A review by moomin333
The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family by Lindsay Wong

2.0

DNF after about 6 chapters. I initially loved this and couldn't put it down. It quickly became very apparent to me that this was going to be a very depressing read but I have enjoyed similar memoirs in the past, as this kind of reminded me of Burroughs' "Running With Scissors". Structurally, the book could have really benefited from staggering chapters between college/adult years/anything else interspersed with her memories from childhood. It was simply too much - too devastating, to read chapter after chapter of insane cruelty from not only her parents, but extended family as well. The entire family was messed up! There was no relief from the torture of her daily existence; not even the humor with which she tells her stories can decrease the burnout rate of the reader, for it doesn't feel "right" to laugh at the situations she was in.

The author does insert small snippets of what she now understands to be the rampant undiagnosed mental illness present within her family, but even the small concessions she makes are not enough to give breathing room in such a tense read. I didn't have extraordinarily high hopes for this, and I'm not asking to make her story more palatable (there's no way it could be), but some tighter editing and restructuring would have gone a long way.