Questionable Fact: Fu Ping's Arrest by Kidnapping

The Original Story:
On Pages 255-257 of Bend, Not Break, Fu Ping details how she was arrested because of her supposed research on infanticide:

One day in the fall of 1982, as I innocently walked across campus making preparations for graduation, someone sneaked up behind me, jammed a black canvas bag over my head, and bound my wrists together tightly. "Don't scream," a menacing male voice whispered as I was escorted into a nearby car. 

We drove for hours...

After 3 days of solitary confinement, she was released:

...As he drove me to my birth parents' apartment in Nanjing, we chatted a little. He told me that I had brought shame to our country because of my research on female infanticide, which had caused an international human rights uproar....

The Later Story:
After her story and timeline was questioned, Jenna Goudreau of Forbes reported that:

Late last night, Fu’s publicist emailed me that they “confirmed that Ping started school in 1978 and left school in the fall of 1982 after being held by the government. She arrived in the U.S. on January 14, 1984.”

The Debunking:
There are several serious questionable facts in this little story:

1. The timeline simply does not work. Fu Ping entered college in 1978, so she should have graduated and left school before summer of 1982, if not having already dropped out earlier. Since her publicist has specifically reconfirmed it, it can't be a typo. But how could she still be "making preparations for graduation" in her school in the fall of 1982? (Graduation schedules were very tightly controlled in China at the time.)
2. The geography does not work. If she was arrested in her school in Suzhou. Why did the police not sent her back to the school but drove her all the way to Nanjing upon release? It was not an easy drive in those days when there was not yet a modern highway.
3. Most importantly of all, why would the police chose such an extreme manner to execute the arrest? In early 1980s, it's pretty common that school authorities or police visited "troubled" students in the open and took them to offices for questioning. There was no need to stage a dramatic, mafia-style kidnapping.

Is this another one of Fu Ping's imagination emotional memory at work?

Fu Ping's Explanation:
On July 3, 2013, Fu Ping told Qiaobao that the "fall 1982" was a "typo" in the book and the arrest actually happened in the spring. She did not bother the explain further of her publicist's clarification and other issues within this story.

Broken Fact: Fu Ping's First Political Trouble in College

The Original Story:
On Pages 252-253 of Bend, Not Break, Fu Ping details the political trouble she endured at Suzhou University in the fallout of her magazine being criticized by Deng Xiaoping:

So when the news came back to Suzhou University of what Deng Xiaoping had said about our magazine, the authorities interpreted it as very bad news and took a preemptive strike against us. 

The Red Maple Society was deemed an illegal underground society responsible for publishing anti-Communist propaganda. University officials arrested and interrogated all the students who belonged to our magazine group. For weeks, they pressed us to confess our counterrevolutionary activities. As the editor in chief, I was held most responsible for the trouble. For punishment, I was given a black mark in my personal file... 

For the rest of the semester, I endured relentless criticism by Communist Party officials and never-ending confession sessions. I sank into a deep depression.

The Debunking:
Now we know that Deng Xiaoping was not even aware of Fu Ping's magazine, the entire premise of the above passage falls apart. Shall we category it as her fantasy, nightmare, or simply "emotional memory"?

Update (6/20/2013): Suzhou University confirmed the existence of Red Maple Society in their school at the time. But no members of that organization had experienced political trouble. Two of its key members were selected to become professors at the school, considered prestige position for its graduates.

Update (7/5/2013): In an interview with Qiaobao on July 3, 2013, Fu Ping reinterpreted the meaning of word "arrest" in this story:

I had indeed not been taken into custody because of Red Maple Society. But in my book I used the word "arrest," which could mean "taking into custody" or "detain," it could also be understood as "stop." It was not as going into prison, but that they don't allow you to attend classes. They put several of you into a room, make you write confessions and expose each other.  

Questionable Fact: The Evolution of Fu Ping's Gang-Rape Memory

The Original Story:
In her book and various media interview, Fu Ping claimed that she had been gang-raped when she was only 10. It is one of the most sensational stories in her life. In Bend, Not Break, she recalls the gang-rape episode throughout different stages of her life.

First, when it happened: On Pages 75-77, she told the story of how, on "one lazy, hot summer afternoon," she was lured out of her room because her sister was thrown into a river and she rushed out to save her. She was then surrounded by "a group of about ten teenage boys" who took her to the soccer field and brutally beat her up:

For a few nightmarish moments, all I could do was feel the boys cutting my clothes off, the knife ripping into my armpits and my bare stomach, and the pain of something blunt pressing between my legs. I lost consciousness. 

