Jan Wong (Chinese: 黃明珍; pinyin: Huáng Míngzhēn; born August 1952) is a Canadian academic, journalist, and writer.
[3] While at Beijing she denounced Yin Luoyi, a trusting fellow student who had sought her help to escape communist China to the West.
In the late 1970s, Wong began her career in journalism when she was hired as a news assistant by Fox Butterfield, China correspondent for the New York Times.
In 2006, Wong attracted attention by imitating the work of Barbara Ehrenreich and going undercover as a cleaning lady in wealthy Toronto homes.
[10] While employed by the Globe and Mail as a reporter, Jan Wong impersonated a maid, and then wrote about her experiences in a five-part series on low-income living.
[12] In it, she drew a link between the actions of Marc Lépine, Valery Fabrikant, and Kimveer Gill, perpetrators of the shootings of the École Polytechnique, Concordia University, and Dawson College, respectively; and the existence in Quebec of bill 101, the "decades-long linguistic struggle".
She implied a relation between the fact that the three were not old-stock Québécois and the murders they committed, since they were, according to Wong, alienated in a Quebec society concerned with "racial purity".
[13] Prime Minister Stephen Harper denounced Wong's article in a letter to the newspaper published on 21 September 2006 saying that her "argument is patently absurd and without foundation.
"[14] On 20 September, the House of Commons of Canada unanimously passed a motion, by Liberal Party Member of Parliament Denis Coderre, requesting an apology for the column.
[19] That provoked her to file a grievance that lead to a confidential settlement, ordered by a labour board arbiter, with a lump sum payment of $209,912 – two years salary – plus the denied sick leave pay.
[20] According to Wong: "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.
[21] In 2010, Wong was Visiting Irving Chair of Journalism at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and is currently an associate professor there.
[22] Her fifth book, Out of the Blue: A Memoir of Workplace Depression, Recovery, Redemption and, Yes, Happiness, is a memoir of her experience with clinical depression in which Jan Wong describes in detail the backlash she received immediately after her article appeared; and how the Globe and Mail management, in her view, abandoned her in the face of a torrent of negative reaction from all sides.
As Chris Nuttall-Smith (top chef Canada) wrote: "a sharp-minded — and famously sharp-tongued — reporter drags her fully grown, chef-trained son on a homestay cooking tour of France, Italy, and China.