Deliciously Uncomfortable — A review of Lindsay Wong’s “Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies”

Lindsay Wong’s Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies was deliciously uncomfortable, blending reality with the supernatural to the point where it was impossible to tell the difference between them. The book explores the role of the corpse spouse (or ghost marriage), where a living person is married and buried with a dead person along with the practice of villain hitting (a practice of cursing people often by hitting their image with a shoe). The two practices, along with resurrected dead characters who still developed maggots meant that the book has the power to unsettle.

A wonderful part of the book is that it is unabashedly Chinese, not trying to cater to white audiences and this is reflected in the protagonist’s challenges in her Masters of Fine Arts degree where she is constantly told that her writing is “too weirdly Chinese”. This book speaks back to the tradition of immigrant and second generation writing in Canada, which tends to focus on explaining experiences to an assumed white reader and “tidying up” anything too culturally different. In fact, Wong uses footnotes throughout the narrative that speak back to white readers, calling out their privilege and the way that most narratives have been shaped to speak to them specifically. 

Wong has written a beautiful counter-textual work that challenges and unsettles, pushing readers into a space of discomfort for them to critically question what has been taken for granted as “normal”. 

Reading this book will leave you wondering if someone is hitting your image with a shoe somewhere!!

Reviewed by Derek Newman-Stille, PhD