Lunch With Nick

Ah, Jan Wong. Like a jack-in-the-box, you never know where she will pop up next. You might never have heard of her, but she has been at varying times a columnist at the Globe & Mail. Her major claim to fame is a series of columns she wrote for the paper called "Lunch with Jan Wong."

In the columns, later released as a book, she would interview various politicos or celebrities and gleefully tear them apart in the column the day after, usually on the basis of what they ate or didn't eat, or their pathetic celebrity foibles such as drinking too many martinis at lunch or perhaps demanding that the mayonnnaise be separate from the salad.

It was hilarious.

But this is the same Jan Wong who, as a privileged Canadian-born Chinese, was admitted to special studies at Peking U. in 1972. According to one account, while she lived in the dorms with Chinese roommates, "the university treated her like revolutionary royalty." She and an accompanying student "were provided with tutors, administrators, a cook and a typist—40 people in all."

But she didn't want special attention; she wanted to be treated like everyone else, in true Communist fashion. She got her wish and "was put to work at the Beijing Number One Machine Tool Factory and, later, at a communal farm."

She was "such an enthusiastic proponent of Communism that she even turned in a classmate who once asked her about life in the West," an act which she later "bitterly regretted."

So the newly-minted, reformed, now committed non-communist Jan Wong married a Westerner and came back to Canada to start life as a privileged "reporter" for a major newspaper.

I don't like Jan Wong. Her series of articles about "lunch" with celebrities and pseudo-celebrities—in which her main plan seemed to be to first trap them with an innocent request by a journalist from a respected newspaper for an interview—were just cover for non-sequiturial petty sniping and clumsy jokes about their idiosyncracies as a result of being well-known figures. Much like the sneering that might have gone on in an interrogation room at the local cadre's meeting hall, thought I.

I feel no sympathy for most of the people she skewered. They were and are pampered members of society's elite and have inexcusably eccentric affectations that would annoy the hell out of most people. But let someone other than Jan Wong skewer them. Of all among us, what gives the right to Jan Wong to magically flit from one privileged reality in which she turns someone in for some imagined transgression—a very serious crime at the time and likely resulting in severe consequences for that person—to another privileged reality in which she now uses her interrogational skills to attempt to deflate others?

I would have said nothing until I picked up today's Globe & Mail. In it, Jan Wong is running a series in which she pretends to be a maid in Toronto. In the vein of a Paris Hilton reality series, she vows to cast off the shackles of "the good life" (and by her own admission, it is very, very good) and become a maid, working for the has-alls in Toronto, cleaning their houses. Great, Jan, whatever.

But she decides to drag her two children into the project, which, consent given or not, is to me unconscionable.

How many times does this person have to prove she is incapable of any rational judgment to be censured by anyone with a brain?

We suffer with you, Jan, as you clean these people's toilets and complain about the minimum wage being earned by them (and you.)

But we all know you'll return to your mansion tomorrow.

Isn't this hilarious?