Jan Wong

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Jan Wong

Born 1953[1]
Montreal, Quebec
Occupation newspaper journalist, columnist and author

Jan Wong (pinyin: Huáng Míngzhēn) 黃明珍(born 1953[2] in Montreal, Quebec) is a Canadian journalist of Chinese ancestry. She is the daughter of Montreal businessman Bill Wong, founder of Bill Wong buffets/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.[3]

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.

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 (usually but not always Canadian). Her Lunch columns were often noted for revealing a rarely-seen 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 [4]. In one of her most famous Lunch columns, Wong took a homeless woman to lunch.

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 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). Shulman, an American draft dodger of the Vietnam era, had joined his father Jack Shulman in China rather than fleeing to Canada. Norman had then 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.[5] 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 Québécois 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,[6] 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"[7] On September 20 the House of Commons unanimously passed a motion requesting an apology for the column.[8][9]

[edit] Published books

[edit] External links

[edit] Miscellaneous

  • Wong appeared as herself in 2001's The Frank Truth.
  • Wong, who was quarantined during the SARS outbreak, was given "special thanks" by the 2005 TV-movie, Plague City: SARS in Toronto.

[edit] Notes and sources

  1. ^ Jan Wong
  2. ^ Jan Wong
  3. ^ Nicola Luksic, "Be nice but get them", NOW Magazine, March 8, 2001, [1]
  4. ^ "Little Miss Mischief", Ryerson Review of Journalism, Summer 2004
  5. ^ Jan Wong, "Get under the desk", Globe and Mail, September 15, 2006, [2]
  6. ^ Jean Charest, Open letter, The Gazette, September 19, 2006, [3]
  7. ^ CTV news. "Harper complains to Globe about Jan Wong column", CTV, September 20, 2006. 
  8. ^ Hansard, 39th Parliament, 1st Session, Number 049, [4]. Accessed 21 September 2006.
  9. ^ | Actualités | Cyberpresse