In a day in early October 2025, a reporter met with Feng Jie at a noodle restaurant in Flushing, New York. She was wearing a black t-shirt, carrying a pink cross-body bag, and her face was covered with a sky-blue hat with black lace trim.
After exchanging greetings, Feng Jie sat down gracefully. She ordered a bowl of chicken rice noodles and started eating silently. The reporter, not feeling hungry himself, took the opportunity to observe this famous “first generation internet celebrity.” Feng Jie, labeled as a “fat, dark, ugly” rural person, left a completely different impression on the reporter. Her eating manners were refined, taking slow, small bites. The aura of fearlessness in the face of being watched and ridiculed lingered around her.
“Feng Jie, you don’t look as fat as in the photos, right?” the reporter couldn’t help but comment.
“Oh, those photos were intentionally taken to make me look ugly,” Feng Jie dismissed, her thick lips puckering slightly in what seemed like annoyance. “Besides, even if I were fat, there are always people fatter than me. It’s a personal matter, and others have no right to interfere.”
Indeed, she remained confident and strong, the same “Feng Jie” – Luo Yufeng – who was mocked as a “ridiculous,” “ugly,” “arrogant,” and “eager to find a boyfriend from Tsinghua University or Peking University” vocational school student more than ten years ago in mainland China.
Like hundreds of millions of Chinese, the journalist had known about “Feng Jie” for years. They knew she had come to New York, but had never met her in person.
“So I was surprised to see you at the recent anti-communist event,” the reporter said. “Why did you come out against the CCP?”
“I was against the CCP from the beginning, but in the past, due to various considerations, I didn’t speak up,” Feng Jie firmly stated. “I’m 40 now, and I don’t want to continue being cyberbullied. I want a normal life, so I want to participate more in these anti-communist activities. I want to become a ‘sensitive term’ for the CCP, so that platforms like Douyin and Xiaohongshu dare not post my photos anymore…”
Feng Jie’s hardships began with a marriage-seeking advertisement posted by a rural girl seeking equality.
She was born in a village in Chongqing, where her parents divorced when she was 7. She followed her mother, who remarried, and was always called a “drag-along” from a young age. At the age of 9, she gained a step-sister, and from then on, she had to not only look after her sister but also cook, work in the fields, cook pig feed by a large pot, and feed the pigs.
“The scariest thing for me was when my sister cried; every time she cried, my mother and grandmother scolded me,” Feng Jie recounted. “Starting from the age of nine, my daily life consisted of working, being scolded, cautious, and living as a dependent. Every time I asked my mother why I was worse off than others, she would say, ‘You have bad luck.'”
After starting school, Feng Jie found solace in her favorite pastime: reading, no matter even if it was just a scrap of paper. At the age of 9, she found a water-soaked book on the school playground, telling the story of the American Civil War and the liberation of slaves, wherein she learned about President Lincoln’s humble origins.
“When later on I read the ‘Declaration of Independence,’ which said all men are created equal and have the right to pursue freedom and happiness, I thought it was correct,” Feng Jie said. “Later, when I read Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream,’ I felt he spoke well.”
This seed of seeking equality and freedom led Feng Jie, after graduating from Chongqing Normal University, to the idea of finding a boyfriend from Tsinghua University or Peking University.
“Because I believe, regardless of education, social status, and income, my soul is equal to these people, so wanting to marry someone like that is not wrong,” Feng Jie said.
Feng Jie initially posted marriage-seeking notices around Lujiazui in Shanghai. Within a month, the media discovered her. She earned 1,300 yuan in a month working as a cashier at Carrefour, and the TV station offered her 400 yuan and said, “Being on the show will improve your image.” Feng Jie believed it and went. In a top post on her platform, she wrote, “Regarding some people thinking I was self-promoting, I want to make it clear: it wasn’t me crying and demanding to go on TV; the TV people called me and asked me to join their show. Out of respect and trust for the Chinese government, I participated in the television program.”
Thus, the “Nine-year-old scholar, twenty-year-old peak” and “No one can surpass her in the past three hundred years, the next three hundred years” – these “Feng Jie quotes” emerged one after the other.
“These TV programs all had pre-arranged scripts, set traps, deleted or omitted some normal remarks, leaving only the parts that made people detest me – for example, they interviewed me for over an hour, but it got edited down to 20 minutes; despite reading so many books, they cut it to make it look like I only read ‘Kids’ Stories’ and ‘Friend’ magazine; even the line ‘I don’t like Chinese men’ was given to me by the director…” Feng Jie said. “On Jiangsu TV’s ‘Real World’ program, they had a psychologist to prove that I’m mentally abnormal; on Shanghai Oriental TV’s ‘China’s Got Talent’ show, they had someone throw a raw egg at me…”
Later, after coming to the United States, Feng Jie received emails from former guests unraveling the behind-the-scenes details orchestrated by the media, saying it was all learned from the TV stations; even the person who threw an egg at her sincerely apologized.
However, since then, Feng Jie was successfully shaped into an image of an ugly, arrogant, and uncouth clown. Overnight, she became the enemy of the entire Chinese population, open to mockery, insults, and public condemnation by all.
Following nearly a year of nightmare-like life of constant disparagement, Feng Jie decided to escape to the land where everyone is equal – America. In November 2010, she flew to New York with money earned through dignity.
Arriving in New York, Feng Jie was clueless about everything. Landlords asking for deposits, shopkeepers not understanding her English, and the subway map making her dizzy. More frighteningly, she thought she had escaped from Chinese mockery and insults by coming to America, but reality gave her a resounding slap in the face as the Chinese and the internet still pursued her like ghosts.
In New York, she had to wear hats, masks, walk with her head down, not dare to linger among crowds, avoid making friends, because wherever she went, she was recognized, photographed unflatteringly, with no place to escape. To dodge the Chinese, she couldn’t work in restaurants or companies; she could only find work in nail salons where ordinary Chinese rarely visited.
“I thought if I don’t go on TV, don’t accept media interviews, and don’t earn money from Chinese people, I would be able to live well,” Feng Jie said. “But the results were the complete opposite. Photos of me working at the nail salon were widely spread and mocked by Chinese media. More people noticed me.”
Hence, the entire Chinese population knew that Feng Jie was in the United States “washing people’s feet.”
“The pressure I endure is greater than that of all Chinese people, I live under pressure every day, have no identity, and am cyberbullied daily, everyone in China knows me, points fingers at me; I have nightmares where people take photos of me with their phones, and I wake up crying…” Feng Jie said, with traces of resentment, helplessness, and fatigue in her tone. “What I never understand is why do so many people in China keep chasing after me relentlessly? It’s been over a decade, why do I have news about me every now and then?”
Moreover, shortly after arriving in the U.S., Feng Jie was shocked to find her name appearing in Chinese civil servants’ “essay” materials as a symbol of “vulgarity” for students to evaluate; exam papers in some primary and secondary schools featured “Feng Jie” in test questions; a psychology lecturer at a university in Chongqing used her as a “mental illness” case to teach students…
Feng Jie had to wrap herself in a cocoon, hiding from life like a mouse. She believed that by hiding more discreetly, becoming more isolated, maybe she could avoid being brought into the limelight and subjected to online abuse. Yet suddenly, last year, someone captured her in Central Park, New York, and the news was circulated back to the mainland, saying she had a “deformed body” and “lost teeth”… on one website alone, the click count reached a staggering 90 million.
This incident truly drove Feng Jie mad.
“I never understood why I became a negative figure in China, how I became someone people despised,” Feng Jie realized. “I understand now: many people living under the CCP rule do not have a good life, they are filled with anger and need an outlet, they need to scold people online, vent their negative emotions; so they need to see me looking ugly, leading an unhappy life. When they see me struggling, they are happy: ‘Look, this person in the U.S. is living so miserably, it means the U.S. isn’t good either – ‘her choice was wrong, mine was correct’. That way, they feel superior.”
Furthermore, Feng Jie explained, “Another reason is that under the unstable rule of the CCP, shaping someone like me is also a strategy to shift social contradictions; after I went to the U.S., because the CCP feared that Chinese people would long for other countries, they might not directly attack the effectiveness of the U.S. Instead, they attack people like me, saying, ‘Look, Feng Jie is living miserably in the U.S.’… The ‘Global Times’ ‘Hu Diaopan’ wrote an article titled ‘What kind of role model is Feng Jie?’ continually emphasized that my profession was ‘foot washer,’ filled with various forms of discrimination…”
Yet Feng Jie believed her “poor background” and “pursuit of equality” were not wrong; the clownish image the media had created of her was not her true character; she should not be stripped of dignity, insulted, and harmed for an image and misdeeds unrelated to her.
Feng Jie made an extraordinary decision, and that was to speak out online, appear on the streets, and stand up against the CCP openly.
“Friends, I have never forgotten the image of me in the CCP media – a stupid, ugly, blindly arrogant person with an appearance like a gorilla; I have never forgotten the humiliation inflicted on me by the CCP, never!” Feng Jie wrote in a X post. “I often think of the humiliations I endured over the past decade. As long as I’m alive, this history cannot be forgotten. I sincerely hope the Communist Party falls as soon as possible! As long as the Communist Party still exists, the Chinese people will remain slaves!”
Currently, Feng Jie is pursuing a degree in environmental studies at a city university, finding solace in studying rocks.
“When we went to Upper New York for geological surveys, it was mentioned that the rocks had a history of 600-700 million years, and I thought, even dinosaurs had a history of only 300 million years, human history is even shorter, the CCP’s history is merely a few decades, and my being scolded lasts for just over a decade, it’s all very brief,” she said. “So I’ve also come to understand, there are billions of people in the world, new people are born continually, old ones die, we humans are insignificant, even if all Chinese people scold me for decades, it’s all very insignificant. I don’t need to care much about these things.”
When asked what job she wanted to do after graduation, perhaps working in government or non-governmental organizations with her environmental expertise, Feng Jie surprisingly replied firmly, “I can do any job, money has never meant anything to me.”
“My only dream is to disappear from the internet! I want to be forgotten by people!” Feng Jie said. “When I was young, my father abandoned me, my mother scolded me, I always wanted a family of my own, I’m already 40, I really want to have a child like other women.”
In the more than a decade of cyberbullying, Feng Jie never resorted to suicide; it was her “unwillingness” to understand why she couldn’t live like an ordinary person that kept her going. She always fantasized that one day if no one paid attention to her, she might finally lead a good life.
“If I can live freely like an ordinary person, if no one pays attention to me, no one takes pictures of me every day, even if I only live that way for a year or a day, it would be good,” she said. It was this “dream” that propelled her through sufferings that others couldn’t bear. “Because my life has been miserable enough, if I die, I won’t be able to live a good life with a family, a child… “