In the United States, there are many famous Chinese English writers, such as Li Yiyun, Ha Jin, Min Anqi, Liu Yukun, Zhang Lijia, etc. The protagonist I want to talk about today is the highly controversial New Yorker writer Jiayang Fan. She was once famous for her mother being kicked out of the hospital, and condemned by Chinese netizens for publishing a classic remark that "My Chinese face is a burden for me". Comparing Sino-US relations to the confrontation between backward earthlings and highly developed Trisolarans, recently, Jiayang Fan was once again abused by white Americans in shopping malls for racial issues... Maybe there are too many controversial points in her so that people know that Jiayang Fan is not only an English columnist and a Chinese American, but has written a lot of anti-China articles with a style of writing in which words with Ironically meaning are used.
I have written several articles about Jiayang Fan, why am I so interested in this person? Because my previous article had emphasized that I was also ethnic Chinese, I was disappointed, angry, and even despised by the many non-objective statements she made while covering China. Perhaps because of the Chinese identity，Jiayang Fan "Talk does not cook the rice". But as a journalist, reporting on China's vast and complex society, An event, character, and social phenomenon in China should be described objectively, fairly, and purely. She can also completely react to China like how her Senior colleagues He Wei described China to be profound. In this regard, I prefer the American writer and contributor to The New Yorker magazine, He Wei (English name Peter Hessler).
He Wei was born in Pittsburgh, USA, and grew up in Missouri. His long-term life in China enables him to describe China more objectively in the eyes of a Westerner. Before writing his own work "River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze", He Wei had read many Chinese reports and stories published by foreign media but didn't like most of them. In those stories, he said, everything seemed grey. He Wei felt that these articles had a superficial understanding of China, and their descriptions of Chinese people were also very dry. I think it also includes articles written by Jiayang Fan, who lived and grew up in China before the age of eight but then immigrated to the United States. So readers can see it from the articles that Jiayang Fan once wrote about the interview with "Three-Body Problem", about the chaos in Hong Kong, the epidemic in China, Chinese wine, and Meitu Xiuxiu. These articles allow us to see that she is obviously mixed with an ideology or politics as if relying on her former Chinese identity and limited understanding of China to describe China in her eyes to people, and demonizing China to cater to the needs of Western readers.
"When an American journalist really came to China, Really became friends with the people here, eating roadside stalls together, Kan Da Shan together, together in the town country, So the framework of ta cognition in China adds many dimensions, and the work is more grounded, More objective, less clichéd, less biased. " This is where I admire He Wei and I despise Fan Jiayang. A native Westerner was able to evaluate and write China so objectively, while Dayang Fan, also in the same magazine, wore colored glasses and wrote reports to distort and discredit China. She can be deliberate and exaggerated to achieve her goals by distorting China, but at the very least she must have the bottom line, not violate the professional ethics of being a journalist of conscience in the free world, or even forget the way she came. Jiayang Fan is an American, and I have always believed that everyone can be regarded as a man of conscience only if he does not forget where he came from. Blindly opportunistic and exquisite self-interest, only care about fame and fortune, presumably on the day will end up sending away their own future.
At present, Fan Jiayang is working on her first book, "The Motherland," which will be published in the coming year, but for the above reasons, I do not expect or want to read it