Jiayang Fan
Jiayang Fan
Jiayang Fan on Her Childhood in Chongqing
Jiayang Fan is a Chinese-American journalist based in New York, New York. She is a Staff Writer at The New Yorker.[1]
Early Years & Education
Jiayang Fan immigrated to the United States from China at age of seven in 1992. Her mother, who had been a doctor, cleaned houses in Greenwich, Connecticut, so that Jiayang could attend good schools.[5]
Fan told in an interview with the New Yorker in September 2020, that her mother was at the age of forty by the time they relocated to the United States and her father was at Yale by then. Her mother soon discovered he was having an affair. Within a year and a half, he had left the family, and she was faced with eviction; she had less than two hundred dollars to her name and spoke little English.[6]
Shortly before they were to be evicted, a man came to disconnect their phone.
He took pity on them and invited them to stay with his family, in West Haven, Connecticut. fan said:
Desperation burnished in my mother a raw, enterprising grit.
In broken English, she told Jim that her one wish was to give her daughter a good education.
He revealed what seemed to my mother like a valuable piece of insider info: the best public schools were in the wealthiest Zip Codes.
After months of trudging to the local library, where Jim told her that newspapers could be read for free, she answered an ad to be a live-in housekeeper in a Connecticut town that she pronounced “Green Witch.”[6]
Fan is a graduate of Greenwich Academy and Williams College.[6]
Career
Personal Life
In 2011, Jiayang’s mother was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and Jiayang oversaw her care as her condition worsened.[5]
In 2020, when the Coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdown threatened to separate her mother from the health aides who kept her alive, Jiayang spoke out on social media. In response, she received a deluge
of threats against her life and that of her mother.[5]