The next thing I remember, I woke up at the NUAA health clinic. A kind nurse told me that I had sustained "deep cuts, a broken tailbone, and internal injuries." It had taken more than forty stitches to close the wounds. I carry the scar to this day. 

I did not understand what had happened to me or why, and I wouldn't for several years. We received no sex education in China and I had no parents or guardians to explain to me that I had been gang-raped. I thought the boys had beaten me up badly, which was cruel, but I didn't realize that what they'd done had brought deep shame upon me.

Then, two years later, she told a visiting "Uncle W" of her attack, on Page 89:

Uncle W's eyes searched my face as I spoke, as if he were looking for clues to my true identity. He asked a few questions, but delicately, so that they never felt intrusive. He was the first one to tell me that I had been raped -- and to explain what "broken shoes" really meant. He told me with a compassionate yet firm voice that it wasn't my fault.

After confiding to this "uncle" she just met, she chose not to tell her own mother, who came back half a year after Uncle W's visit (Page 126):

Nanjing Mother had never asked and I never did tell her about the rape, though I suspect at some point she guessed what had really happened. 

Finally, some time in 2005, when Fu Ping was about 47 years old. She was invited to attend a leadership training that involved "a guided hypnosis session," during which she had a sudden, unexpected mental breakdown (Page 222):

I saw blood. I saw the guts of my teacher splattered across a lawn. I saw my journals burning. Then, for the first time in my life, vivid details of the rape flooded my brain. I saw the faces of my attackers twisted into sneers. I heard them shouting, "Beat her!" I felt the sharp pain of something entering me between my legs.

The Debunking:
In a nutshell, Fu Ping did not know she was raped when it happened. The "kind nurse" who cared for her did not mention any injuries of sexual nature, which should have been severe for a 10-year-old girl after a gang-rape. Yet she was released from the clinic right away. (We will have more on the clinic and injuries in a separate post.)

"Uncle W" was a "middle-aged man" and a distant relative who came to visit Fu Ping out of blue when she was 12 years old and befriended her right away. This part of the story is truly unsettling: What kind of a middle-aged man who heard a girl that young -- who he just met -- recalling a beating that happened two years ago would immediately jump to the conclusion and inform the poor girl that she had been raped?!

Other than this mysterious "Uncle W," however, there is no mention of Fu Ping talking to anybody else about this tragedy. Not even her Shanghai mother, who she regarded as the dearest to her, she had visited quite a few times during the same time period. The sentence above she used to explain not telling her biological mother sounded strange -- how would the mother suspect or guess that she had been raped if she didn't tell, just because she was teased by other kids as a "broken shoe"?

As if that was not bizarre enough, Fu Ping would, many many years later and for the first time in her life, saw her attackers' faces and felt the sharp pain of penetration while being hypnotized. Is this gang-rape event a socalled "suppressed memory" that "Uncle W" had at least helped seeding?

Or, could it be another occurrence of the author's "emotional memory"?  After all, in the exact same "awakening," she had also seen the guts of her teacher splattered across a lawn, a "vivid detail" that she could no longer be certain about.

How believable is her story then? We can't know for sure. But in the next several posts we will look into more details of this dark episode.

Broken Fact: The Brutal Killing of Teachers

The Original Story:
On Page 44 of Bend, Not Break, Fu Ping told this unusually gruesome story:

On one afternoon, the Red Guards gathered us to watch a teacher be thrown head first into a deep well, and another quartered by four horsemen on the soccer field. Later they beat to death an older boy for a prank he had pulled involving a cat because the Chinese word for cat, mao, has the same pinyin spelling as Chairman Mao's name, differing only by a subtle tone change. Crime and punishment were meted out haphazardly, so no one among us black elements ever felt safe.

She recited the same story to Dick Gordon on the American Public Media's The Story show on March 9, 2010:

When we first got together in the dormitory, they gathered us all to a soccer field. It's a big soccer field in the middle of the living quarter of the student dormitory. They killed two teachers right in front of us to scare us. So, they basically said that, if you dare to say anything wrong or do anything wrong, this is what gonna happen to you. One teacher was tied up on 4 horses on the field and, when the 4 horses going 4 different directions and she just got split. We were forced to watch it. That was in the first 10 days I was there.

The Changed Story:
After Fang Zhouzi openly questioned her tall tale involving four horses, Fu Ping made the following clarification on March 6, 2013:

To this day, in my mind, I think I saw it. That is my emotional memory of it. After reading Fang's post, I think in this particular case that his analysis is more rational and accurate than my memory. Those first weeks after having been separated from both my birth parents and my adoptive parents were so traumatic, and I was only eight years old. There is a famous phrase in China for this killing; I had many nightmares about it. 

