Fu Ping's Interview with a Chinese Newspaper in USA

On July 3, 2013, Fu Ping was interviewed by Qiaobao, a Chinese language newspaper published in the USA, in which she answered some questions raised by her alma mater Suzhou University. The interview is originally in Chinese.

Qiaobao: Suzhou University accused you for falsifying academic credentials. They displayed your student registration and files at the school and proved that you had dropped out in March, 1982 and did not earn any degree there. Have you ever publicly stated that you have a Bachelor degree in Chinese Language and Literature from Suzhou University? 

Fu Ping: I rarely mentioned Suzhou University because I didn't obtain any degree there. In my social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc., I never included Suzhou University. In fact, in all places I have control, I never mention Suzhou University. 

But there are places that I have no control of. About 10 years ago, our company's marketing department has a girl from Malaysia. I told her that I did not graduate from Suzhou University. So she wrote on our page "post graduate degree." Because she thought "post graduate degree" could also mean "non degree" besides "masters graduate student." We made corrections right away and it was not on our company web site. But recently when our company changed web site, an program that was automatically fetching files made it visible again. I did not discover it in time. 

Right now there are many web sites, including Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, etc., all carried this incorrect information. I found out later that it was because their automated search feature. The real culprit of this academic credentials fraud is the automated search, not me. 

In fact, my business is in computers. I earned BS and MS in computer science in the US. I do not need a degree from Suzhou University for any of my work. It's not like a degree from Harvard, after all. 

Someone said that they obtained information from University of Illinois where I had worked to prove that I had claimed of possessing a degree from Suzhou University. But the information I do possess do not prove that. I have also inquired to University of Illinois. They told me that they have never told anyone that I had a degree from Suzhou University. I feel that those who are attacking me were misled. [Note: we do have evidence indicating otherwise.] 

Another place is a technological paper I wrote as the third author. The author's bio section of this paper stated that I earned a Bachelor of Chinese Language and Literature in 1983. As a matter of fact, I did not write that. I only published a technological paper. The author's bio was added by editors. 

Qiaobao: In your book, you said that in the fall of 1982, you "innocently walked across campus making preparations for graduation, someone sneaked up behind me, jammed a black canvas bag over my head ... escorted into a nearby car." Since you had already dropped out school that March, why were you walking on campus in the fall? 

Fu: This is a typo. If you read the whole passage, all the stories happened in the spring. The fall only occurred in this sentence. It was an error. 

In fact, I have corrected it as soon as I found this mistake. 

Qiaobao: You also mentioned in your memoir that you published a paper while you were in school, on the subject of female infanticide under the one-child policy. You were arrested and deported because of it. But Suzhou University said that all the graduation thesis in the Department of Chinese Literature were about literature or linguistics. They wouldn't be involved in sociology subjects such as infanticide. There were no teacher for this thesis of yours. How do you respond? 

Fu: Before graduation, I wanted to go to graduate school in journalism at Nanjing University. So I intended my thesis to be like a news report. In 1981, the one-child policy was going crazy in China and got my interest. With the permission from my adviser, I started interviewing people and then discovered the female infanticide problem in rural China. 

I heard a lot of stories from rural women and became their sounding board. In order to do this work, I had indeed spent a lot of time and missed a lot of classes. 

Then I wrote them down and showed my teacher. My teacher passed my article to his friend in Shanghai's Wenhui Daily. At that time I did not know where this paper reached, but heard later that it was handed higher and higher in the official hierarchy and reached the Party Central. 

This was not good news for the new leadership. Therefore I was arrested and locked up for 3 days. After the release, the police told me to leave Suzhou University and not tell anyone the reason. That's why my mother and I were insistent in dropping out of the school. 

Qiaobao: Who is the teacher who allowed you to write this article? 

Fu: It's not just one, but I cannot provide names. In fact, the person who approved my work no longer admits that. I don't think it's necessary to expose this. They are all my teachers and classmates. If they want to say I am lying, then let them say that. I know who I am and don't want to explain. 

Qiaobao: In your book you said that you experienced "finger checking" for pregnancy. This was strongly condemned by Suzhou University and your classmates. What happened there? 

Fu:  This is indeed my mistake. I wrote about "finger checking" to illustrate the difference between China's one-child policy and the population policy in the west. In 1981, getting pregnant in China could be illegal. Therefore there was checking with fingers. But the procedure was using one's own fingers to prove period, not allowing other people's fingers to enter. 

I told my coauthor Meimei Fox of this concept. But she did not write accurately. The illegal pregnancy checking was subjecting to those who have already given birth, not all females. It was written in the book as for all women, but not students of Suzhou University. 

But Chinese are not a precise language. It could be interpreted in different ways when viewed from different angles. It read like all female students in Suzhou University must submit to the checking. I discovered it later and corrected it on New York Times.
I feel sorry for this. I did not spot this mistake before the book went to press. Later Fang Zhouzi hyped on it and wrote it in a very dirty way. If this hurt the dignity of students in Suzhou University, I am willing to apologize. 

But the "finger checking" absolutely happened. It was not just me. Other articles have mentioned it too. I wrote it because I hope to raise the outside world's awareness of China's one-child policy. It was not meant to insult female students in Suzhou University. 

Qiaobao: You had participated in a literature organization called Red Maple Society. You said in the book that you were arrested and interrogated because an article published by the society. Suzhou University said that was a lie. What do you think? 

Fu: 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. 

The Department of Chinese Literature had a student journal called Wu Gou. According to my memory, I was the editor-in-chief (主编) for Wu Gou, but not the ultimate decision maker (总编). Because I was the only girl in the society and the journal, they let me be the editor-in-chief, in charge of printing and logistics. Now some people say I wasn't the editor-in-chief. If they could tell me who was, I would like to correct that.
In January, 1979, Wu Gou published the article "The Confession of a Communist Party Member" by Liu Buchun. The article raised doubts on Communist Party and Communism. 

At that same time, Peking University, Tsinghua University and other 11 colleges co-founded the magazine This Generation. They reprinted an article from Wu Gou. Our journal sent a representative to Beijing to attend a meeting by This Generation. I don't remember who went, but it wasn't me. 

After arriving at Beijing, he didn't attend the meeting but went to the Great Hall of People to watch Deng Xiaoping receiving leaders of the Communist Youth League. There, Deng Xiaoping clearly stated that he wouldn't allow universities publish their underground journals. Afterwords, This Generation and Wu Gou all closed down. The school investigated and interrogated us. The Red Maple Society could not meet any more.

Broken Fact: The Infamous Period Police

The Original Story:
In Bend, Not Break, Fu Ping tells one of the most outlandish tales on Page 254:

At our school, officials confirm that all female students were menstruating each month by checking their sanitary napkins. When they discovered that some women were cheating by bringing in their friends' soiled pads, the officials began inserting their fingers directly into our vaginas to check for blood. 

The Changed Story:
After being widely criticized for the implausibility of this story, Fu Ping "volunteered" a clarification to Didi Kirsten Tatlow of the International Herald Tribune:

In the interview, she volunteered an example of an error: a widely criticized account of the "period police," the authorities who checked a woman’s menstrual cycle to ensure she wasn’t pregnant in the early days of the one-child policy. To stop women substituting others’ sanitary pads for inspection, they were sometimes required to use their own finger to show blood. Through a misunderstanding with Ms. Fox, Ms. Fu said this was portrayed as the use of other people’s fingers — an invasion of the woman’s body.  

Ms. Fox “wrote it wrong,’’ she said. ‘‘I corrected it three times but it didn't get corrected.’’ Women used their own finger to show blood, she said, but the mistake went into print anyway. 

The Debunking:
It would be interesting to know who exactly dropped the ball on the correction for an error of this magnitude, as the original story describes a sexual crime regularly committed to young women, some of whom were virgins.

But even the modified version is not believable at all. A lot of bad things happened when the one-child policy was imposed, checking female periods wasn't one of them.

There were indeed sporadic tales of period-verification in some memoirs of the Cultural Revolution era. The purpose of those was however to make sure females did not falsify them as an excuse to escape hard work or study sessions.

But to check period regularly as a means to detect pregnancy is just impractical, as Fang Zhouzi had pointed out in one of his blogs: Female students did not have their periods synchronized. These officials would have to keep detailed records for each student and perform such checks on weekly if not daily basis. That's just unthinkable.

Furthermore, although "unauthorized" pregnancy was of course discouraged, the enforcement of the one-child policy centered at after-pregnancy: forced abortion. Therefore, there was no need to know if a student had missed periods. If she was pregnant, she wouldn't be able to hide that fact for long.

Fang Zhouzi: The Double Faced Political Correctness of New York Times in Ping Fu Affair

The following post was published by Fang Zhouzi in his Chinese blog on February 25 and translated into English by xgz. It's a direct response to the two articles by Didi Kirsten Tatlow.

The International Herald Tribune (the Global Edition of The New York Times) reporter Didi Kirsten Tatlow wrote two articles on the Ping Fu affair. One was published on the International Herald Tribune (www.nytimes.com/2013/02/21/world/asia/21iht-letter21.html), the other was posted on the New York Times blog (rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/true-or-false-the-tussle-over-ping-fus-memoir/). The contrast between these two articles is like they were written by two different people. In the blog post, Tatlow did some investigation, which allowed readers to see how Ping Fu flip-flopped and twisted herself into a pretzel. However, in the newspaper article, Tatlow flip-flopped herself on behalf of Ping Fu, adopting the tactic of Ping Fu’s team to blame the so-called fallibility of memory, and further using the lack of openness of information about China as an excuse to claim that one cannot prove whether Ping Fu is lying. No wonder the co-author of Ping Fu’s memoir MeiMei Fox recommended the newspaper article on Twitter while ignoring the blog post. Ping Fu’s team may be under the impression that even if her memoir is full of errors, as long as one cannot prove that Ping Fu is intentionally lying, they win. 

In my previous article "Fu Ping’s Incredible American Story" I expressed hope that someone would go to the Albuquerque Police Department to check whether there was any record about Ping Fu being kidnapped by a Vietnamese Chinese. I was certain that no such record existed, because the story of being kidnapped from the airport by a Vietnamese Chinese to babysit for him for three days was a total fabrication. The most valuable point in Tatlow’s blog post, was that she checked with the Albuquerque Police Department. And, just as I expected, Albuquerque Police Department had no record of such a case. Ping Fu contended that she did not press charges against the Vietnamese Chinese. "I don’t know how they keep records," as if there would not be a police record simply if she did not press charges. Anyone with a little bit of knowledge of the US would know that this is impossible. First of all, kidnapping is a felony. Even if Ping Fu as the victim did not cooperate with the police, the police would not automatically close the case. Secondly, even if they closed the case, there would still be the records of the 911 call, the sending of the officers, and the police interview. Furthermore, this case involved three abandoned children. The police had to find social services to deal with the children, which means a lot of paperworks. There had to be a big paper trail. The fact that no record exists only means that the case never happened. Ping Fu made up the whole thing. 

Ping Fu blamed inconsistencies in interviews of her and in her memoir on memory lapses, and also blamed them on American reporters misunderstanding her meaning and their undisciplined writing. I predicted that Ping Fu would next make her co-author MeiMei Fox a scapegoat. Sure enough, Ping Fu blamed some mistakes in her memoir on poor communication with Fox, on exaggerations by Fox, on Fox’s ignorance in Chinese geography, and on Fox using incorrect material found on the internet - inadvertently revealing that the so-called memoir was not based entirely on Ping Fu’s own memory. Ping Fu even complained that Fox ignored her requests to correct mistakes. I gave an example of Ping Fu’s reckless fabrication in a previous article "A Habitual Liar Ping Fu”: Ping Fu said in her memoir that after China began to implement the one-child policy in 1982, all female students at Suzhou University were checked every month by university officials, who inserted their fingers into the vaginas of the students to check for menstrual blood. Now Ping Fu is changing the story to that what she meant was that the university officials asked the students to put their own finger into the vagina to check their menstrual blood, that Fox made a mistake, and that she tried to correct it three times to no avail. 

