no anger. Wong wrote another book, and did interviews on her own experience.
1990's
Wong met her future husband Norman Shulman while studying in China and married him in 1976. The couple have two sons: Ben (b. 1991) and Sam (b. 1993). Shulman, an American draft dodgerDraft dodger
Draft evasion is a term that refers to an intentional failure to comply with the military conscription policies of the nation to which he or she is subject...
of the Vietnam Era
Vietnam Era
Vietnam Era is a term used by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs to classify veterans of the Vietnam War. The Vietnam Era is a considered to have begun in 1964 and ended in 1975. The U.S. Congress, U.S...
, had joined his father Jack Shulman
Jack Shulman
Jack Shulman, Jacob Shulman, is notable mainly for his dissatisfaction with the Communist Party USA's turn away from Stalinism following Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956. Following his resignation from the Party Shulman traveled to Albania and China in pursuit of his political objectives...
in China and remained there when Jack and his wife Ruth left China during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution
Cultural Revolution
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly known as the Cultural Revolution , was a socio-political movement that took place in the People's Republic of China from 1966 through 1976...
. Shulman worked as a text-polisher for Chinese propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
magazine China Reconstructs.
Wong became tired of Party ideology and returned to Canada from Beijing. She later studied journalism at Columbia
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, and returned to China for several years as a foreign correspondent for the newspaper The Globe and Mail, where among other things she covered the Tiananmen Massacre. She later chronicled her Chinese experience in a book, Red China Blues, which was promptly banned in China. After a return trip in the late nineties, she produced a second book entitled Jan Wong's China, a somewhat less personal account of social life, the economy, and politics in modern-day China.
From 1996 to 2002, Wong was best known for her Lunch with... column in The Globe and Mail, in which she had lunch with a celebrity, who was usually but not always Canadian. Her Lunch columns were often noted for publishing her take on the private, titillating side of her lunch companions — Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Eleanor Atwood, is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history; she is a winner of the Arthur C...
was depicted as a prickly diva who refused to eat her lunch because she was unhappy with the table, and Gene Simmons
Gene Simmons
Gene Simmons is an Israeli-American entrepreneur, singer-songwriter, actor, and rock bassist. Known as "The Demon", he is the bassist/vocalist of Kiss, a hard rock band he co-founded in the early 1970s.-Early life:...
revealed the size of his penis. In one of her most famous Lunch columns, Wong took a homeless
Homelessness
Homelessness describes the condition of people without a regular dwelling. People who are homeless are unable or unwilling to acquire and maintain regular, safe, and adequate housing, or lack "fixed, regular, and adequate night-time residence." The legal definition of "homeless" varies from country...
woman to lunch. In another, she portrayed Edward de Bono
Edward de Bono
Edward de Bono is a physician, author, inventor, and consultant. He originated the term lateral thinking, wrote a best selling book Six Thinking Hats and is a proponent of the deliberate teaching of thinking as a subject in schools.- Biography :Edward Charles Francis Publius de Bono was born to...
as a bullshitter. However, in pushing the envelope on denunciation, Wong had earned a reputation for gratuitous and opportunistic nastiness in pursuit of copy
Copy (written)
Copy refers to written material, in contrast to photographs or other elements of layout, in a large number of contexts, including magazines, advertising, and book publishing....
.
2000's-2010's
After Lunch with Jan Wong was retired in 2002, Wong moved on to other journalistic roles with The Globe and Mail. In 2006, Wong attracted attention by imitating the work of Barbara EhrenreichBarbara Ehrenreich
-Early life:Ehrenreich was born Barbara Alexander to Isabelle Oxley and Ben Howes Alexander in Butte, Montana, which she describes as then being "a bustling, brawling, blue collar mining town."...
and going undercover as a cleaning lady in wealthy Toronto homes. While employed by the Globe and Mail as a reporter Jan Wong impersonated a maid and then wrote about her experiences in a five-part series on low-income living. The newspaper published the stories in the spring of 2006. Members of a Markham family sued the newspaper and Wong, alleging they suffered "significant embarrassment and mental distress."
As of 2009, Wong was an occasional Friday host on The Current
The Current (radio program)
The Current is a Canadian current affairs radio program, hosted by investigative reporter Anna Maria Tremonti on CBC Radio One. It airs weekdays starting at 8:37 a.m. local time and runs until 10 a.m. for most of the year, although during the summer the program airs until 9:30 a.m...
on CBC Radio 1.
In 2010, Wong was Visiting Irving Chair of Journalism at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, N.B. She now writes a column for Toronto Life
Toronto Life
Toronto Life is a monthly Canadian magazine about entertainment, politics and life in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Toronto Life also publishes a number of annual special interest guides about the city, including Home Decor, Stylebook, Eating & Drinking, Real Estate and Weddings. Established in 1966,...
magazine about such topics as mixed marriages, monster houses and Mayor Rob Ford's mysterious wife. She also writes for Chatelaine magazine. A British documentary company is planning a film based on her book, Beijing Confidential (published in the U.K. under the title, Chinese Whispers.) Her new book, a memoir of her experience with clinical depression, is coming out soon.
