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For six years, Jan Wong was The
Globe and Mail's Beijing correspondent. A Canadian of Chinese descent,
Wong went to China in 1972 at the height of the Cultural Revolution. In
1997, she published Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now,
a memoir of her student days - she was the second Westerner to attend
Beijing University - and a chronicle of her journalistic tenure in Beijing
from 1988-94. She would write on China again in 1999 in Jan Wong's
China: Reports From a Not-So-Foreign Correspondent.
In Red China Blues, Wong describes how an interest in feminism
originally moved her in the direction of Maoism and Communism. Gradually,
however, as Mao and his successors diluted the Maoist ideology, her views
changed and she became disgusted with the culture and way of life, and
returned home. Her next encounter with China would be as a journalist.
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Following her return to Toronto, Wong's next assignment with The Globe and
Mail was as a weekly columnist who took her subjects to lunch and then
wrote about the meal … and them as dining partners. But far from being the
noon-hour trough-feeding of a socialite, Wong's "Lunch With" work was
pointed and often critical of her tablemates, who included author Margaret
Atwood, actors John Hurt and Anthony Quinn, fashion reporter Jeanne Beker
and rock star Bryan Adams, among many, many others. This, too, resulted in
a book, Lunch with Jan Wong in 2000.
After a six-year run, her column was discontinued in 2002. Today Wong
writes features for The Globe and Mail, as well as Report On Business
magazine.
