Jan Wong

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Jan Wong (pinyin: Huáng Míngzhēn) 黃明珍(born 1953 in Montreal, Quebec) is a Canadian journalist of Chinese ancestry. She is the daughter of Montreal businessman Bill Wong, founder of Bill Wong restaurants. She currently writes for The Globe and Mail, a Toronto-based newspaper.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Towards the end of the Cultural Revolution period, she left McGill University and flew to China. The optimistic Maoist became one of two foreign college students permitted to study at Beijing University. While at Beijing she willingly turned in a fellow student who had sought her help to escape to the West. The student was subsequently shamed and expelled.[1]

Wong gradually became disillusioned with Party ideology and returned to Canada. She later studied journalism at Columbia, and returned to China for several years as a foreign correspondent for the The Globe and Mail newspaper, 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.

In the late 1990s, Wong wrote a regular column, "Lunch with...", in The Globe and Mail. This column, in which she profiled a celebrity over lunch, brought Wong greater attention in Canadian journalism. Wong was widely criticised for her confrontational style in the column, but its popularity didn't subside. A selection of columns was compiled under the title Lunch with Jan Wong. In 2006, Wong attracted attention by imitating the work of Barbara Ehrenreich and going undercover as a cleaning lady in wealthy Toronto homes.

Wong and Norman Shulman, whom she married in 1976, have two sons: Ben (b. 1991) and Sam (b. 1994). Norman Shulman, an American draft dodger of the Vietnam era, had joined his father Jack Shulman in China rather than fleeing to Canada but then had been left behind when Jack and his wife Ruth left China during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution.

[edit] Controversy

[edit] Quebec

Main article: Jan Wong controversy

Jan Wong published the article "Get under the desk" in The Globe and Mail on September 16, 2006.[2] In it, the author drew a link between the actions of Marc Lépine, 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 protective language laws, the "decades-long linguistic struggle". She implied a relation between the fact that the three were not old-stock Quebecers and the murders they committed, since they were, according to Wong, alienated in a Quebec society concerned with "racial purity". This was denounced in Quebec as defamatory "Quebec bashing".

Public outcry and political condemnation 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,[3], 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 Quebeckers. Prime Minister Stephen Harper denounced Wong's article in a letter to the newspaper published on September 21, 2006 saying that her "argument is (was) patently absurd and without foundation" [4] On September 20 the House of Commons unanimously passed a motion requesting an apology for the column.[5][6]

[edit] Published books

  • 1997 : Red China Blues : My Long March From Mao to Now
  • 2000 : Lunch with Jan Wong

[edit] Further reading

  • Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now, Jan Wong, 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
  • Jan Wong, Lunch With Jan Wong, Bantam, (June, 2001), trade paperback, ISBN 0-385-25982-4

[edit] External links

[edit] Notes and sources

  1. ^ Nicola Luksic, "Be nice but get them", NOW Magazine, March 8, 2001, [1]
  2. ^ Jan Wong, "Get under the desk", Globe and Mail, September 15, 2006, [2]
  3. ^ Jean Charest, Open letter, The Gazette, September 19, 2006, [3]
  4. ^ CTV news. "Harper complains to Globe about Jan Wong column", CTV, September 20, 2006.
  5. ^ Hansard, 39th Parliament, 1st Session, Number 049, [4]. Accessed 21 September 2006.
  6. ^ http://www.cyberpresse.ca/article/20060920/CPACTUALITES/60920106/6128/CPSPECIAL12
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