Jada Yuan

She was born in Los Alamos, grew up in Pojoaque in northern New MexicoNew MexicoNew Mexico is a state in the Southwestern United States. Its capital is Santa Fe and its largest city is Albuquerque. It was admitted to the Union on January 6, 1912, as the 47th state, and had a population of 2,117,522 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, and graduated from Los Alamos High School in 1996.⁠[1][2]

In an essay published in 2021 she writes that she grew up partly in the mountain town of Los Alamos. On July 24, 2023, she wrote on X: “I grew up in Los Alamos, NM, and the surrounding area (the beautiful Rio Grande Valley).” On February 24, 2024, she called Pojoaque, New Mexico, “my hometown” on X and described it as “a rural blip on the road near Santa Fe.”⁠[3][4][5]

In the same essay she describes Los Alamos as a mountain town whose life centers on the national laboratory that dates from the Manhattan ProjectManhattan ProjectThe Manhattan Project was the United States program that developed the atomic bomb during the Second World War, managed from 1942 by the Manhattan Engineer District of the Army Corps of Engineers with British and Canadian participation. It built plants and laboratories at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Hanford, Washington, and Los Alamos, New Mexico, among other sites, carried out the first nuclear test in 1945, and produced the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, later that year; after the war its functions passed to the civilian Atomic Energy Commission.Open the full entry; many of the adults she knew held security clearances, and the children learned not to ask about their work. The other part of her childhood was spent in a rural valley, where going on foot to the gas station for candy took up a whole day. She writes: “The bomb in many ways brought my family to New Mexico.”⁠[3][6]

The essay says that her grandmother came to see the family in New Mexico only once, when Jada Yuan was a baby, and did not take to the place: the altitude affected her blood pressure and no good Chinese food was to be had.⁠[6][3]

The Santa Fe New Mexican’s profile of May 2018 states that on at least a couple of occasions when she was young she and her parents loaded camping gear into her mother’s black cargo van, which was used to haul artwork, and set out for Mexico to see how far it would get before breaking down; on one trip the van overheated 100 miles south of the border and the family was stranded until someone with a tow truck came by, after which they went from one backyard mechanic to the next until they reached the beach, where they camped with hippies from British Columbia and slipped into the pool areas of resort hotels to wash up. She said: “I have these really fond memories of trips like that,” trips on which things went wrong and the family had to make do and have a good time anyway.⁠[1]

She writes that the family traveled to New York twice a year, mostly during school breaks, to visit her grandparents, who lived in a rent-stabilized faculty apartment near Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University, formally Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private research university in New York City and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1754 by royal charter from King George II as King's College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in New York State and the fifth oldest in the United States. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 and adopted the university name and moved to Manhattan's Morningside Heights in 1896. It has 17 schools and four affiliated colleges, with 35,978 students enrolled in fall 2025. Legal scholar Jennifer L. Mnookin became president on July 1, 2026.Open the full entry. Among the childhood scenes she recalls are dancing around her grandmother in a polka-dot party dress that had been a present from her, and hurrying down to the street with her to watch Christmas carolers.⁠[3]

On the NPR program she recalled that in New York she slept on a foldout couch in her grandmother’s study and had to fold it up every day so that her grandmother could go to work there; she described the home as a “sanctuary,” with Chinese cabbage, wontons and dumplings cooking, scroll paintings everywhere and a great deal of ornate china, and said that her grandmother tried to overfeed her.⁠[7]

She writes that when she was 9 her grandmother announced with excitement an outing whose object she could not make out, and that only as they pressed through the crowds at the Bronx Zoo did she understand that it was the giant pandas Yong Yong and Ling Ling, then on short-term loan from Beijing. Her grandmother also took her to a children’s orchestra concert conducted by Yeou-Cheng Ma, the sister of Yo-Yo Ma; the violin was for a long time what she cared about most, and her parents kept her grandmother informed of her progress on it and of her schoolwork.⁠[3]

She writes that none of her friends had their school reports passed on, as hers were, to “a near-Nobel laureate,” and that after a single bad grade at the age of 6 she never had another. The one quarrel with her grandmother that she remembers came when, as a preteen, she showed off her newly pierced ears: her grandmother was very angry and asked how she could choose to put holes in her body.⁠[3]

She writes that she said “Grandma,” where a Chinese child more exposed to the culture would have said “nai nai”; that as a child she often grew frustrated on the telephone because she could not make out her grandmother’s accent, and that the two got on better face to face and through the letters and postcards her grandmother sent from around the world. Her grandparents were able to go back to China many times from the late 1970s on, but never took her, their only granddaughter, with them. The family’s stays in New York, she writes, were full of visits to relatives, at which the children ran about and were given red envelopes holding crisp dollar bills.⁠[3]

