Jan Wong is a writer best known for her series of columns in The Globe and Mail called Lunch With Jan Wong. While these columns ran, they were justification for buying the weekend paper, and my roommates and I often read them aloud to each other and cackled. As it sounds, Lunch With Jan Wong involves Jan Wong having lunch with someone famous, and then writing about it. Writing about what they ordered, how they ate it, how much salt they put on their food, how they treated the server, basically all these things that we, or at least I, most want to know about people. And then she would ask them the most audacious questions. Seemingly with the intent to piss them off. Most people got brutally skewered by her combination of observation, juxtaposition of facts, and straight-up rudeness. The only people she liked were the genuinely sweet people (the guy involved in the Walkerton, Ontario E.coli thing) and the trashmasters (a matriach of a Canadian wrestling dynasty, a disgraced beauty queen).
You can read more about her here.
Lunch With Jan Wong ended because, presumably, no one would eat lunch with her ever again. I think part of the indignation of her interviewees has to do with her being female and asian and also a ballsy reporter. Wow! What an unexpected combination!
Anyway, Jan Wong has just completed a series in the Globe called Maid for a Month in which she spends a month living an approximation of the lifestyle of the single parent making minimum wage in Canada. It's some good reporting. Check it out.
I love her, even though she would totally tear me a new one if we ever had lunch.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment