Do you know *this* Jiayang Fan?

September 28, 2020 3:06 PM

Jiayang Fan writes on the struggles she and her mother faced immigrating to America (The New Yorker), including her mother’s A.L.S. diagnosis. This year, as COVID-19 threatened her mother's healthcare, Chinese nationalists began calling them traitors to their country.

Previously on Metafilter:

• "Liu Cixin's War of the Worlds" - a profile in The New Yorker (2019)
• Follow the New Silk Road (2018)
• "If I'd at least gotten closer to that impossible perfection…” (2018)
• Liu Xiaobo, rights activist, 1955 -- 2017
• China's Mistress Dispellers (2017)

posted by adrianhon (12 comments total)

She also appears on the Sinica podcast this week

Online vitriol and identity with The New Yorker’s Jiayang Fan
posted by WhackyparseThis at 5:40 PM on September 28, 2020

I will say, only for myself, that ever since The New Yorker began making a deliberate effort to start covering China in long form (starting, one might argue, with Evan Osnos' reportage in the late aughts), Jiayang Fan has been (IMHO) their best get yet. Starting at The New Yorker just a few years after Osnos, she has brought a consistent vitality and insight both to the culture(s) of China, as well as to aspects of American culture, that I had not, and still have not, seen anywhere else. She is a joy to read, and for being such relatively young writer when she started at the magazine, appeared even then remarkably skilled and engaging right off the bat. There are few reporter/writers that I will always read when I see their byline, and she is one, because I never fail to learn by reading her work.
posted by buffalo at 5:48 PM on September 28, 2020 [9 favorites]

Criticism of Jiayang Fan is particularly ironic given her New Yorker colleague Peter Hessler is often praised in Chinese media and his articles translated and shared, despite the fact that he is conducting journalism illegally there (he's on a work visa as a visiting academic, and not a J-visa which allows reporting). Hessler is, of course, an American man, while Fan is a Chinese woman, so anything positive he says is given extra weight by some in China, while even her mildest criticisms are seen as treacherous.

China scholar Geremie Barmé wrote about how official China likes Hessler and the problems with that recently:

In the heavily curated environment of online China, Mr Hessler is praised as a “good American” for his writing; indeed, he’s just the kind of American that in today’s fractious environment official China finds palatable. And therefore I would note that a translated version of his report has been circulated widely on the Chinese internet with official sanction. I would suggest that Mr Hessler is to my understanding engaging in unaccredited reporting, something that, strictly speaking, is illegal in China. Therefore, by extension, it only stands to reason that if this piece had been critical, there is little doubt that the authorities would have reacted very differently. At the least one very much doubts that he would have been showered with praise, or enjoyed the kind of cross-platform promotion that has occurred in recent days. Moreover, I can’t help thinking that such a possibility would not have escaped Mr Hessler himself.

I must admit that, at times, Hessler’s writing brings to mind another American journalist, a man who reported from another authoritarian country nearly a century ago. A Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who served as the bureau chief of The New York Times in the Soviet Union for over a decade, Walter Duranty evinced an overall sympathy for the Soviet experiment and, over time, he acted as an apologist for the country’s harsh social engineering something, he argued, that could be best understood as the modern evolution of traditional “Asiatic” collectivism. Anyway, Duranty reasoned, the heavy hand of Stalin was actually a reflection of a “Russian mindset”, the default mode of which, as his on-the-ground informants assured him, is autocracy. For that writer, Western values were best seen as another form of colonialism and, although he readily admitted that the Soviet system could be brutal, its overall cruelty could be justified by the benefits that it would inevitably bring its subjects.

See also, Fan on the Longform podcast.
posted by usr2047 at 8:12 PM on September 28, 2020 [6 favorites]

That's a really interesting observation, usr2047, thanks for the link!
posted by adrianhon at 4:03 AM on September 29, 2020

Unrelated to the points above - the facility where her mother lives doesn't actually provide enough care to keep her alive. Fan has to pay for two health aids who live in the room at the facility with her mother or her mother would die. (I mean, technically she herself could live at the facility with her mother 24/7 and provide care, but she would have no money and would, I guess, eventually run out of food, etc.) That's really appalling, and what it means is that if Fan weren't making fairly good money, her mother would be left to die.
posted by Frowner at 6:35 AM on September 29, 2020 [3 favorites]

This was a hard and very good read. I was not familiar with Fan and am glad to have that fixed. Thanks for posting.
posted by eirias at 7:26 AM on September 29, 2020 [1 favorite]

This is such a tough read.

The nationalist publication that offered to donate a ventilator to Fan turns out to be 留学生日报, who presumably were unhappy about New Yorker's coverage of them in 2019. It's a bit heartening to read their rebuke of online criticsm for such a crocodile's tears offer -- certainly plenty of Chinese people look down on this Wechat rag too. (Links to Zhihu, a Chinese Quora-alike site.)
posted by of strange foe at 10:54 AM on September 29, 2020

I apologize for what seems very much like my own gross obtuseness in asking, but what was her great sin in the minds of her Chinese critics? That she asked for help for her mother? Been wracking my brain, but I cannot make sense of their vitriol. I apologize again if it's something simple and obvious that I've overlooked. Thanks
posted by sensate at 12:53 PM on September 30, 2020 [2 favorites]

It was her previous reporting that was critical of the Chinese government.
posted by adrianhon at 3:43 PM on September 30, 2020

Wasn't there something going on with asking for help for her mother, though, too? I didn't quite understand it myself, but it seemed like that picture she posted of her mother was something that she and her relatives thought would bring shame, and that she thought her mother would be horrified by if/when she found out. What was going on with that?
posted by clawsoon at 3:46 PM on September 30, 2020

...or maybe it wasn't the asking for help part, but the showing weakness or illness part?
posted by clawsoon at 3:46 PM on September 30, 2020

I think you're looking for logic and reason where none is to be found. Yes, her picture went viral in China, but only because it was accompanied by a false tale of her being an anti-China woman who fled to America, and now the Americans were going to kill her mother.
posted by adrianhon at 3:59 PM on September 30, 2020