She writes: “I was good at science and math, but I liked telling stories more,” and says that “not becoming a scientist was the most subversive thing I could do.”⁠[3]

The Columbia News article of February 2021 states that she was raised in New Mexico and, growing up, was only vaguely aware of the extent of her grandmother’s accomplishments; the NPR episode description likewise says that growing up she did not realize how famous her grandmother was in the world of physics. On the program she said that as a child she heard people say that her grandmother should have won the Nobel PrizeNobel PrizeThe Nobel Prize is an international award established under the will of Alfred Nobel, comprising five prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace, awarded since 1901; its funds are managed by the Nobel Foundation, whose Board is based in Stockholm. The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, established in 1968, is not a Nobel Prize.Open the full entry and did not really know what that meant.⁠[8][9][7]

She holds a degree in history from Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry.⁠[2]

When her grandmother died in February 1997 she was in the second semester of her freshman year at Yale University.⁠[3]

She writes that her last memory of her grandmother dates from shortly after the first stroke, in 1996: she was holding her grandmother’s hand as her grandmother sat in one of the two armchairs, covered in faded yellow corduroy, in which her grandparents liked to sit together. On the day of the death her roommate said, “You have to call your mom,” who had telephoned 20 times; a classmate she did not know well offered his condolences, having read the obituary in The New York Times before she had.⁠[3]

The Columbia Chronicle’s interview states that before her round-the-world assignment her longest trips had all been in college, among them a summer in Italy, and that she had been accepted to a junior-year study-abroad program which, she said, was not financially feasible for her.⁠[10]

From her graduation in 2000 she worked at New York magazine, where she wrote long-form celebrity profiles.⁠[1]

She spent more than a decade there as a contributing editor, working in print and online at Vulture, the Cut and Daily Intelligencer.⁠[2]

In those years she traveled to Cannes, Sundance and Toronto to cover film festivals and to Denver, Minneapolis and Philadelphia for the presidential conventions of 2008 and 2016; she profiled Stevie Nicks, Ava DuVernay and Bill Murray, interviewed wrongly convicted prisoners in New York, and covered protesters in Ferguson, MissouriMissouriMissouri is a state of the United States bounded on the east by the Mississippi River; its capital is Jefferson City, its largest city is Kansas City, and its second-largest is St. Louis. It was admitted to the Union on August 10, 1821, as the 24th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 6,154,913.Open the full entry, and the career of the first Black transgender fashion model.⁠[2]

Her cover stories and features also appeared in Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Elle, Glamour and Bloomberg Businessweek.⁠[2]

The Columbia Chronicle states that she had written celebrity profiles and features, among them a Cosmopolitan piece on dating with Tinder in cities across the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry, and that in 2017 she was looking for something different. The Santa Fe New Mexican states that in her interviews with The New York Times she stressed her ability to drop into high-profile situations such as movie premieres and awards ceremonies and quickly get the access a story needed, and it reports her as saying that what followed was a cyclonic but welcome upheaval to a life and career in need of a refresh.⁠[10][1]

Longform’s writer archive lists four of her articles for New York magazine: “The Pinup of Williamsburg,” a profile of Zooey Deschanel (September 2011); “The New New Girl,” a profile of Mindy Kaling (September 2012); “The Fairy Godmother of Rock,” a profile of Stevie Nicks (June 2013); and “The First Black Trans Model Had Her Face on a Box of Clairol,” written with Aaron Wong (December 2015). Marie Claire’s author page lists one article by her, “Janelle Monáe: The Passionista,” filed under career advice and shown without a date.⁠[11][12]

In her 2021 essay she writes that in 2012, a hundred years after her grandmother’s birth, she and her parents flew to Shanghai and then drove about an hour north to Liuhe, which she calls the fishing village where her grandmother was raised; the local government had arranged centennial celebrations, which the family went through, she writes, in a haze of jet lag. On the NPR program she called Liuhe a tiny river town in Jiangsu province.⁠[3][7]

She writes that at the unveiling of a statue of her grandmother, relatives led her father, her mother and her to the front of a great expanse of folding chairs covered in red and yellow cloth; the statue showed her grandmother as a young woman, seated on a pedestal in academic robes. During the speeches, which were in Chinese and not translated, she caught her father’s name and then her own, and her uncle signaled urgently that they should stand, wave and acknowledge the applause; when her mother was introduced and stood up, the crowd, which she puts in the thousands, gasped. On the NPR program she said that the statue was three stories tall and mint green, that its face was not as she remembered her grandmother’s, and that her uncle had let them know only the day before that they were going to see it.⁠[3][7]

She writes that there is a memorial hall in Nanjing, where her grandmother was an undergraduate, and another statue of her, in bronze, in Shanghai; on the trip the family attended the opening of a museum displaying her grandmother’s academic papers and the qipao dresses she wore under her laboratory coats, and visited classrooms of the school in her hometown that her grandmother’s father had founded, chiefly, she writes, so that his daughter could be educated. She writes of noisy banquets with Communist Party officials every night, at which the most outgoing men, such as her uncle, Su Wu, went from table to table proposing toasts; the din around her was in a language that she and her American-born father have heard all their lives but can seldom follow.⁠[3]

She writes that on the trip she watched an opera whose program bore the title “Chien-Shiung Wu.” A small boy who played her father appeared in a couple of scenes; in one he ran in waving a passport and asked why anyone would want to leave America, and the actress in the role of her grandmother struck him so hard that he fell down in tears. At the scene of her grandmother’s arrival in America, represented by cardboard cutouts of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Empire State Building and Mount Rushmore all together, she had to hold back a laugh; she looked over at her father, who was asleep.⁠[3]

The New York Times announced the position of “52 Places Traveler” in October 2017; it drew more than 2,400 applications in the first 24 hours and over 13,000 in the nine days the posting was open.⁠[2]

The Santa Fe New Mexican states that a few days before Christmas 2017, while spending the holidays at her parents’ home in Pojoaque, she did the final-round interview by webcam from a combination office and laundry room, her laptop plugged into an Ethernet cable; because the internet connection there was often poor she had run a dozen test webchats with friends beforehand, the interview went off without a hitch, and she got the job days later.⁠[1]

On January 10, 2018, The New York Times Company, releasing its annual list “52 Places to Go in 2018,” named her to the position, with the plan that she would travel to every destination on the list during 2018 and write about each place and about life on the road.⁠[2]

The release states that the annual list was in its 13th consecutive year and that first place in 2018 went to New Orleans, in the year of the city’s 300th anniversary; the travel search engine KAYAK was to use its travel data to help plan the most efficient route. In the release Monica Drake, assistant managing editor of The New York Times, calls her “a tenacious reporter and a great interviewer” and says that readers would get a vivid sense of all 52 destinations through her eyes and those of local people. The release also quotes her own words: “I’m so grateful to The Times for choosing me to go on this crazy adventure.” She said that the news was still shocking and a little overwhelming, that she had always thought she would have to give up journalism to live her dream of traveling the world, and that she could not wait to get started.⁠[2]

The Columbia Chronicle’s interview states that her reaction to being chosen was “Total shock”; she had written out talking points and was ready to argue her way into the job when she learned that she had it, and The New York Times never used the footage it recorded of her reaction, because, she said, it was too dull.⁠[10]

At the time of the release she lived in Brooklyn, New York City; the Santa Fe New Mexican’s profile of May 2018 calls her a Manhattan-based features writer.⁠[2][1]

The Santa Fe New Mexican states that journalists who had written about the position described it as “the most enviable job in journalism,” “a dream job” and possibly “the best job on the planet.”⁠[1]

She set out in January 2018 and made her own itinerary in each place, with one person in New York helping to book tickets and research destinations; apart from a few visits from friends she traveled alone. She later wrote on X that the year was “100% economy” (September 19, 2023) and that, traveling alone, she stayed almost exclusively in hotels and hostels (June 19, 2022).⁠[13][14]

By mid-May 2018 she had reached Branson, Missouri, the 17th stop of the trip; earlier destinations included Puerto Rico, Chile, the Baja California peninsula and Cincinnati, and the route ahead led through Western Europe, Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia and Australia. Besides writing, she took photographs and videos. She wrote on X that Chattanooga was her second stop (August 3, 2021); that she was setting off for Grants Pass on the Rogue River in OregonOregonOregon (officially the State of Oregon) is a state on the Pacific coast of the western United States; its capital is Salem and its largest city is Portland. It was admitted to the Union on February 14, 1859, as the 33rd state. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 4,237,256.Open the full entry (April 8, 2018); that her Rogue River dispatch covered a fishing trip, a snowy drive to a closed Crater Lake and a little wine (May 22, 2018); that she recommended staying at the Weasku Inn, wine tasting and Rogue Creamery cheese, and that it was still snowing when she went in April (January 25, 2019); and, when the First Lady was to serve Rogue River blue cheese at the state dinner for France, that Rogue River had been on 52 Places and that she had gone to the dairy (November 30, 2022).⁠[1][14]

Her destinations also included Tasmania in Australia and Gangwon Province in South Korea.⁠[13]

