32 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020
PERSONAL HISTORY
MOTHERLAND
A daughter caught between China and America, a parent suspended between life and death.BYJIAYANG FA N
T
he messages wishing me a grue-
some death arrive slowly at first
and then all at once. I am con-
demned to be burned, raped, tortured.
Some include a video of joyful dancing
at a funeral, with fists pounding on a
wooden casket. The hardest ones to read
take aim at my mother, who has been
immobilized by the neurodegenerative
disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis since
- Most of the messages originate in
China, but my mother and I live in New
York. As the Covid lockdown has swept
the city, I find out that the health aides
she depends on are to be banned from
her facility and take to Twitter to pub-
licize my despair. But this personal plight
as a daughter unexpectedly attracts the
attention of Chinese nationalists who
have long been displeased with my work
as a writer reporting on China. In short
order, my predicament is politicized and
packaged into a viral sensation. “Has
your mom died yet?” China15z0dj wants
to know. “Your mom will be dead Haha.
1.4 billion people wish for you to join
her in Hell. Haha!”
At some point, I stop scrolling. The
messages I dread the most come not
from Internet strangers but from peo-
ple who know me—my aunt, my uncle,
my mother’s childhood best friend. On
WeChat, they link to various Chinese-
language articles about me and ask, “Have
you read this?” The next question would
be almost funny if it weren’t so painfully
earnest: “Do you know this Jiayang Fan?”
I do not presume to know this char-
acter, but countless social-media posts,
video blogs, and comments describe her
as a creature driven by self-loathing. I
find a story about my mother and me
in the Global Times, a state-controlled
Chinese newspaper with twenty-eight
million followers on Weibo. It has been
picked up by the country’s most popu-
lar news aggregator and then energeti-
cally disseminated on various platforms.
The more I read, the more fascinated I
become by the creation of this alter ego.
I am watching a portrait of myself being
painted, minute by minute, anonymous
hands contributing daubs and strokes,
the more lurid the better. “Jiayang Fan,
of Chongqing, China, followed her par-
ents to the U.S. at the age of eight,” one
article begins. “Even though her body
flows with Chinese blood—the blood
of the descendants of the Yellow Em-
peror—she has decided to metamor-
phose into an American citizen and
denigrate her Chinese face as an indis-
putable burden!” Creatively, the same
words are used as a voice-over accom-
panying a video post in which images
of my mother’s face and mine, culled
from social media, are rendered in tra-
ditional Chinese brush-painting style.
A computerized female voice describes
Jiayang Fan as a columnist at the New
York Times—evidently, this piece of fact
checking fell by the wayside—one who
makes a living by smearing her home-
land. Not only have I falsely accused
China of being the geographic origin
of the coronavirus pandemic; I also had
the nerve to support the pro-democracy
terrorists in Hong Kong.
Deliciously, once the U.S. finds itself
in the grip of the pandemic, Jiayang Fan
gets her comeuppance. It turns out that
her mother is on a ventilator, and, when
medical equipment runs short, it seems
that she is to be summarily unplugged
from the machine, as a result of Amer-
ican racism. “She might believe herself
to be American,” the article notes. “But
she never expected Americans would
treat her like this.” Many articles and
posts are illustrated with grainy cell-
phone screenshots of a woman in her
sixties in a hospital bed. Her face is
bloated and shiny with tears; a thick
suction tube protrudes from her throat.
In the upper right corner of each image,
in a smaller box, is a younger woman
whose twisted, wailing face matches
that of the older woman. We quicklyunderstand that this is Jiayang Fan in
a video chat with her mother. The ar-
ticles invite us to behold the humilia-
tion that befits a villain. There is some
confusion about whether Fan’s mother
has died—she has not—but the moral
of the story is clear enough: despite
Fan’s sycophantic “worship” of Amer-
ica, her adopted country does not re-
ward the depraved traitor.
“Jiayang Fan” is reminiscent of the
heroes and villains of the revolution that
I used to write about as a first grader.
My home town, Chongqing, was briefly
a Nationalist capital at the end of the
Civil War, in 1949; my first school out-
ing, at the age of six, was to Zhazidong
and Baigongguan, concentration camps
where the Nationalists incarcerated, tor-
tured, and executed hundreds of Com-
munists. One prisoner in particular cap-
tured my imagination: Song Zhenzhong,
a boy my own age known as Little Turnip
Head, because his bony skull appeared
outlandishly large atop his malnourished
body. The son of high-ranking Com-
munists, Little Turnip Head was less
than a year old when he was captured
with his parents, and grew up in prison,
passing messages to his parents’ com-
rades in neighboring cells. On the eve
of the Communist victory, as National-
ists prepared to flee, he was shot, and
became sanctified as the revolution’s
youngest martyr.
By second grade, I’d written several
“reflections on the heroism of Little
Turnip Head.” Imitating what I read in
my school primers, I mastered the for-
mula: in my essays, people were forever
sacrificing themselves, rescuing injured
classmates at great personal cost. All
this moral valor was pretty much the
opposite of what I observed in the Army
compound where my mother and I lived,
where daily life abounded in pedestrian
deceptions. Didn’t my mother, whom I
idolized, sell her egg coupons on the
black market? And hadn’t she, as an