Denise Chong - Writing Career

Writing Career

Though her professional writing career did not begin until much later, Denise Chong was a journalist for the Ubyssey, a student newspaper at UBC, while she was an undergraduate student there.

Denise Chong has published three non-fiction books of literary non-fiction and edited one compilation of short stories. Because of the importance of the Canadian historical research in Chong's first book, a memoir of her family, The Concubine's Children, she has become "renowned as a writer and commentator on Canadian history and on the family." This book, one of the first non-fiction narrative accounts of the Chinese in Canada, was a Globe and Mail best seller for ninety-three weeks.

That Denise Chong's work has been important to the study of Canada is also reflected by the fact that a speech that she gave for Citizenship Week in 1995 entitled "Being Canadian" has been widely anthologized, including in the books Who Speaks for Canada: Words that Shape a Country by D. Morton and M. Weinfeld (1998), and Great Canadian Speeches by D. Gruending (2004).

Chong's emphasis on the voices of women, as well as her particular brand of nationalism (which is more than a little critical), are both reflected in her edited compilation The Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women. That many of the authors published in this anthology are also women of transnational identities is a reflection of Denise Chong's concern for the multicultural quality of being Canadian. In Chong's own words, "Canadian citizenship recognizes differences. It praises diversity. It is what we as Canadians choose to have in common with each other How we tell our stories is the work of citizenship". In her Introduction to the anthology, Chong highlights what attracted her to the stories, seeming to also articulate one of the strong characteristics of her own writing: "The plot that interested me was life lived in the chaos and uncertainty of everyday happenings and relationships." All of Chong's books evoke such "everyday happenings and relationships" amidst the extraordinary circumstances of war, communism, immigration, and racism.

Denise Chong's second book, The Girl in the Picture, about the iconic Vietnamese napalm victim, was also groundbreaking, in its portrayal of everyday life in war-torn Vietnam. Her most recent book was released on 29 September 2009 by Random House Canada. Egg on Mao: The Story of an Ordinary Man Who Defaced an Icon and Unmasked a Dictatorship is Chong’s first book in a decade. Egg on Mao tells the story of Lu Decheng, a bus mechanic, who, with two friends, challenged his family's communist allegiance by defacing a portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong during the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square. In an interview about this story exploring human rights in China, Chong said, "It was a very Chinese act. In the West, we would view something like this as a quixotic and think how naive these men were. But in China, it's your only gesture. Of course they were naive. But you have to balance the futility of the gesture against the weight of repression... people are willing to make a futile gesture for the nobility of having acted."