She also visited São Tomé and Príncipe, the island nation off the west coast of Africa, and Saskatoon in Canada, where she stayed overnight at Wanuskewin Heritage Park.⁠[15]

The KIRO Newsradio article states that she moved every four to seven days, often flying to another country, with a change of language, currency and customs each time, while also finding lodging, planning what to do and writing about earlier stops; she said she was “already behind” from the start, and called the assignment a dream job and a privilege but also the hardest work year of her life. There was no fixed budget: she paid out of pocket and was reimbursed afterward, and she traveled modestly, as much at the newspaper’s direction as by her own wish, saying that she wanted to travel as she would if she were spending her own money.⁠[13]

The same article states that in Costa Rica the newspaper sent her to Peninsula Papagayo in Guanacaste, which she described as basically a Four Seasons and a number of other luxury resort properties, and where the Four Seasons cost $1,400 a night; she stayed on a yacht booked through AirbnbAirbnbAirbnb is a travel platform for booking stays, experiences, and services, co-founded by Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk and headquartered in San Francisco, United States; its Class A common stock trades on Nasdaq under the symbol ABNB. The business began with hosting guests in the founders’ home in 2007, then joined YC’s Winter 2009 batch, and gradually expanded into local experiences, services, and boutique hotels.Open the full entry and got into the Four Seasons by making a lunch reservation. Her favorite destinations were Patagonian Chile and Bhutan; in Seattle she explored the glass scene, ate a bowl of pho and saw the tulips blooming in the Skagit Valley. She recommended traveling solo, saying that being alone makes a traveler vulnerable and that this vulnerability leads people to want to help, and that the year had proved to her that people are nice. She gave the interview over Skype from Bangkok, Thailand; the photograph with the article, supplied by her, shows her in Jiayuguan City in China.⁠[13]

The Santa Fe New Mexican states that she partied with famous musicians in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, spent an entire day riding roller coasters in Branson, and on the Baja California peninsula found her way through what she called a “choose-your-own-adventure” web of unmarked dirt roads to Las Palmas Tropicales, a palm oasis on the west coast. In March she spent 12 days in Chile, where she usually stayed three to seven days in a place; there she explored buildings left empty since a volcanic eruption ten years earlier, among them an overgrown, graffiti-covered building with blue bars still on its doors, which she concluded must have been a prison, and sheltered there from a rainforest downpour; when the rain had not eased after an hour she ran through it to her car, a moment she called “very freeing.” Two days later she climbed Volcán Chaitén, which had erupted in 2008; after she reached the summit it began to hail and she “felt so lonely and sad,” and a German man named Manuel then turned up and traveled with her for four or five days.⁠[1]

The same profile states that she was on the road every few days with weekly deadlines, estimated that she pulled about two all-nighters a week, had a lot of time alone, had cried in the backs of cabs and had found strength in intense loneliness; from being a print feature reporter she had become someone who also takes photographs and videos and posts them, and she felt guilty when she did not get to the posting. The profile says that traveling the world and writing about it is “tougher than it looks” and that after four months on the road she admitted she was still striving to master a job of intense highs and lows; speaking by telephone from Branson, she called the job renewing and said that her northern New Mexico roots had helped prepare her for the trip. The profile calls Branson the 17th stop and also says that she had visited 18 locales in North and South America, and it gives December as the end of the trip.⁠[1]

The CBC Radio interview states that before going she had not known that São Tomé and Príncipe was a country and went there on the recommendation of UN Habitat workers she met in an airport line; there she learned about UN Habitat’s work helping a community that had lived in former slave quarters on a cocoa plantation move to better housing, and she counts the country among her favorite places. Saskatoon was her only Canadian stop; she said she went because of the Remai art museum and the strong First Nations culture there, spent the night in a teepee at Wanuskewin Heritage Park, where First Nations guides explained their culture, and called it one of the more memorable experiences of the trip.⁠[15]

The same interview states that she checked bags and had only two baggage mishaps, and that a selfie stick she had carried for 11 months broke in Korea just as she decided to use it. The page embeds posts from her account @jadabird, one of them tagged #52places2018.⁠[15]

The Columbia Chronicle’s interview states that her favorite part was waking for sunrises (“It was always worth it to wake up for a sunrise”); that Disney Springs in FloridaFloridaFlorida is a U.S. state occupying mainly the Florida peninsula, with its capital at Tallahassee; its most populous city is Jacksonville. It entered the Union on March 3, 1845, as the 27th state, and had a population of 21,538,187 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry was not the best fit for her, because she had too little time there, did not make it into Disney World, wandered a huge parking lot and ended up eating roadside Peruvian food, which she called delicious; and that Chile was the hardest stop, mostly because of the writing: she was not sleeping, had deadlines to meet and found that the internet was not always kind to her, and she telephoned a friend and talked about quitting until the friend persuaded her to give it a couple of days, after which the feeling passed. She advised solo travelers on a budget to choose hostels over Airbnb rentals, use as much local transport as possible and travel slowly, called trains and boats the best forms of transport, and recommended Patagonia in Chile, Palermo in Italy, going from there as far south as one can to the very bottom of the Amalfi Coast, and Siem Reap in Cambodia, the site of Angkor Wat, as a place to start.⁠[10]

The KIRO Newsradio article quotes her as saying that no sane person would ever travel this way and that nobody goes to all of South America in two months; she said that tourism in Bhutan is tightly regulated, that its nature looks pristine, and that the country is 70 percent forest and carbon negative. The Santa Fe New Mexican states that she learned to pack more efficiently and, nearing the halfway point, said that she was getting a handle on the constant travel and meant to take breaks and learn to “appreciate it more.”⁠[13][1]

The Columbia Chronicle’s interview states that she finds that hostels make it easy to meet other travelers but, because the guests keep to their own bubble, hard to meet local people, and that she found Southeast Asia easy to travel in; travel matters, she said, because it shows that everyone in the world is trying to put food on the table and live their lives, and because it helps a person understand herself when stripped of her possessions and comforts. A photograph caption with the interview mentions Lima, Peru, among the places whose adventures she chronicled.⁠[10]

She finished the year-long journey around the world in January 2019. She wrote on X that her last two places were Luang Prabang in Laos and the Cambodian coast, to be followed by a final reflections piece (December 26, 2018), and that she spent New Year’s Eve 2018 in Bangkok; on January 9, 2019, she wrote on X that The New York Times had named Sebastian Modak as the 2019 traveler. On February 15, 2019, she shared on X her New York Times essay about being a culture writer who had not consumed pop culture for a year, and on September 5, 2019, she summed up the year on X as “6 continents, 52 Places, 74,900 miles.”⁠[10][13][14]

Carol Off, host of the CBC Radio program As It Happens, interviewed her in January 2018 as she set out and again a year later when the trip was over.⁠[15]

In the interview a year later she called it “a very hard year” with “amazing amounts of wonder”; she said that the life she had before the trip “doesn’t exist anymore” and that she had become calmer, more trusting and less afraid and wanted more adventures.⁠[15]

The CBC Radio interview states that in January 2018 she called the assignment her “dream job” and that the host then advised her to pack good shoes and not to check any bags; the Columbia Chronicle’s interview states that her working world is publishing in New York, where few people wake early.⁠[15][10]

The Washington Post’s author page lists her articles; those dated between December 2, 2019 and February 10, 2020 deal with subjects including the Democratic candidates in the 2020 presidential race and their partners, celebrity support for candidates, and Ivanka TrumpIvanka TrumpIvanka Trump is an American businesswoman. She served as executive vice president of development and acquisitions at the Trump Organization and founded an eponymous fashion brand, and during Donald Trump’s first presidential term she was an unpaid White House adviser to the president, focusing on issues such as women’s economic empowerment, job training, paid parental leave, and combating human trafficking. After the first term ended, she turned to entrepreneurship and investing.Open the full entry’s appearances in IndianaIndianaIndiana is a state in the Midwestern United States; its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. It was admitted to the Union on December 11, 1816, as the 19th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 6,785,528.Open the full entry.⁠[16]

In that list, the two items of December 2, 2019 concern Valerie Plame, the former CIACentral Intelligence AgencyThe Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is an independent U.S. intelligence agency established under the National Security Act of 1947 to provide national security intelligence to senior U.S. policymakers. It is headquartered in Langley, Virginia.Open the full entry operative turned congressional candidate, and the holiday theme “The Spirit of America” unveiled by the first lady; those of December 10 and 11 concern Ivanka Trump at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and her visit to a women’s prison in Indiana with MC Hammer, the Apple chief executive Tim Cook and the commerce secretary Wilbur Ross; the item of January 8, 2020 concerns the partners of the two dozen Democratic presidential hopefuls, that of January 29 the comedian Dave Chappelle campaigning for the candidate Andrew YangAndrew YangAndrew Yang is an entrepreneur and author who ran for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination advocating universal basic income. He co-founded the Forward Party and is the founder and CEO of Noble Mobile.Open the full entry in Columbia, South CarolinaSouth CarolinaSouth Carolina (officially the State of South Carolina) is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Ocean bordering Georgia and North Carolina; its capital is Columbia and its most populous city is Charleston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on May 23, 1788, the eighth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 5,118,425.Open the full entry, and that of January 30 a congresswoman seen as a catalyst for Bernie Sanders’s surge in the polls; for the item of February 4 the page gives only the line “It started with a call to hearts and minds. It ended with a hold signal.”; the item of February 7 concerns celebrity support for candidates and that of February 10 an A-list after-party.⁠[16]

