Fu Ping devoted Pages 17 to 31 of Bend, Not Break to the first real dramatic story of her life: one day shortly after her 8th birthday in late summer of 1966, she was
- shocked by the revelation that her Shanghai parents are not her real parents
- forcefully removed from her Shanghai home and sent back to Nanjing
- witnessed her Nanjing parents being sent away amid a very chaotic street scene
- became the caretaker of her 4-year-old sister Hong
In subsequent interviews with various media, she repeated the same story many times, only occasionally differed in small details. In particular, she likes to state that, "on that same day, I lost the parents who raised me, I lost the parents who born me, and I became the surrogate mother to my little sister."
The Debunking:
The biggest question of this story is of course its premise: Fu Ping had lived in Shanghai since days after her birth till 8th birthday and that she did not know who her biological parents were. That itself is very questionable.
The earlier version of her autobiography, Drifting Bottle, describes a happy childhood she lived with her biological parents in Nanjing.
But even if we ignore this glaring issue, there are still quite a few telling tales that her story was made up. In the next few posts, we will go through some of them in detail as we debunk this story.
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