This book reads like an endless number of user-submitted stories to a February issue of Reader’s Digest. “Between my mother’s hysterics and the uncertainty of my illness, I couldn’t help but believe that I had fallen into madness.” On one hand a witty and touching memoir about the Asian immigrant experience, and on the other a harrowing and honest depiction of the vagaries of mental illness, The Woo-Woo is a gut-wrenching and beguiling manual for surviving family, and oneself. And when Lindsay herself starts to experience symptoms of the woo-woo herself, she wonders whether she will suffer the same fate as her family. The eccentricities take a dark turn, however, when her aunt, suffering from a psychotic breakdown, holds the city of Vancouver hostage for eight hours when she threatens to jump off a bridge. From a young age, she witnessed the woo-woo's sinister effects at the age of six, she found herself living in the food court of her suburban mall, which her mother saw as a safe haven because they could hide there from dead people, and on a camping trip, her mother tried to light Lindsay's foot on fire to rid her of the woo-woo. Lindsay Wong grew up with a paranoid schizophrenic grandmother and a mother who was deeply afraid of the 'woo-woo'-Chinese ghosts who come to visit in times of personal turmoil. In this jaw-dropping, darkly comedic memoir, a young woman comes of age in a dysfunctional Asian family whose members blamed their woes on ghosts and demons when in fact they should have been on anti-psychotic meds.

The woo woo by lindsay wong