On February 10, 2021, a Columbia News article on the Chien-Shiung Wu stamp identified her as a Washington Post reporter and quoted her recollections of her grandmother; it states that the two spent more time together after she came East to attend college.⁠[8]

In that article she describes her grandmother in these words: “She was incredibly interesting and curious, always reading, always traveling, always passionately working on something.” She says that her grandmother did not teach her as such, but that growing up around a powerful woman is powerful in itself; she believes that her grandmother, who did not like to call attention to herself, would be happy to be remembered in this way and pleased with the stamp and its illustration.⁠[8]

On February 11, 2021, the United States Postal Service dedicated the Chien-Shiung Wu Forever stamp in a virtual ceremony, in which she took part together with her father, Vincent YuanVincent YuanVincent Yuan (born 1947) is a physicist whose research has been carried out at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the son of Chien-Shiung Wu and Luke Chia-Liu Yuan; he took part in the TRIPLE Collaboration’s research on parity violation in neutron resonances and was first author of an experiment that measured the temperature of a shock wave by neutron resonance spectroscopy.Open the full entry, and Brian GreeneBrian GreeneBrian Greene is an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University who works on superstring theory; he is known for popular-science books such as The Elegant Universe and the NOVA documentaries adapted from them, and he co-founded the World Science Festival with his wife, Tracy Day.Open the full entry, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University.⁠[17]

In her essay of December 2021 she writes that the United States Postal Service wrote to the family, in an email marked “Confidential,” to ask whether it would support including Chien-Shiung Wu in the Distinguished Americans stamp series; her father, who by her account is bad about answering such requests, replied to this one at once, the only time she has seen him do so; she adds that the family still does not know who put her grandmother’s name forward or how she came to be chosen. When she posted about the stamp on Facebook, some friends passed the post on to their own circles; a friend in New York used the stamp on 100 postcards for the Stop Asian Hate movement, which people were encouraged to send to their representatives in Congress, and she pointed out to the friend that each card carried 12 cents more postage than it needed. The stamp, she writes, put her in touch with cousins she had lost track of and with former students of her grandmother’s, and small girls who love science have sent drawings of C.S. Wu; elsewhere in the essay she writes that her grandmother’s discovery inspired countless girls and women, who contact her to this day.⁠[3]

On December 13, 2021, The Washington Post published her long essay about her grandmother Chien-Shiung Wu; a Los Alamos National Laboratory publication and NPR refer to it by the title “Discovering Dr. Wu.” She wrote on X that on December 14 the paper’s homepage showed Jing Li’s illustrations for the article in motion, and that on December 15 the article appeared in print, taking up “Four whole pages” of The Washington Post’s Style section; in that post she thanked her editor, Hank Stuever.⁠[3][6][9][14]

In the essay she writes: “I am a keeper of my grandmother’s memory, but an imperfect one.”⁠[3]

She writes that the essay took months to write and that in those months she had surgery on her uterus and had been freezing her eggs. She also writes that the subject is still difficult for her, because looking hard at it means facing the idea that her grandmother did not balance her work and her family life, and that those choices have come down through her father to her in ways she is only beginning to understand after years of therapy.⁠[3]

In the essay she describes herself as single at 43 and wonders whether she will be the end of her grandmother’s family line.⁠[3]

For the essay she spoke with Janna LevinJanna LevinJanna Levin is an American theoretical physicist, cosmologist and writer, professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University, who studies black holes, the cosmology of extra dimensions and gravitational waves; she wrote popular science books including Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space and the prize-winning novel A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, and leads science programmes at the Brooklyn cultural institution Pioneer Works.Open the full entry, an astrophysicist at Barnard College, and she writes that the children’s book “Queen of Physics,” published in 2019, turned out to be unexpectedly useful. She writes that when the stamp was being released a reporter got in touch with her father and asked him about his mother, and that he copied her on his answers, which were more candid than he had ever been with her. She adds that admirers of her grandmother often seek her out as a last resort, to ask whether she can get her father to write back to them.⁠[3]

In the essay she notes that she is her grandmother’s only grandchild, names her own “American incuriosity” and her grandmother’s “Chinese stoicism” as one of the distances between them, and says that she feels a sense of loss whenever she passes her grandmother’s street near Columbia University.⁠[3]

