Jiayang Fan

Jiayang Fan (; born 4 August 1984) is a Chinese-American journalist. She was born in Chongqing and immigrated to the United States at the age of seven. She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2016. Her works include cultural and political commentary, personal history, and food critique. Her first book, Motherland, is scheduled to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2023.

Early life Jiayang Fan was born in Chongqing, China in 1984. In 1986, her father went to the United States as a visiting scholar to study biology at Harvard. As a child, she lived with her mother in a residential complex in Chongqing's military zone. The complex was run-down, had no hot water, and had shared bathrooms, while the sole nearby convenience store served around 20,000 residents.

Fan attended Greenwich Academy as the only Asian student in her year. At that time, she could barely speak English and was struck that the teacher and classmates' perceived her as an outsider. She spent a lot of time watching CCTV, the state channel of China, with her mother, at the house she worked. In a personal essay published in 2017, Fan said that even with greater familiarity with the English language and the American culture, she still felt like a "putative insider and perpetual outsider."

Fan and her mother later moved to New York City. In the fall of 2011, Fan's 59-year-old mother was diagnosed with A.L.S., or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive neurodegenerative disease that gradually paralyzes the patient. Her mother had since then frequently visited the ICU and once stayed in a nursing home. In 2014, Fan's mother was moved to the Henry J. Carter Speciality Hospital in Harlem, New York City.

Career

Jiayang Fan became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 2016. She was the first China-born staff reporter at the magazine, and became its third writer known for reporting on China, along with Peter Hessler and Evan Osnos. Her works include cultural and political commentary, personal history, and food critique. Before achieving staff writer status, her reporting on China, American politics, and culture had appeared in the magazine since 2010. Before becoming a staff writer, she also worked for the outlet as a fact-checker. In the writer's most-known fiction, The Three-Body Problem, which was published in the U.S. in 2014, he wrote about two fictional civilizations that are modeled after the U.S. and China, Fan wrote.

The interview was cited by five Republican U.S. senators in a letter to Netflix. In September 2020, then-Senator Marsha Blackburn raised concerns over the streaming platform's decision to adapt and promote "The Three-Body Problem." Blackburn argued that Liu propagated the genocidal rhetorics regarding the Muslim Uyghurs and supported the Chinese's government's internment camps.

In an article published by the Chinese online platform Sohu, Fan's interview was criticized as full of "leading questions" that intended to bring the topic to "the China threat theory," "but Liu smartly circled those questions".

Hong Kong Protests Fan went to Hong Kong during the 2019 Anti-Extradition Amendment Bill Movement as a reporter for The New Yorker. She joined the rally and offered saline solution for those who were attacked by the police with tear gas. In her story published in December 2019, she voiced her support for anti-Beijing protestors.

Her comments caused mainland Chinese to attack her on the internet, accusing her as a traitor to China. Some Hongkongers also criticized her for not fully supporting the protestors in her story, which recorded discrimination that Mandarin speakers faced in Hong Kong as well as violent acts of protestors. Sichuan restaurant Málà Project, and California-Mediterranean composite Covina. In NYMag's food section Grub Street Diet, Fan wrote about a food diary where she recounted that "food is our language" between her mother and her.

COVID-19 controversy In March 2020, during the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Fan and mother became the target of Chinese nationalists. The letter said that, the fact that Fan made the analogy between Earth-Trisolaris in The Three-Body Problem and China-U.S. is "not worth commenting" and reflective of her view on China and U.S.-China relations. In the letter to Fan College Daily said that while The New Yorker editorial board ignored their "reasonable request for taking down the story," they still decided to send ventilators to Fan in the principle of humanitarianism. It was an attempt to "combat evil with kindness," the publication wrote.

The Asian-American In her 2022 and 2021 The New Yorker articles, Fan talks about Asian American women starting self-defense classes in response to the anti-Asian racism in the United States and discussed the surge in violence against Asian Americans, and why women are a particular target.

She also analyzed the reasons why Asian Americans feel powerless in the battle over elite high schools in New York.