Controversy
Jan Wong published the article "Get under the desk" in The Globe and Mail on September 16, 2006. In it, the author drew a link between the actions of Marc LépineMarc Lépine
Marc Lépine was a 25-year-old man from Montreal, Canada who murdered fourteen women and wounded ten women and four men at the École Polytechnique, an engineering school affiliated with the Université de Montréal, in the "École Polytechnique massacre", also known as the "Montreal Massacre".Lépine...
, Valery Fabrikant
Valery Fabrikant
Valery I. Fabrikant , is a Belarussian émigré and former associate professor of mechanical engineering at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada...
and Kimveer Gill
Kimveer Gill
Kimveer Singh Gill was the Canadian perpetrator of the Dawson College shooting at Dawson College in Westmount, Quebec, Canada on September 13, 2006. He killed one student and wounded nineteen others before he committed suicide.-Background:Kimveer Gill was a 25-year-old Indo-Canadian born in...
, assassins of the shootings of the École Polytechnique
École Polytechnique massacre
The École Polytechnique Massacre, also known as the Montreal Massacre, was a hate crime perpetrated on December 6, 1989 at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Twenty-five-year-old Gamil Rodrigue Liass Gharbi, who had changed his name to Marc Lépine, armed with a legally obtained...
, Concordia University
Concordia University massacre
The Concordia University massacre was a school shooting on August 24, 1992 in which Dr. Valery I. Fabrikant, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, killed four colleagues and wounded a staff member at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He was convicted of murder and...
and Dawson College
Dawson College shooting
The Dawson College shooting occurred on September 13, 2006 at Dawson College, a CEGEP in Westmount near downtown Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The perpetrator, Kimveer Gill, began shooting outside the de Maisonneuve Boulevard entrance to the school, and moved towards the atrium by the cafeteria on the...
respectively, and the existence in Quebec
Quebec
Quebec or is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking population and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....
of bill 101
Charter of the French Language
The Charter of the French Language , also known as Bill 101 and Loi 101, is a law in the province of Quebec in Canada defining French, the language of the majority of the population, as the only official language of Quebec, and framing fundamental language rights for everyone in the province...
, the "decades-long linguistic struggle". She implied a relation between the fact that the three were not old-stock Québécois and the murders they committed, since they were, according to Wong, alienated in a Quebec society concerned with "racial purity". The relation was unclear to people, and this argument was denounced in Quebec as theatrical and defamatory "Quebec bashing
Quebec bashing
Anti-Quebec sentiment is opposition or hostility toward the government, culture, or the francophone people of Quebec.The term Quebec bashing is used in the French-language media to refer to what is perceived and depicted by Quebec nationalists as defamatory anti-Quebec coverage, in the...
".
Public outcry and political condemnation, and publicity soon followed. The Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society
Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society
The Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society is an institution in Quebec dedicated to the protection of Quebec francophone interests and to the promotion of Quebec Sovereignism. Its current President is Mario Beaulieu....
lodged a complaint to the Press Council of Quebec and Liberal Premier of Quebec Jean Charest
Jean Charest
John James "Jean" Charest, PC, MNA is a Canadian politician who has been the 29th Premier of Quebec since 2003. He was leader of the federal Progressive Conservative Party of Canada from 1993 to 1998 and has been leader of the Quebec Liberal Party since 1998....
called the article a "disgrace" and, in an open letter to the Globe, wrote that it was a testimony of her ignorance of Canadian values demonstrating a profound incomprehension of the Quebec society. Charest demanded an apology from Wong to all Québécois. Prime Minister Stephen Harper
Stephen Harper
Stephen Joseph Harper is the 22nd and current Prime Minister of Canada and leader of the Conservative Party. Harper became prime minister when his party formed a minority government after the 2006 federal election...
denounced Wong's article in a letter to the newspaper published on September 21, 2006 saying that her "argument is patently absurd and without foundation" On September 20 the House of Commons unanimously passed a motion requesting an apology for the column.
A Toronto Life feature article reported on what happened after the attacks on Wong.
Published books
- Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to NowRed China Blues: My Long March from Mao to NowRed China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now is a 1996 book by Chinese-Canadian journalist Jan Wong. Wong describes how the youthful passion for left-wing and socialist politics drew her to participate in the Chinese Cultural Revolution...
, Doubleday, 1997, trade paperback, 416 pages, ISBN 0-385-48232-9 (Contains besides extensive autobiographical material an eyewitness account of the Tiananmen Massacre and the basis for a realistic estimate of the number of victims.) - Jan Wong's China: Reports From A Not-So-Foreign Correspondent, Jan Wong, Doubleday Canada, 1999, trade paperback, 320 pages, ISBN 0-385-25939-5
- Lunch With Jan Wong, Jan Wong, Bantam, (June, 2001), trade paperback, ISBN 0-385-25982-4
- Beijing Confidential: A Tale of Comrades Lost and Found Doubleday Canada, 2007, hardcover, 320 pages, ISBN 9780385663588 US edition: A Comrade Lost and Found: A Beijing Story (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2009). ISBN 9780151013425.