She sets down a story that she has often heard: that when her father was born in Princeton in 1947, a friend who came to see her grandmother in the hospital was Albert EinsteinAlbert EinsteinAlbert Einstein (1879–1955) was a German-born physicist who formulated the special theory of relativity in 1905 and the general theory in 1915 and received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. From 1933 until his death he was a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States.Open the full entry. Her father, she writes, cannot confirm it.⁠[3]

In the essay she writes that she is close to the age at which her grandmother made her great discovery and has now lived twice as long as the time she knew her; she writes that it has sometimes been hard to keep up “the facade of endless enthusiasm” about honoring her grandmother, and that people, institutions and countries want to claim her grandmother, as she herself still does.⁠[3]

She also writes in the essay that she comes from a family of physicists and is herself no expert on nuclear physics; she became a journalist who wrote many sit-down profiles of celebrities, yet had never tried to look behind the fame in her own family. She writes that she had always wondered why her father went into physics, and that she does not want to have to learn about her grandmother from history books.⁠[3]

On January 11, 2022, the WBUR program Here & Now aired a segment in which she reflected on her grandmother’s public and private life; the program page identifies her as a Washington Post political reporter.⁠[18]

On March 9, 2022, the NPR podcast Short Wave released a conversation between its host Emily Kwong and her; the program describes her as a Washington Post reporter covering culture and politics who writes for the paper’s Style section with a focus on national politics.⁠[9][7]

The NPR episode was the second of two parts, produced by Berly McCoy, edited by Gisele Grayson and fact-checked by Katherine Sypher; in it the host says that she has written about arts and culture and that a few years earlier she had won a contest to travel to 52 destinations at the expense of The New York Times. She says on the program that the article took months and allowed her to be in conversation with her father, her relatives and her mother about their memories of her grandmother; that she had been too young to know to ask her grandmother what it was like to do the experiment, and wishes she could ask what it was about physics that lit her fire; and that there is “a longing” that comes from the things one could not ask. She adds that her grandmother knew how to keep a secret and to wait wryly before she spoke, a quality that she says her father has as well: he stays quiet, lets the information play out in front of him and then comes up with a “zinger.”⁠[9][7]

The WBUR page gives the length of the segment as 9 minutes 35 seconds and links her article of December 13, 2021; the host of the NPR program says that she had to gather data like a scientist and theorize the rest.⁠[18][7]

The University of North TexasTexasTexas is a U.S. state in the south-central United States, with its capital at Austin and its largest city Houston. It was admitted to the Union on December 29, 1845, as the 28th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 29,145,505 residents.Open the full entry’s 2022 Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference announced the winners of its annual writing contests, and “Discovering Dr. Wu,” her essay in The Washington Post, took third place in the Best American Newspaper Narratives category, which recognizes long-form narrative stories published in American newspapers during the preceding calendar year; the works honored that year had been published in 2021.⁠[19]

On December 14, 2022, she wrote on X that she was honored that the conference had recognized her piece about her grandmother, Chien-Shiung Wu, as “one of the best American newspaper narratives of 2021.”⁠[14]

On July 24, 2023, she shared on X her Washington Post article “Inside Christopher Nolan’s 57-day race to shoot ‘Oppenheimer’,” noting in her post that Christopher Nolan built a replica of 1940s Los Alamos in under three months, shot in J. Robert OppenheimerJ. Robert OppenheimerJ. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) was an American theoretical physicist and science administrator who directed the Los Alamos laboratory that developed the atomic bomb during World War II.Open the full entry’s real house and hired real scientists as extras.⁠[20]

In 2023 Insight Editions published her book “Unleashing Oppenheimer: Inside Christopher Nolan’s Explosive Atomic-Age Thriller.” The film “Oppenheimer” was written and directed by Christopher Nolan, with Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer; the publisher’s description says that the book traces the making of the film from script to screen through exclusive interviews with the director and his cast and crew, and that it includes on-set photos, concept art, research materials and storyboards.⁠[21]

In a post on X on July 24, 2023, she wrote that the book about the making of the film would be “out October 10”; Insight Editions lists the hardcover edition, with jacket, with a publication date of October 24, 2023, 272 pages and ISBN 9798886630961. On October 24, 2023, she wrote on X “Publication day!” and “It’s out today!”, saying that she had written a book about the making of Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” and added: “I got to include a note about my grandmother, Chien-Shiung Wu and her work on the Manhattan Project.”⁠[22][21][23]

Insight Editions also issued a limited edition (ISBN 9798886633818, 272 pages) of 500 numbered copies, each signed by Christopher Nolan, with a foil-stamped cover and a slipcase made for that edition, sold only by Insight Editions. Simon & Schuster’s UK website lists an eBook edition, ISBN 9798886631012, 272 pages, published by Insight Editions and distributed by Simon & Schuster, with the date July 21, 2023.⁠[24][25]

