She served in the People's Liberation Army in Chengdu, during the Cultural Revolution in Tibet and later as a journalist in the Sino-Vietnamese War, achieving a rank equivalent to lieutenant colonel.

[5] Yan holds a bachelor's degree in literature from Wuhan University, and a Master's in Fine Arts in Fiction Writing from Columbia College Chicago.

Zhang Yimou, the Chinese director of To Live and Raise the Red Lantern adapted her novella 13 Flowers of Nanjing to the screen as The Flowers of War, and his movie Coming Home was based on Yan's novel The Criminal Lu Yanshi.

[6] She has worked on other scripts including a biography of Mei Lanfang, the Peking opera star, for Chinese director Chen Kaige.

As of 11 February 2022, Yan was censored on China's internet after commenting on the atrocity and government cover-ups in the Xuzhou chained woman incident and agreeing with Zhou Xiaozheng's assessment that Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping is a "human trafficker" who imposed a large sum of money for "donation" on foreign families who adopt Chinese orphans.