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Jiayang Fan

Jiayang Fan is on the editorial staff of the New Yorker. She regularly writes about social, economic, and political issues in China for the magazine online. She is also a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, Slate, the Paris Review, and the LA Review of Books, among other publications. 

Author

<i>On Such a Full Sea.</i> By Chang-rae Lee. Riverhead, 2014. 368p. HB, $27.95.

New America and Old China in Dystopian Novels

By Jiayang Fan

Spring 2014 | Criticism

Chang-​rae Lee’s fifth novel begins in the voice of a “we” that evokes the past and discounts its significance in a single sentence. “Everyone is from someplace,” the faceless collective muses, “but that someplace, it turns out, is gone.” In Lee’s dystopia a century and a half into the future, what is irrevocably gone is the United States of America.

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