Jiayang Fan is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she melds political, cultural, and personal perspectives to cover China and U.S.-China relations. In recent years, she has written about hospice care in China, the Hong Kong protests, JD.com’s impact on rural China, the Chinese beauty industry, and much more. This spring, in a popular episode of The Daily, a podcast run by The New York Times, she lucidly discussed the discrimination that Asian Americans have faced during the Covid-19 pandemic, and below, she reflects on the biases she’s encountered from both China and the United States. She was born in Chongqing, China, and moved to the U.S. at the age of eight.
Jiayang Fan Illustration by Kate Copeland
Q: How did you first get into journalism?
A: I got into journalism by way of a fluke. I was never involved in my school newspaper in college or high school. When I landed in New York City in my early 20s, I had a vague idea that I wanted to be a writer. But I had