Denise Chong

Her 2013 non-fiction book, Lives of the Family: Stories of Fate and Circumstance, relates stories about the experiences of Chinese-Canadian families who settled in Canada's National Capital Region. This work earned her praise in Toronto Star and Vancouver Sun book reviews, republished by Penguin Random House Canada

In addition to continuing her career as a writer, Chong serves on the boards, task forces, and committees of several organizations including the Task Force on the Participation of Visible Minorities in the Federal Public Service, the National Advisory Board on Culture Online, and the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. In 2013, she was appointed to the Order of Canada, the country's highest civilian award.

Denise Chong's second book, The Girl in the Picture, about iconic Vietnamese napalm victim Kim Phuc, was also groundbreaking, in its portrayal of everyday life in war-torn Vietnam. Her book Egg on Mao: The Story of an Ordinary Man Who Defaced an Icon and Unmasked a Dictatorship, released on 29 September 2009 by Random House Canada., was 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."

Denise Chong lives in Ottawa, Ontario, with her husband, CTV reporter Roger Smith, and her two children, Jade and Kai. She received honorary doctorates from York University in October 2007, Bishop's University, and the University of Northern British Columbia.

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).

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.

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 Elliot 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."

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

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.