ASHLEIGH MATTERN
Editor-in-Chief
After working for the Globe and Mail for almost 20 years, journalist Jan Wong was fired in 2008.
For legal reasons, she has been unable to talk about it until recently. She spoke about her firing publicly for the first time as a keynote speaker at a student journalism conference in Edmonton on Jan. 15.
In 2006, Wong wrote a story called “Get Under the Desk” for the Globe and Mail, suggesting the three post-secondary shootings that had taken place in Quebec were caused by alienation due to language laws.
She was hit with thousands of angry emails, and even death threats. There was a public outcry. Prime Minister Stephen Harper denounced her article. Rumours were spread about her father being an illegal immigrant and his restaurant went out of business.
Amidst all this, Wong became clinically depressed.
“I was sick for about two years with clinical depression,” she said in an interview. “I couldn’t write because I was sick. It’s just one of the manifestations; if (writing is) what you do for a living, you can’t do it.”
Wong has had an incredibly successful career. She covered the massacre at Tiananmen Square while working as a foreign correspondent in Beijing for the Globe and Mail from 1988-94. For five years, she wrote a popular column called “Lunch With Jan Wong” in the Globe and Mail where she interviewed celebrities like Margaret Atwood, Bryan Adams, Don Cherry and Samuel L. Jackson. She has also worked for The Montreal Gazette, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal.
Wong also has four books published: Red China Blues, Jan Wong’s China, Lunch with Jan Wong and Beijing Confidential. The fifth, to come out later this year, is based on her experience with depression and is called Out of the Blue: A Memoir of Loss, Recovery, Redemption and, Yes, Happiness.
“It’s all about how corporations deal with people who are mentally ill,” she said on writing her latest book. “I just couldn’t write but I kept my eyes open. Towards the end I was able to write at least a journal.”
She says that although it’s her memoir, she didn’t just write about herself, but also delved into the history and politics of depression, asking questions and challenging the status quo.
“Why are we embarrassed to say we’re seeing a psychiatrist? Why do people not want to know about this?”
Wong had no previous history of depression, and when she started researching it she was surprised how many people have to deal with it, pointing out that one in five people deal with depression at some point in their lives.
“It has nothing to do with whatever society or culture you live in; most cultures in the modern world have taboos against it,” she said. “People just talk about having headaches all the time or backaches. Luckily here in Canada we have medicare.”
Despite all that followed from her contentious article, she still defends her comments. As a Canadian of Chinese descent, Wong says she has felt the kind of alienation described in the article.
Noting that all three of the post-secondary shootings that have happened in Canada took place in Quebec and were committed by people who were not old-stock Quebecois, she said she saw a pattern and reported what she saw.
Her only regret was that the Globe and Mail didn’t stand by her in the aftermath of the article and the ensuing depression.
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