Nancy Yi Fan

Nancy Yi Fan: The Girl Who Emailed the CEO

The email arrived at HarperCollins with the subject line "Dear President Friedman." The publisher did not accept unagented manuscripts and had no reason to open it. Jane Friedman, then chief executive of one of the largest publishing houses in the world, opened it anyway. "I started to read it, which is not something we usually do because we don't accept unagented manuscripts," she later recalled, "but I thought there was something here, really something here." The manuscript was a fantasy novel about warring flocks of birds. Its author was twelve years old and had not spoken a word of English five years earlier.

Beijing to Syracuse

Nancy Yi Fan — 范秎 — was born on 26 August 1993 in Beijing. In 2000, at the age of seven, she moved with her parents to Syracuse, New York, arriving with no English at all and settling into an American childhood barely a year before the September 11 attacks reshaped the country's mood.

The attacks lodged in her. So did birds. She had loved them since China, and in upstate New York she watched them obsessively — in her own backyard, in the woods, along nature trails — cataloguing their habits, plumage, songs and habitats with the seriousness of a field naturalist. The two preoccupations fused in a dream. "One night, I had a dream about cardinals and blue jays fighting, and of a huge white magical bird," she has said. "When I woke up, I wanted to turn my dream into a story because I wanted to express the importance of peace and freedom."

Writing with a Sword

She began writing at ten, three years after arriving. She started the manuscript in earnest at eleven and finished it at twelve, completing the draft in roughly a year. The research went beyond ornithology. In third grade, classmates had asked whether she knew martial arts like Jackie Chan; she took up the practice and worked with a sword. Her reasoning was purely technical. "I took martial arts classes to help me write better fighting scenes," she explained.

The result was *Swordbird*: Aska, a blue jay of the Bluewingle tribe, learns from an enslaved robin named Miltin about a tyrannical hawk, Turnatt. Aska unites two warring tribes, undertakes a dangerous journey for a magical gem, and summons Swordbird — "the mystical white bird, the son of the Great Spirit" — who destroys Turnatt. In the closing pages the tyrant's fortress is converted into a library, which is as clear a statement of authorial values as a twelve-year-old is likely to make.

Fan's own theory of storytelling was already fully formed: "a good story should have interesting characters, drama and action scenes and a message that readers will remember."

Fifty Thousand Copies

Friedman's instinct became a first printing of 50,000 copies. HarperCollins Children's Books published *Swordbird* in 2007, illustrated by Mark Zug. Within weeks it reached the *New York Times* bestseller list, and it was nominated for the Book Sense Children's Picks list for spring 2007. It appeared in the United States, the United Kingdom and China — and the bilingual Chinese edition was translated by Fan herself, an act of authorial control almost unheard of at any age.

She wove Chinese material into a fundamentally Western fantasy frame: fortune-telling symbols, ghost stories she had absorbed from her grandmother. She appeared on *The Oprah Winfrey Show*, presented as one of the world's smartest kids. Jackie Chan, to whom she had written, read the book and responded publicly: "I know that Nancy wrote her story partly as a reaction to the events of 9/11. I'm happy that she found a way to express her desire for peace and freedom."

The Series

*Sword Quest*, a prequel set a hundred years earlier, appeared in January 2008. It follows Wind-Voice, a dove enslaved by archaeopteryx forces, who discovers his identity and hunts seven Leasorn Gems holding clues to the Hero's Sword, gathering a woodpecker scribe, an eagle prince and a myna along the way before a final confrontation with the villain Maldeor on the island of Kauria. *Sword Mountain*, centred on golden eagles, followed in 2012. All three were published by HarperCollins.

The critical response was genuinely mixed, and it is worth recording honestly. *Publishers Weekly* found the "tightly woven story delivers a manifest message promoting peace and freedom." *School Library Journal*'s Elizabeth Bird reserved her praise mainly for the illustrator, noting that Zug "took the author's imagery and made it believable as well as attractive." *Kirkus Reviews* was blunt: "Fantasy elements are both derivative and inconsistent." On *Sword Quest*, reviewers including Laura Ruttig, Robyn Gioia and Sarah Sawtelle praised the emphasis on "family, friends, and peace, rather than power or treasure," the "credible" characters and a book "brimming with equal amounts of suspense and hope"; others found the dialogue awkward and complained that the "story drags and stumbles along at a terrible pace," while conceding it improved on the debut.

Why Nancy Is Called a Genius

Oprah Winfrey's producers called her one of the world's smartest kids, and that framing has stuck. It deserves careful handling, because the extraordinary thing about Nancy Yi Fan is not measurable intelligence but a rare combination of linguistic acquisition, sustained executive function and sheer nerve — and each of those is a different faculty.

The linguistic feat is the hardest to dismiss. She arrived in America at seven with no English and produced, at twelve, a full-length novel in that language good enough for a major publisher's editors to buy without an agent standing behind it. That is genuinely unusual language plasticity, applied with unusual discipline. The second feat is structural: she researched a subject empirically, took up a physical discipline to solve a specific craft problem, and carried a book-length project to completion over a year at an age when most writers cannot finish a chapter. Her own account of what it gave her is characteristically unromantic: "It trained me to think more logically. It helped my imagination and certainly tested my determination, self-control and dedication."

The honest counter-case is that this is precocity and prodigious effort rather than literary genius, and the reviews say so. Kirkus called the fantasy elements derivative; *School Library Journal* praised the illustrations more warmly than the prose. Much of the book's fame rested on the story of its author, and the "world's smartest kids" label was television framing, not a critical assessment. And no one had to be a genius to email a CEO — but almost nobody does it. The most accurate description is that Fan possessed, at twelve, an adult writer's work ethic, a translator's ear for two languages, and a total absence of the fear that stops other people. That combination is rarer than talent.

Legacy

Fan's three novels remain the most visible modern example of a child author reaching the *New York Times* bestseller list on her own initiative rather than through connections. Her most quietly remarkable achievement may still be the bilingual Chinese edition she translated herself — a twelve-year-old rendering her own American novel back into the language she had left behind at seven. Whatever the reviews said about the fantasy, the trajectory of the writer was the real story: a child who dreamed of a white bird bringing peace, and then simply refused to be told no.