Post-partum depression: a Chinese-Canadian mother’s graphic memoir demystifies the mood disorder

Lying in bed one night about five years ago, in her hometown of Calgary, Canada, Teresa Wong suddenly had an idea for a book. Pregnant for the third time in under five years, she couldn’t sleep, or stop her mind returning to the births of her two daughters, Scarlet and Eden.

Instead of feeling a warm glow at the miracle of childbirth, Wong saw nightmares of physical trauma and months of postnatal depression. “I was thinking back to the delivery room with Scarlet, and just crying,” Wong recalls. “I just couldn’t get these images out of my head. I thought maybe I should write about that.”

Ever since high school, writing had been Wong’s way of “figuring out how I was feeling about certain things”. She had tried, and failed, to complete a memoir about her own parents’ extraordinary journeys from Guangdong to Canada, where they eventually settled and raised their two children: Teresa and her younger brother, Michael.

What Wong sketched on that sleepless night seemed little more than a “bunch of notes. A script. A letter, really”. And that, more or less, is what Dear Scarlet, published earlier this year, became – a letter addressed to her firstborn expressed in the form of a graphic memoir, augmented by Wong’s own rudimentary black-and-white line drawings.

“I still kind of cringe,” Wong says today. “It wasn’t a stylistic choice so much as the limits of my ability. When I started the book, I didn’t think I would illustrate it. Everyone I showed it to said it’s such a personal story, so intimate, it really needs to come from you. I said, I can only draw about 25 per cent better. Will that take away from the story?”

The simple answer is no. In addition to her candid writing, Wong’s stark, unsentimental portraits convey her isolation, the mounting psychological pressure and, above all, the silence of those dark days. They are touching and funny, if in a somewhat grim fashion.