The Debunking:
To Fu Ping's credit, this is the only occasion so far that she has publicly recanted a portion of her story, although she chose to hide behind the phrase "emotional memory." As Fang Zhouzi had already decisively pointed out -- and Fu Ping concurred -- the four-horse-style execution is only a legend and impossible to carry out in real life.

Fu Ping's candid admission showed that she may have trouble separating her imagination (nightmares) from reality, which actually could explain a lot of discrepancies we are debunking in her story.

She also chose not to respond on questions of the other two killings. Some readers have investigated NUAA campus and concluded that there was never a deep well near the soccer field. During the Cultural Revolution, many people had suffered unexpected, and some lost their lives, due to unfortunate word associations, but that between "cat" and Chairman Mao had not shown up in all the existing literature.

Fu Ping: Clarifying the Facts in Bend, Not Break

Amid a major "backlash" to her life story, Fu Ping published a blog on Huffington Post on February 1, 2013, in an attempt to clarify her facts. While answering some of the questions raised, she avoided other more significant ones. She also insisted on what was in her book Bend, Not Break, even though she had frequently told different versions of the same "facts" in her various online interviews, see "In Fu Ping's Own Words" here. She did clarify, however, that the infamous "four-horse story" is likely only her "emotional memory."

An article about my book, Bend, Not Break, which appeared in Forbes and was translated into Chinese for ForbesChina.com (this link is to a Google English translation), contained several inaccuracies in wording. The posts have since been corrected. Meanwhile, Chinese blogger Fang Zhouzi posted a story in which he questioned my credibility, and John Kennedy reacted to that blog in the South China Morning Post. Though factually correct based on the original version of the Forbes article, both Fang and Kennedy made comments based on inaccurate information, rather than on material actually printed in the book. I would like to respond to their comments, as well as the comments of other critics who have since posted to various websites attacking the authenticity of my story. 

Why did you say you were in a labor camp during the Cultural Revolution? 

I did not say or write that I was in a labor camp; I stated that I lived for 10 years in a university dormitory on the NUAA campus. Chinese children don't get put in labor camps. I also did not say I was a factory worker. I said Mao wanted us to study and learn from farmers, soldiers and workers. 

If you were deprived of an education for those 10 years of the Cultural Revolution, and less than 5 percent of applicants were accepted when universities reopened, how did you get in? Were you a prodigy? 

After 1972, school resumed (p. 128). We had few formal classes at my school at the edge of Nanjing in an industrial area. I studied nonstop (pp. 229-231) and was known by my family as "the girl who never turns off her lights." (p. 231) 

Suzhou University did not reopen until 1982. How could you go there in 1977? 

A: This is a typo in the book (p. 232). I took the college entrance exams in 1977 and 1978, and was admitted in 1978. When I entered, I believe it was called Jiangsu Teachers College or Jiangsu Teachers University. Its name changed to Suzhou University before I left; it was the same university in the same location. 

In a 2010 NPR interview, you say you saw Red Guards execute one teacher by tying each limb to a separate horse and dismembering her by having each horse run simultaneously in a separate outward direction. During the Cultural Revolution, dismemberment using four horses was unheard of and would have been quite difficult. This was a legend from several hundred years ago. 

To this day, in my mind, I think I saw it. That is my emotional memory of it. After reading Fang's post, I think in this particular case that his analysis is more rational and accurate than my memory. Those first weeks after having been separated from both my birth parents and my adoptive parents were so traumatic, and I was only eight years old. There is a famous phrase in China for this killing; I had many nightmares about it. 

You claim you were brutally gang-raped. Gang rape doesn't happen in China. 

A: Rape is a very private matter and this definitely happened. I know this was not a hallucination. I have scars. My body was broken. 

In the Forbes piece, you say you wrote your undergrad thesis at Suzhou University on the practice of female infanticide in rural China. Your research received nationwide press coverage at the time, and you were sentenced to exile as a result.NOTE: The Forbes editorial mistake noting that I "published my thesis" on female infanticide in rural China has been corrected. 

I said I was asked to leave quietly. I did not say my research was published; it was never published. I was told that the reason I was arrested was because of my research (book p. 257). 

In the 2005 Inc. Magazine article, you explained that your findings on female infanticide were later covered by Shanghai's Wen Hui Bao newspaper and later then by People's Daily, resulting in condemnation from around the world, sanctions imposed by the UN, and you getting tossed into prison. People's Daily archives for the period when your research would've been published have nothing regarding female infanticide in rural China. 

