Jiayang Fan

Jiayang Fan (Chinese: 樊嘉扬; pinyin: Fán Jiāyáng; 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.

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.

In 1992, she immigrated to the United States with her mother. They first settled in New Haven, Connecticut, while her father was at Yale University. Fan's mother found out that her father was having an affair. She subsequently divorced him, and was left unemployed with only 200 dollars. Fan and her mother briefly stayed with a family in East Haven to avoid being evicted. After some time, they moved to Greenwich, one of the most affluent towns in the United States. Fan's mother believed that living in a wealthy neighborhood would be necessary for her daughter to attend a good public school. To support the family, Fan's mother worked as a live-in housekeeper while making a plan for Fan's education.

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 1998, she attended Deerfield Academy, a co-ed college-preparatory school in Deerfield, Massachusetts. She studied Philosophy and English at Williams College, an elite liberal arts college, and graduated in 2006. 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.

Fan's mother died on January 12, 2022.

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.

For a profile published in June 2019 in The New Yorker, Fan interviewed Chinese sci-fi writer Cixin Liu about the rise of China. 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 (R‑TN) 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. She wrote, "In an interview with the New Yorker last summer, when asked about the ongoing atrocities in XUAR, Mr. Liu stated… ‘If anything, the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty…If you were to loosen up the country a bit, the consequences would be terrifying.’" The letter was signed by then-Senators Rick Scott (R‑FL), Kevin Cramer (R‑ND), Thom Tillis (R‑NC), and Martha McSally (R‑AZ).