Jan Wong’s blues
Journalist chronicles her controversial descent into workplace depression
Jan Wong’s new memoir is a gripping rollercoast ride into depression and madness, sparked by turmoil over comments she wrote about a Montreal school shooting.
Photograph by: Allen McInnis, STF
Out of the Blue:
A Memoir of Workplace Depression, Recovery, Redemption and, Yes, Happiness
By Jan Wong
Self-published, $21.99
Jan Wong’s latest book should be titled: Reporter Eats Newspaper for Lunch.
Wong, of course, is famous — or is that infamous? — for her former “lunch with” column at The Globe and Mail in which the diminutive (five-foot-three) journalist would invite a celebrity to lunch and then write a profile of the person that tended to pinball between humour and cruelty.
Wong no longer works for the Globe. The columnist and former China correspondent was fired June 4, 2007 from the newspaper where she worked and starred for 20 years. Now she has written and self-published a book explaining her version of the events that led to that career-changing day.
This gossipy, gripping page-turner chronicles her descent into depression and her eventual recovery, as well as an employer’s supposed failure to deal with workplace depression. The uncharitable might see Out of the Blue as a book of revenge.
Anyway, consider it a long lunch date between Wong and her employer. Both come armed with sharp knives. The table gets very messy.
Wong sums up the events this way near the beginning of the book: “I wrote a feature story that sparked a political backlash, my employers failed to support me and later silenced me, and after I became clinically depressed, they fired me.”
This being a memoir rather than a work of unbiased journalism, we really only get Wong’s version of the story. And she does admit that clinical depression can skew one’s interpretation of events. But, in an interview, Wong said she remains very sure she has her facts straight.
“I don’t have doubts about the facts or the events.”
The events began Sept. 13, 2006 when a young Montreal-area man, Kimveer Gill, went to Montreal’s Dawson College and began shooting randomly. He killed one student and wounded 19 others. Gill also died at the scene.
The Globe dispatched Wong the next day to Montreal, her hometown. She says she had 24 hours to write a 3,000-word story describing and analysing the events.
Buried within that story were a few sentences which noted that Gill and two earlier perpetrators of Montreal school shootings were of immigrant backgrounds and that the three murderers had all been “marginalized” in a society that valued French “racial purity.”
Reaction was swift and brutal. Quebec Premier Jean Charest wrote a letter of complaint to the Globe. All political parties in the Commons unanimously endorsed a motion condemning the story.
Wong started receiving death threats. She, her family and her family’s Montreal restaurant business were all subjected to racist slurs based on their Chinese heritage.
Wong claims that the Globe’s then editor, Edward Greenspon, read her story in advance and approved its publication. Nevertheless, Greenspon wrote in the newspaper that Wong’s “opinion” about the racial purity angle should never have been printed. As a result, Wong felt “betrayed” by her employer. That betrayal consumed her.
“That’s what started my depression,” Wong said in the interview.
Wong says she became so depressed she could not do her job and write stories on other topics. She booked off sick. But the Globe, she claims, would not believe she was sick, despite a diagnosis of clinical depression from her family doctor and two psychiatrists, including one picked by the employer.
Sick pay was withdrawn and after months of tense negotiations, Wong was fired. She did receive “a big, fat cheque” for an amount she agreed to keep secret. Despite attempts by the Globe, she did not agree to a gag order to prevent her from publicly discussing the background to the firing.
Wong’s tribulations did not end there. During her long, drawn-out negotiations with the Globe, she says she assiduously took notes and arranged a book deal with Doubleday, the publisher of her four earlier bestselling books, Red China Blues, Jan Wong’s China, Lunch With Jan Wong and Beijing Confidential. That last book is about the days during the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s when Wong was a Maoist at Beijing University and she ratted on a fellow student who wanted to flee communist China for the United States.
Mere days before Doubleday was to print Out of the Blue, the deal evaporated. Doubleday, according to Wong, was unhappy with the sections citing the Globe’s “corporate bullying.” The publisher denied the Globe had threatened any legal action but Wong said she had discovered that the newspaper’s in-house counsel “had indeed phoned Doubleday’s libel lawyer a month earlier to express displeasure with an article I’d written in Chatelaine magazine, mentioning this upcoming memoir.”
So Wong self-published Out of the Blue. It is required reading for anyone interested in journalism. It is also required reading for anyone interested in the way employers treat employees with mental illnesses.
Wong takes us on a horrifying rollercoaster ride into temporary madness, where she is consumed by paranoia, fears for her very life, becomes a shopaholic and cries hysterically in front of her two teenaged sons to such an extent that the bewildered lads have to parent Mom.
Amidst all this, Wong’s employer relentlessly demanded she return to work by couriering threatening letters to her home. At one point the Globe even hired Garda, a private security firm, to follow Wong outside her home and film her to see if she acted or looked depressed, as if depression means a large, indelible D is tattooed on your forehead. She apparently looked normal to Garda even though the firm screwed up the audio of its film and could only guess what Wong was saying to other people.
Anyone familiar with Wong’s writing knows she is the master of the telling detail. That’s how she managed to skewer all her lunch guests with their haughty attitudes to waiters or eccentric diets. In Out of the Blue, she presents the sounds, sights, terror and anguish of a Kafkaesque experience some of her friends in China compared to the public humiliation of dissidents during the Cultural Revolution. The difference, the friends said, is that the Communists would not have withdrawn her sick pay.
Wong now divides her time between Toronto, where she is a columnist for Toronto Life magazine, and Fredericton, where she teaches journalism at St. Thomas University.
In class, Wong says she warns her students that journalism is a stressful occupation and can lead to depression. Being a student can also be stressful, so she encourages any student feeling depressed to seek help.
Out of the Blue contains an anecdote in which Wong hires an actor to burst into her Fredericton classroom with a cock-and-bull story. Some of the journalism students immediately see through the ruse. They got better grades from Wong when writing about the event.
“I gave them points for skepticism,” Wong says.
But what if her students read Out of the Blue and are skeptical? What if they think they are getting only part, maybe not even half, of a very sad and complicated story? Will they still get “points for skepticism?”
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