I remember reading an editorial in a newspaper in 1982 that called for gender equality. It was not a news article and not written by me, and I didn't know it had anything to do with my research (pp. 253-255). When writing the book, I did not name the paper, since I wasn't certain. However, I think that is where I read the editorial because it was the most popular and official newspaper. People who have not read my book made assumptions that I submitted the research to the newspaper, or I published the thesis, but that was not how I described it in the book. 

Why does nobody else in China know that the UN placed sanctions on China in 1981? And how do you know that? 

A: I heard about the sanctions in China while awaiting my passport. I was told that the UN was unhappy about this issue. A quick web search shows that the American-based journalist Steven W. Mosher wrote about female infanticide in China in 1981. His book, called Broken Earth, was published in 1983 -- the same year I was waiting for my passport. Knowing this, it makes sense that I was asked to leave quietly. Anything else would have drawn more attention to the issue. According to the Los Angeles Times, Mosher successfully lobbied George W. Bush to cut UN funding for China. His story and the timeline are consistent with my experience. 

You say you were walking on campus when a black bag was suddenly thrown over your head and you were stuffed into a car before being arrested? 

Yes, this is how it happened. I never returned to classes and I did not graduate. My classmates were told that I had a mental breakdown. After my release, I did what I was told and laid low at home (book, p. 255, pp. 258-259). I originally had been planning to go to graduate school to study comparative literature in Nanjing, but that could not happen due to the circumstances. 

You said you were held three days and narrowly avoided being sentenced to reform through labor when authorities decided instead to send you into exile. 

A: I was asked to leave quietly and never come back again (book p. 258). 

Why would you, an unknown, be deported/expelled to study in the U.S., a treatment reserved for very prominent dissidents? 

As I describe in the book (pp. 257-261), I was told that I had to leave China, but not given a specific destination. I got a student visa, which was secured through a family friend at the University of New Mexico. On pages 258-259, I detail my application process to live abroad and how I ended up in America. 

Chinese international students had many ways of being able to stay in the United States. One of those was to fabricate bizarre tales of having faced persecution in China and apply for political asylum. It didn't matter how fantastic you made your experiences, Americans would still believe them to be true. 

I didn't apply for political asylum; I was explicitly told not to attract attention. 

According to Inc., you arrived at Suzhou University wanting to study engineering or business, but the Party assigned you to study English. 

When the acceptance letter came in the fall of 1978 (this is a typo in the book, where it reads 1977 on p 232), it said that I had been assigned to study literature at Suzhou University. Inc.magazine made an editorial error on my major in China; I majored in Chinese literature, not in English literature. (p. 99) 

Forbes said you arrived in the United States knowing only three words of English, yet there are different sets of those first three words: Inc.: Please, thank you, help; Bend, Not Break: Thank you, hello, help; NPR: Thank you, help, excuse me. 

In college, English language classes were offered, but not required. I had "level zero" English, just like most Americans know a few words of Spanish or French. I tried to learn more English when I knew I was going to the U.S., but when I arrived, I only remembered a few. 

In the Fast Company story image, you and other kids are wearing Red Guard armbands under the Red Guard flag, yet you claim you were not a Red Guard. 

If you zoom into that picture, you only need to look closely to see I have no red band on my arm. The image was taken in front of a Red Guard flag at the school that I attended in the late 70s. I wrote in the book that the situation got better after 1972. Still, I was never a Red Guard. 

One of my classmates also responded to Fang's article on his blog. What he says is consistent with what I wrote in the book, so he must be a classmate. He made comments based on Fang, assuming that what Fang said was in the book, however it was not. I would like to respond. 

You weren't in a labor camp. 

A: True, I did not say I was in a labor camp in the book, or ever. 

You did not go to college in 1977. 

True, I went in 1978; that is a typo in the book. 

How can the labor camp be 10 years long for you? 

He asked this question based on Mr. Fang Zhouzi's blog, which was an incorrect choice of words. I never said that I was at a labor camp. Forbes corrected this error. 

You did not publish your research and it was never published. 

Correct; I did not publish my research and it was never published. I left school; my mother and I went to the school and declared I had a mental breakdown so I would not be sent to remote China (page 258). You just didn't know the true reason I left. 

I want to say that I respect Mr. Fang Zhouzi, Forbes, and the classmate (sorry, I do not know the name since he used a pen name). Democracy means everyone is entitled to freedom of expression. Criticism is not a form of defamation; it is a form of speaking or seeking truth. I welcome constructive criticism.