Motherland - Part 2

July 1, 2021·47 min·4 clips

Jiayang Fan receives death threats from Chinese nationalists after sharing her mother's COVID-19 struggle on Twitter.

This episode opens with a recap of part one: Jiayang Fan emigrated from China at age eight, her mother became a housekeeper in Connecticut after her husband left them, and her mother was diagnosed with ALS, which progressively paralyzed her while leaving her mind intact. By the time of this narrative, her mother has been in the Henry J. Carter Specialty Hospital in Harlem for years, dependent on a ventilator and two full-time aides, Ying and Zhou, whose costs Medicare and Medicaid do not cover. When the COVID lockdown bars all visitors in March 2020, Fan is cut off from the facility where her mother has been, forcing her to manage everything through FaceTime calls and a network of phone calls to the nursing desk. The episode details the intricate social dynamics of caregiving: her mother and aide Ying do not speak English, nurses do not speak Cantonese or Mandarin, and Fan has served as the linguistic and emotional intermediary for years. Cut off from physical presence, the system begins to strain. Her mother beams coded distress through nicknames she assigns to nurses based on appearances, and Fan receives midnight calls requiring her to decode who among the ward staff are the bad actors. She describes the humiliating dynamic of begging Ying to stay for another week on false assurances that the lockdown would lift in a week. A separate strand concerns the ideological complication of being a New Yorker reporter who covers China while her mother remains attached to Chinese state media and wary of Fan's work. When Fan tweets about her despair at the lockdown banning her mother's aides, Chinese nationalist accounts attack her and threaten her mother. The episode excavates the history of the phrase losing face as a Chinese concept, mianzi, and the complex class dynamics between Fan and her mother, including a scene where Fan reminds her mother of her own past as a housekeeper to encourage her to treat Ying with more respect.

As heard by us

An immigrant caregiving story that keeps its power in the small facts, while tracing split identity and grief with care.

Motherland - Part 2 follows an immigrant daughter's family history through the plain details of care: six suitcases, a marriage lost, little money, and years shaped by ALS, ventilators, aides, and hospital rules. The piece works best when it stays close to those facts.

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Why you'd press play

For when survival looks like suitcases, hospital rules, and two selves.

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