annotations: a very good profile
Jiayang Fan on Constance Wu; reporting on the death of a brother; and other things I read
This is annotations, a newsletter in which I annotate a story every two weeks, and also read and write other stuff.
Note: annotations will be skipping an issue. It will return on Friday, October 25. In the meantime, here is one newsletter I have been enjoying that you might, too: Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day, feat. all the cursed online content you probably didn’t need to see.
annotated: “Constance Wu’s Hollywood Destiny” by Jiayang Fan, The New Yorker
Photograph by Djeneba Aduayom for The New Yorker
When New Yorker writer Jiayang Fan’s profile of Constance Wu was published a couple weeks ago, it was widely praised as a masterful, maybe even one of the best, celebrity profiles in recent memory. Fan, one of my favorite writers, covers a wide range of topics (most often China and America and politics and culture), but I would not exactly consider her an entertainment journalist, or someone who is known for celebrity profiles. That, it turns out, is the key to this story: it is both about Constance Wu and not. It sheds light on Wu, of course, but Fan’s strength here is in finding the connective threads and tensions between the subject and the context in which the subject resides: Asian America, Hollywood, all these age-old burdens of being one of the few prominent faces in what some people might call a wave or a movement.
Anyway, it’s good. HERE ARE MY ANNOTATIONS. (remember, you can add your own comments or respond to mine/each other’s. please annotate responsibly!)
read
“When my brother died, I was too shattered to write his obituary … In his life, I grieved the loss of a boy who had hardened himself to conform to societal expectations of manhood. Now, I mourn the death of a man who felt he had no choice but to be any other way.” [Jezebel]
Silicon Valley in 2012: the dawn of the unicorns. [The New Yorker]
Silicon Valley in 2019: a crisis of conscience. [The New Yorker]
Revisiting this from seven years ago: Cord Jefferson on grand leaps, falling, and Leo. [The Awl]
Thanks, see you in a month!
jgz