34 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020
Army doctor, given my teachers medi-
cations for minor ailments, in order to
exempt me from corporal punishment?
Still, the hagiographies and demonol-
ogies of official Party history formed
the basis of my education.
“Jiayang Fan,” in her small way, bears
all the hallmarks of a new villain. Her
crime, turning her back on her mother-
land, is one I have been taught to revile
since I was two, when my father left for
America. It was 1986, and he had been
selected to study biology at Harvard, as
one in the first wave of visiting scholars
in the U.S. In my mind, my father re-
sembled America itself, an abstraction
that gestured toward a gauzy ideal. That
he was chosen to go there rendered him
special, the way that America, the rich-
est country on earth, was special. At the
same time, America’s ruthless capital-
ism and unapologetic dominance also
made the country sinister and soulless.
And so, although our government had
sent my father to the U.S., his presence
there now made him suspect.
If I had some intimation that my
mother was working to secure our pas-
sage to the West, it was hard to reconcile
with her public protestations to the con-
trary. Although she griped about the
red tape hampering our departure, she
remained unflinchingly devoted to the
Communist Party, whose patriotic hymns
she hummed daily while she rinsed the
dishes. In 1992, as we prepared to leave,
adults sometimes asked me if we were
going to America. Were they truly cu-
rious, or did they already know the an-
swer? Innocent questions were just as
likely to be perilous trip wires. Before
answering, I watched my mother’s eyes
for instruction and waited for her gaze
to guide me. When I solemnly shook
my head, I felt myself not to be lying,
exactly, but deflecting bodily harm.
Maybe such reflexive doublethink
shows me to be as devious as my online
persecutors alleged. But their fixation
on my disloyalty to China does not en-
compass the existential complexity of
my betrayal. For what is an immigrant
but a mind mired in contradictions and
doublings, stranded in unresolved splits
of the self? Sometimes I have wondered
if these people knew something about
Jiayang Fan that had always eluded me.
For them, there is not an ounce of doubt,
whereas uncertainty is the country where
I most belong.O
n July 4th—a date that had no
meaning to me except that it was
exactly a month short of my eighth birth-
day—my mother and I landed at J.F.K.
Airport, our six suitcases bulging with
rolls of hand-sewn bedding, bags of Si-
chuanese chili peppers, a cast-iron wok,and her stethoscope. My mother now
found herself, at the age of forty, living
in a tiny studio apartment in New Haven,
Connecticut—my father was at Yale by
then—with a husband who, she soon
discovered, was carrying on an affair.
Within a year and a half, he had left us,
and she was faced with eviction; she had
less than two hundred dollars to her
name, and spoke little English.
Now the two of us became the em-
bodiment of the Chinese phrase xiang
yi wei ming—mutual reliance for life.
My mother knew that in a vastly un-
equal and under-resourced world she
would have to secure whatever small ad-
vantages she could. Born to Party cad-
res who, as soldiers, had been wounded
on the battlefield in the quest to realize
Mao’s vision of Communist China, my
mother had been spared the worst of
the Great Famine and the Cultural Rev-
olution. A brutal, unsentimental prag-
matism shaped her deepest instincts.
Her decision to become a physician
sprang not from a passion for medicine
but from the realization that this was
her only path to a college education. My
parents met in graduate school and, after
I was born, a product of China’s one-
child policy, entrenched sexism dictated
that she should shift her focus from her
career to fending for me, her only child.
Shortly before we were to be evicted,
a man with a handlebar mustache came
to disconnect our phone. A kindly so-
cialist in his fifties named Jim, he took
pity on us and invited us to stay with
his family, in West Haven. Desperation
burnished in my mother a raw, enter-
prising 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 valu-
able piece of insider info: the best pub-
lic 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 house-
keeper in a Connecticut town that she
pronounced “Green Witch.” My mother
did not believe herself to be doing some-
thing bold or daring. She had simply de-
vised a Chinese work-around to a quin-
tessentially American problem.
In the mid-nineties, Greenwich was
one of the wealthiest places in the coun-
try, and as blindingly white as the bliz-“Are we there yet?”