Jan Wong
| Jan Wong | |
|---|---|
| Born |
August 15, 1952 Montreal, Quebec, Canada |
| Occupation | Newspaper journalist, columnist, author, and professor |
| Spouse(s) | Norman Shulman (m. 1976) |
| Children | Ben Shulman and Sam Shulman |
| Website | http://www.janwong.ca/ |
Jan Wong (Chinese: 黃明珍; pinyin: Huáng Míngzhēn; born August 15, 1952) is a Canadian journalist of Taishan, Guangdong ancestry. Wong worked for The Globe and Mail, serving as Beijing correspondent from 1988 to 1994, when she returned to write from Canada. She is the daughter of Montreal businessman Bill Wong, founder of Bill Wong's buffet in 1963, and earlier of the House of Wong which was the city's first Chinese restaurant to open outside Chinatown.
Towards the end of the Cultural Revolution period, she left McGill University and flew to China. The Maoist became one of two foreign college students permitted to study at Beijing University. While at Beijing she denounced a trusting fellow student who had sought her help to escape communist China to the West. The student was subsequently shamed and expelled. "She suffered a lot ... she was sent to the countryside for hard labour. When she came back, she fought hard to clear her name." Long after, having returned from her own escape to the West, and having eventually found this person again, Wong takes comfort in learning she had not been her confidante's only betrayer, and that she did not express anger. Wong wrote another book, and did interviews on her own experience.
Wong met her future husband Norman Shulman while studying in China and married him in 1976. The couple have two sons: Ben (b. 1991) and Sam (b. 1993). Shulman, an American draft dodger of the Vietnam Era, had joined his father Jack Shulman in China and remained there when Jack and his wife Ruth left China during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. Shulman worked as a text-polisher for Chinese propaganda magazine China Reconstructs.
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. Wong became tired of Party ideology and returned to Canada from Beijing. She then studied journalism at Columbia, receiving a master's degree, and found work with the Montreal Gazette, Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal before joining the Globe and Mail as a business reporter.
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