safe and take care!!!” I’d been on Twit-
ter long enough to be familiar with
the platform’s tendency to magnify op-
position and heighten vitriol. It wasn’t
uncommon for attacks to be personal
and vicious, but I usually paid them lit-
tle attention.
This was on a different scale. Replies
were arriving faster, devoid of context:
“I never know what happiness is until
I see your sobbing bitch face”; “Author-
itarianism rescues the injured and saves
life: democracy takes the life of your
bitch mother.” “Brownnosers will brown-
nose until they have nothing,” an at-
tractive young woman whose bio read
“Born in China” wrote. Many people
used the abbreviation “NMSL,” which
perplexed me until I Googled it. It stands
for ni ma si le, a common insult in Chi-
nese and one with particular relevance
to me: “Your mother is dead.” A star-
tling number of people wished that I
had a fatal case of the coronavirus.
At the beginning of the pandemic,
I had read that a virus is neither dead
nor alive, and replicates only in the shel-
ter of a host organism. I began to think
of “Jiayang Fan” as viral not in a social-
media sense but in a biological one; the
calamitous state of the world and cer-
tain random mutations in the story had
made it unexpectedly contagious. My
original posts had served their purpose;
now they were serving the purposes of
others. I had unwittingly bred a potent
piece of propaganda.
Corners of the Chinese Internet
buzzed with theories about my moti-
vation. I was slandering China in ex-
change for American citizenship. No, I
was after fame and fortune. When a na-
tionalist publication wrote a public let-
ter offering to donate a brand-new ven-
tilator to save my mother’s life—“to
combat evil with kindness”—it was pre-
sumed that an ingrate like me would
try to find fault with the machine. I was
besieged on Twitter, Facebook, and In-
stagram. Many people on Twitter seemed
to have come from Chinese platforms;
sometimes, when a new crop of assail-
ants descended, they would be hailed
as “soldiers” come to do battle with the
enemy, Jiayang Fan.
None of this felt quite real. I received
notifications of attempts, originating in
China, to hack my Apple password, but
I did not fear for my personal safety.
My mother’s voice echoed in me: “Where’s
your bruise?” But, soon, seemingly every-
one I’d ever encountered in China mes-saged me articles with a screenshot of
my mother. My aunt forwarded me a
message that a friend had shown her.
“What Jiayang Fan has inflicted upon
her mother is worse than any disease,”
the author lamented. “How could a
daughter so wretchedly trample her
mom’s good reputation?” My aunt said
that many acquaintances had written
her notes like this and that they made
“her heart hurt.” My actions, even if
they took place on the other side of the
world, had ramifications, she wanted
me to know: “They affect my daugh-
ter and your uncle, too.” The family
name was at stake.
In a chat thread she sent me, some-
one with the screen name Bering Strait,
who had known my maternal grandfa-
ther, recalled that he had been a loyal
follower of Mao in the Red Army. “It
is a good thing he is dead not to be party
to this humiliation,” Bering Strait ob-
served. Gradually, an intimate history
of my mother’s life came into view; read-
ing through such discussions was like
wandering into rooms of a past that my
mother had locked away long ago. Some-
one else knew that my mother, as a child,
had been informally promised to a neigh-
bor’s son, as was sometimes the custom.
Her enthusiasm for learning English
in college, to the point of “forgetting to
eat and sleep,” was recounted, and cast
in a newly suspect light: had she been
plotting her escape to America all those
years ago? For all her diligence and
beauty—she “was known as the god-
dess among the male comrades”—she
was evidently an incompetent mother.
“A child’s wrongdoing is a parent’s fail-
ing”—a deeply Confucian adage—was
a sentiment evoked time and again to
explain my mother’s fate. Many were
worried that this airing of our “family
ugliness” might taint their own reputa-
tions. Anyone who had even a passing
affiliation with the institutions of my
mother’s youth—her Army battalion,
college class, hospital ward—bemoaned
the possibility that their mianzi could
be compromised.
For all my aunt’s frustration with
me, she was insistent that my mother
should never know the way that she
was being discussed. “It would eviscer-
ate her,” she told me. That I knew was
true. My mother had lost touch with
many people who knew her in China,“If you don’t hurry up and open it, we’ll only have the
memories of bypassing the main security system.”