[4] The complex was run-down, had no hot water, and had shared bathrooms, while the sole nearby convenience store served around 20,000 residents.

[6] In a personal essay published in 2017, Fan said that even with greater familiarity with the English language and the American culture, she still felt like a "putative insider and perpetual outsider.

In the fall of 2011, Fan's 59-year-old mother was diagnosed with A.L.S., or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,[8] a progressive neurodegenerative disease that gradually paralyzes the patient.

[3] For a profile published in June 2019 in The New Yorker, Fan interviewed Chinese sci-fi writer Cixin Liu about the rise of China.

[12] In September 2020, then-Senator Marsha Blackburn (R‑TN) raised concerns over the streaming platform's decision to adapt and promote "The Three-Body Problem."

Blackburn argued that Liu propagated the genocidal rhetorics regarding the Muslim Uyghurs and supported the Chinese's government's internment camps.

[12] She wrote, "In an interview with the New Yorker last summer, when asked about the ongoing atrocities in XUAR, Mr. Liu stated… ‘If anything, the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty…If you were to loosen up the country a bit, the consequences would be terrifying.’"[12] The letter was signed by then-Senators Rick Scott (R‑FL), Kevin Cramer (R‑ND), Thom Tillis (R‑NC), and Martha McSally (R‑AZ).

[3] When Fan worked for The New Yorker as a fact-checker, she had the opportunity to visit restaurants in New York City; that was when she started to write food critique for the magazine.

[3] Her writings include Salon de Ning, a high-end Shanghai-style rooftop bar in the Peninsula New York,[19] Sichuan restaurant Málà Project,[20] and California-Mediterranean composite Covina.

[5] She tweeted with a screenshot of the FaceTime video and mentioned Mitchell Katz, the president of New York City Health and Hospitals:Jiayang Fan [@JiayangFan] (April 9, 2020).

Moms nurses collectively anguished for her" (Tweet) – via Twitter.That night, she received a text from New York state assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, whose district includes Manhattan's Chinatown.

[5] She also heard from state senator Brian Benjamin, whose district includes Harlem, as well as a prominent Twitter personality who knew Mitchell Katz and offered to text him.

[5] The day after her mother's aide returned to the hospital, Fan received a Twitter private message telling her that she was being targeted on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform.

The letter criticized the "non-behaving American politicians" who led to the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S., and made reference to Fan's previous reporting on Cixin Liu.

[23] The letter said that, the fact that Fan made the analogy between Earth-Trisolaris in The Three-Body Problem and China-U.S. is "not worth commenting" and reflective of her view on China and U.S.-China relations.

[23] In August 2019, The New Yorker published a story about College Daily, calling it a "post-truth" publication where Chinese students in the U.S. receive their news.

[5] In an interview with New Yorker executive editor Dorothy Wickenden, Fan said that she became the target because of the ongoing, intensifying social media war between U.S. and China, while her story existed at the intersection of anti-America sentiment and nationalistic feelings that Chinese people have.

A study conducted by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) found out that Fan, and other journalists and China analysts of female and ethnic Chinese heritage were targets of an ongoing, coordinated and large-scale online information campaign on Twitter led by a pro-Chinese Communist Party network known as Spamouflage.

It involved inauthentic Twitter accounts engaging in online harassment against the journalists by issuing threats of violence and racial insults, and spreading accusations of being a traitor.