Jiayang Fan

Jiayang Fan hangs out with the hosts of a Chinese-language radio show aimed at students, as they debate how to cover the Hong Kong protest.

Attitudes toward same-sex marriage in China are shaped not only by the contradictions of the country today but by its long history of homosexuality.

Yuh-Line Niou will soon take office as the first Asian-American to represent lower Manhattan in the New York State Assembly.

Wang, who works as a health aide for elderly Chinese, is sixty-one and careworn, with drooping eyelids so thin that I could see the wine-colored veins that threaded through them. Since coming to the United States, thirty-two years ago, she has been outside New York just once, and the only places she has lived in are the Manhattan Chinatown and the Brooklyn one, in Bensonhurst. One afternoon in late April of last year, she was leaving the Bensonhurst branch of Marshalls when an agitated woman in…

After an injury cut short her dancing career, a few years ago, she and some friends set up an advertising business. Many of her clients were social-media companies, and her work for them led to an observation about the sector’s development: first there was the text-based service Weibo, the largest social-media network in China at the time; then people started posting images. “But a single picture can only say so much,” she told me recently. “To really communicate a message, you need a video.” To…

In 2016, “The Vegetarian” became the first Korean-language novel to win the Man Booker International Prize, which was awarded to both its author, Han Kang, and its translator, Deborah Smith. In the English-speaking world, Smith, at the time a twenty-eight-year-old Ph.D. student who had begun learning Korean just six years earlier, was praised widely for her work. In the Korean media, however, the sense of national pride that attended Han’s win—not to mention the twentyfold spike in printed copie…

In certain respects, Orwell recognizes the theatricality of his position, the repugnance of British imperialism, the fulsome geopolitical spectacle in which he is “an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind him.” To shoot the elephant seems to him an act of murder. But to be a white man of authority, a sahib, is “to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things.” When Orwell finally kills the elephant, it is not out of conviction but fear of not ac…

“Now Yinchuan turns water into wine,” Su Long told me on a sunny September morning, when he picked me up from my hotel in a hunter-green jeep. Su, a Yinchuan native in his late thirties, was taking me to the Chandon China winery, where he is the estate director. As we turned onto a broad boulevard, he gestured at the buildings on either side. “About fifteen years ago, this was all farmland,” he said. In the near distance, a high-rise came into view. “That’s the government offices,” he remarked.…

Along with her executive chef, Jay Reifel, the pair picked four women out of the thirty-nine originally featured in Chicago’s work and concocted a meal showcasing items from each of the periods in which the women lived. The trickiest part proved to be finding recipes from the relevant eras. “We would have loved to have the Primordial Goddess,” Reifel said, “but it’s anyone’s guess what she ate.” On a muggy July evening, forty guests gathered at the Museum of Food and Drink, in Brooklyn, and took…

Luoyang, in Henan Province, is an arid backwater, but its position in the Yellow River Basin made it one of the cradles of Chinese civilization. For fifteen hundred years, from the eleventh century B.C., it was an imperial capital; on its streets, Confucius, a failed official turned itinerant sage, is said to have met Laozi, the founder of Daoism. Nowadays, Luoyang is best known for the Longmen Grottoes, where tens of thousands of Buddha statues have been carved into cliffs on the banks of the Y…

Fan did not speak on camera, but it was hard to imagine what could have prompted a more lip-quivering performance than the open letter that she published on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, where she has sixty-two million followers. After expressing “deep shame and sorrow,” she admitted to years of underreporting her earnings, through the practice of “yin and yang” contracts, in which a smaller contract is disclosed but a larger one is paid to the star. She was ordered to pay a hundred…

A shopping mall also features prominently in “Severance” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Ling Ma’s zombie apocalypse of a début, which was published in August, won the Kirkus Prize for fiction in October, and has begun to pop up, as the year nears its end, on various best-of-2018 lists. In “Severance,” the mall reads as a knowing gesture: Romero’s work, and the waves of subsequent entrants to the genre that he created, are, one gathers, part of the world that her characters inhabit. When the novel op…

I. M. Pei, who died on Thursday, in Manhattan, at the age of a hundred and two, likely wouldn’t have divided the world along such parochial lines, even though he crossed many of them in his time. He was perhaps the most eminent architect in the world when, in 1984, President François Mitterrand selected him to redesign the entrance to the Louvre, the symbolic heart of France. But, when his plan for the steel-and-glass structure was revealed, he was accused of sacrilege. A headline in the newspap…

Although Beijing has been encroaching on Hong Kong’s autonomy for decades, citizens have recently been galvanized by a controversial bill that would give authorities the power to extradite suspects to mainland China, a step that would tear down the firewall between the city’s independent judiciary and China’s famously opaque, Party-controlled courts. Since early June, protesters have swarmed the streets in some of the largest demonstrations of the city’s history. A few days after the police used…

A week later, when I contacted Wu, who is thirty years old, through a mutual friend in China, she was still consumed by stories posted by victims of the coronavirus, which was soon named COVID-19. She had noticed that, as the virus sealed people off—even members of her extended family stopped visiting one another—the relative anonymity of the Internet and the urgency of the crisis seemed to be freeing people from their usual reticence. In a manner that Wu had never before witnessed, they were di…

Zhixia dutifully took the pills, but after a few months the lump was still there, so Sulin accompanied her to a hospital in Yangquan, a nearby industrial city of 1.5 million people. The doctors said that she needed immediate surgery. As is typical with dire diagnoses in China, they did not tell Zhixia that she had breast cancer, informing only her mother. Sulin, in turn, assured her daughter that the growth was benign. After the operation, a biopsy revealed that the cancer had spread. The doctor…

A week ago, as helicopters buzzed above my Harlem apartment and police lights glided across my window, I scrolled through image upon image that I had captured on my phone of men and women in masks facing off against police in riot gear. Nine months earlier, when I posted similar images from Hong Kong, friends and colleagues here who had known the city as a gleaming, orderly metropolis expressed their shock. What compels a city to erupt? This, of course, is the question that I was sent to answer.…

On Monday morning, Lai, who is seventy-two, was taken into police custody at his home on Kowloon and later paraded, in handcuffs, through the newsroom of Apple Daily, where I had interviewed him a year earlier. Among the nine others arrested across the city that day were Agnes Chow, the twenty-three-year-old democracy activist, Lai’s two sons, and four executives of Lai’s media company, Next Digital, which publishes Apple Daily. The ostensible charge against Lai is “collusion with a foreign coun…

In a way, Justine’s—named for its proprietor, the daughter of the famous Upper East Side wine importer Neal Rosenthal—harks to a different era, when the economy was a little more flush and overt extravagance a touch less gauche. But, then again, in 2023 even an upscale bistro where bottles average around a hundred and fifty dollars feels, well, very 2023. On a recent evening, a genial if slightly harried-looking waiter apologized that there’s no longer a sommelier on staff and that the cheapest…

Of course, many people make it twice a day, five or even six days a week. I encountered one of those people after boarding the 7 at Grand Central one day in early March. It was a little after 6 P.M. and I had nabbed a seat toward the rear of what turned out to be a local train. I can never remember which shape—circle or diamond—denotes the express, and the difference wouldn’t have registered immediately if I hadn’t heard a sharp intake of breath next to me, followed by a quiet but audibly exaspe…