203: My Crazy Chinese Family

The New Family Podcast - A podcast by Respected parenting editor Brandie Weikle of thenewfamily.com and the 1,000 Families Project talks to compelling people whose stories represent the changing face of family.

It’s said that something like one in five people will be affected by some level of mental illness at at least one point in their lifetime. There have been times when I’ve wondered if that figure might not be a little low. In many cases, family history plays a part, and that was certainly the case in the family of my guest for today’s episode, Lindsay Wong. Lindsay is a writer with a distinguished academic career including an MFA in literary non-fiction from Columbia University. But as you’ll learn in our discussion, the road that got her there was am extremely bumpy one, complicated by her elder’s unorthodox approach to the mental illness that ran in their family, and their deep distrust of Western medicine. Lindsay writes about this in an at once page-turning and darkly comedic new memoir called The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons and My Crazy Chinese Family, which is out this month. Notes Love our work? Please check out our Patreon Campaign! Become a patron of the show for as little as $1 per month