“Crying will turn you into a zombie like Mommy,” Wong’s engineer father would announce. One summer, when Wong was six years old, her mother brought her and her siblings to a mall food court every day because she believed the bright lights would protect them from the dead people who haunted their house. Wong’s grandmother had schizophrenia and Wong grew up with superstitious relatives who all believed in ghosts. I was one of her students, and, as we listened to Bach and analyzed the passionate lyrics of Carmen, I had no idea about the family drama that my smart and well-organized teacher was experiencing. To make extra cash as a teen, Wong taught music history to studious Asian immigrant kids in her parents’ basement. In her darkly comic memoir, The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons and My Crazy Chinese Family, Wong dubbed the suburb where we lived “Pot Mountain” because of the meth labs and marijuana grow-ops that surrounded us. I met her through my best friend at the time. Lindsay Wong was a year ahead of me in secondary school and lived a few blocks down the hill in a sprawling neighbourhood of large but generic homes in Coquitlam, British Columbia, an hour’s drive from Vancouver.
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