郑霭玲

郑霭玲 OC（英语：Denise Chong，1953年6月9日—）是一位加拿大华人经济学家和作家。

生平

是第三代华人移民，1953年出生于温哥华，成长于乔治王子城，1975年毕业于不列颠哥伦比亚大学经济系，1978年毕业于多伦多大学。毕业后搬迁到渥太华任职于加拿大财政部直到1980年她之后在加拿大总理办公室做了一年特别顾问。负责处理与不列颠哥伦比亚省相关问题。1981年升职为高级经济顾问，和皮埃尔·特鲁多共事直到1984年。 1984年之后转行做作家。

荣誉

2013年获得加拿大勋章。

Denise Chong, OC (Chinese: 鄭霭玲; born 9 June 1953) is a Canadian economist and writer.

Early life and schooling

A third-generation Chinese Canadian, Chong was born in Vancouver, British Columbia on 9 June 1953, and was raised in Prince George. She studied economics at the University of British Columbia (UBC) earning her bachelor's degree in 1975. She received an MA from the University of Toronto in 1978.

Career as an economist

Chong's career as an economist began when she moved to Ottawa to work in the Department of Finance, where she was employed until 1980. She then worked for one year as a special advisor in the Prime Minister's Office, dealing with issues pertaining to British Columbia. In 1981, she became a senior economic advisor and worked closely with the late Pierre Elliott Trudeau until the end of his term in 1984. It has been noted that her presence, as a Chinese female, was remarkable in the white male dominated world of government finance and that "she was a trailblazer for the more inclusive public service that was to come." Denise Chong's career in the Canadian government is made even more significant with her realization, through her familial and historical research, that her "grandparents lived in Canada at a time when they could not participate in White society. They were excluded from it: they could not take out citizenship, they couldn't own land, they couldn't vote."

With the end of Trudeau's term in 1984, Denise Chong left her role as a public servant in order to pursue a career as a professional writer.

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 four literary non-fiction books 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. 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.