A /Film article of October 13, 2023, describes her as a Washington Post reporter and says that in the book she provides new interviews with Christopher Nolan, his producing partner and wife Emma Thomas, the lead actor Cillian Murphy and other cast members including Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh; the article says that the 272-page book chronicles the making of the film and includes a plethora of behind-the-scenes photographs of Nolan and his cast at work.⁠[26]

She later wrote on X that she had spent a great deal of time with Christopher Nolan learning how he and his team made “Oppenheimer” (January 7, 2024) and that Jack Quaid had come to her “Unleashing Oppenheimer” book party at a friend’s house in Brooklyn (January 23, 2024); in a post of February 24, 2024, she also mentioned interviewing Robert Downey Jr. for the book.⁠[27][28][29]

The December 2024 issue of Physics Today (volume 77, issue 12) featured Chien-Shiung Wu on its cover and carried the article “Chien-Shiung Wu’s trailblazing experiments in particle physics” by Chon-Fai Kam, Cheng-Ning Zhang and Da Hsuan Feng. On December 12, 2024, she wrote on X about her grandmother’s appearance on the cover of Physics Today: “My dad and I had no idea!”⁠[30][14]

In early February 2026 The Washington Post carried out mass layoffs that eliminated approximately 300 jobs and reduced its staff by one-third; she was among the culture writers laid off, and she made her own layoff public on X. Her post was dated February 4, 2026, and began “Hi everyone, some news”; on February 5 she wrote on X that she had been out of state when she was laid off along with about 300 colleagues, and on March 15 she wrote on X that the Post had laid off “all their movies reporters (including me, the person who used to cover the Oscars).” On January 30, shortly before the layoffs, she had posted coverage of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival awards on X.⁠[31][14]

The Washingtonian article states that the cuts were announced by the executive editor, Matt Murray, alongside the human resources officer, Wayne Connell, on a companywide video call, and that the casualties included the sports and books sections, multiple foreign bureaus and the daily podcast Post Reports; it also quotes Jon Fischer, who lost his job as well, as saying that the paper had slashed the bulk of its arts coverage, including most of the critics. In her post she wrote that she had been laid off as part of the massive cuts at The Washington Post, that she was thinking about her colleagues on the foreign desk living in war zones, much of the arts team, and the paper’s readers, and added: “We’ll need your support and, as soon as the numbness passes, I’ll need work!”⁠[31]

As of November 2026 the bio of her X account, @jadabird, describes her as a “Freelance writer,” the author of “UNLEASHING OPPENHEIMER” and the first “52 Places Traveler” of The New York Times, and lists New York magazine and The Washington Post as former employers (“Former: @nymag + Wash Post”); the location given on the profile is “Brooklyn + DC,” that is, Brooklyn in New York City and Washington, D.C.⁠[14]

The profile links to her author page on The Washington Post’s website and shows that she joined in February 2009; the pinned post, of December 13, 2021, links to her Washington Post essay about her grandmother. On May 23, 2026, she posted coverage of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival on X.⁠[14]

Her father is Vincent Yuan and her mother is the glass artist Lucy Lyon; the Santa Fe New Mexican’s profile of her in May 2018 and a Los Alamos National Laboratory publication both describe her father as a nuclear physicist at the laboratory. In posts on X in June 2026 she wrote that her father is Chinese American (June 13) and referred to him as “my dad (from Morningside Heights)” (June 17).⁠[1][6][3][14]

In her 2021 essay she writes that her mother is blond-haired and blue-eyed and, in her words, “ethnically but not religiously Jewish”; when her father fell in love with her mother, she writes, her mother was a hippie with long blond hair, “very much not Chinese,” who later became a glass artist, and her grandmother was not overjoyed. The Santa Fe New Mexican states that her mother exhibits at LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe.⁠[3][1]

She writes that her grandfather Luke did the cooking, drove her grandmother wherever she went, since her grandmother never learned to drive, and often put her needs first; he outlived her grandmother by six years.⁠[3]

The Columbia News article of February 2021 states that she was 19 when her grandmother died; the Santa Fe New Mexican’s profile of May 2018 gives her age as 40 and describes her as single; the KIRO Newsradio article of January 2019 gives her age as 39, which does not agree with the ages printed elsewhere.⁠[8][1][13]

The biographical memoir of Chien-Shiung Wu published by the National Academy of Sciences states that Chien-Shiung Wu was proud of the academic achievements of her granddaughter, Jada.⁠[32]

The Washington Post: Official website: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (opens in a new window). X: Public account: https://x.com/jadabird (opens in a new window). Instagram: Public account: https://www.instagram.com/alphajada/ (opens in a new window).⁠[16][14][15]