Even conceding that Ping Fu originally meant to say that the officials asked the students check their own menstrual blood for them to see, does that make this story believable? Not at all. First, there were thousands of female students at Suzhou University at the time, but no one ever came out and said there had been such a bizarre thing. On the contrary, several female students who studied at Suzhou University at that time came out and said such humiliating things never happened. Second, the family planning policy would have been targeted at married women,  not at female students in college, almost all of whom were unmarried in the early 1980’s. Checking for unmarried pregnancy at that time would not have been because of family planning. Unmarried girls who got pregnant would be punished for their immoral behavior, not for violating family planning policy. Third, to detect unmarried pregnancy, checking menstruation would be both laborious and inaccurate. Because there were many female students and their menstrual periods were not synchronous, the students needed to be checked everyday. Even if a female student did not have her period, it didn’t necessarily mean that she was pregnant. Menstrual irregularity is quite common. If the university’s purpose for detecting pregnancy was not to provide prenatal care as soon as possible, but to force abortion, then why did they need to know so early? Why not wait until there would be obvious signs of pregnancy? How compromised must one’s intelligence be to believe a story of checking for menstrual blood (either by self-fingering or fingering by others)? And how perverse must the storyteller be to concoct such a story? 

After the Guardian reported that Professor Cheng Yinghong, who attended the same university with Ping Fu, never heard of the student publication Red Maple edited by Ping Fu, she now changed her story to say that she remembered wrong, and that she was involved in editing a student publication called Hook of Wu (Tatlow incorrectly translated it as No Hook). Ping Fu spent considerable lengths in her book to describe how while in college she organized a student club called Red Maple (also attached a photo of club members), and acted as the chief editor of (now she changed to "participated in editing") a student publication named Red Maple, and how famous this publication was both within and outside the campus. In 1979 student representatives who attended a meeting of college student publishers each held a copy of Red Maple, and went to meet Deng Xiaoping, who took a look at the magazine, which had an anti-party article that attracted his attention, and therefore the chief editor Ping Fu suffered the consequences... Now Ping Fu is telling us that she remembered incorrectly the name of this famous publication. Ping Fu claimed that this is an example “that shows everyone’s memory can be wrong". But I do not believe that someone would misremember the name of their own college publication which they acted as a chief editor. Moreover the names Hook of Wu and Red Maple are neither similar in pronunciation nor in meaning. How could one misremember Hook of Wu as non-existent Red Maple? 

Ping Fu also changed her story about what magazine the representatives to the 1979 meeting of the national college publishers were holding. It was not Red Maple, but This Generation instead. I have to point out that Ping Fu “remembered incorrectly" again. This Generation was a joint publication published after the meeting, and was printed by Wuhan University. Jiangsu Teachers College, where Ping Fu was a student, took no part in it. In fact, Jiangsu Teachers College sent no representative to the meeting. This Generation had only one issue. Its publication license was revoked because of two poems, rather than an "anti-party" article titled “A Confession of a Communist Party Member” as claimed by Ping Fu. There was no article with that title in the only issue of This Generation. 

Sing Tao Daily said that Ping Fu obtained her green card through political asylum when it reported Ping Fu’s "Outstanding American by Choice” award, and people suspected that her initial motive for fabricating her persecution in China was to apply for political asylum. Ping Fu said that she obtained the green card by marrying a U.S. citizen: September 1, 1986, she married a U.S. citizen in California and divorced three years later. She said that her reason for not mentioning this marriage before was to protect this American. Protecting from what? Did she already foresee that her memoir would be criticized and lies exposed? The real reason for hiding this marriage in all interviews and in her memoir may not be so honorable. Searching marriage registration records one finds that someone named Ping Fu and Richard Lynn Ewald married on September 10, 1986, not in California, but in Las Vegas, Nevada - a marriage and divorce paradise. The procedure there is extremely simple. In U.S. movies, television shows, and literature, going to Las Vegas to get married is often depicted as not being serious about it. This marriage after she was less than two years in the US seemed almost non-existent for Ping Fu, and her memoir reflects it: 

“I was almost thirty years old and had no personal life. It had been more than 5 years since I'd landed in the United States, yet I still wondered, what was an American life exactly? I had much to learn and to experience if I wanted to make this country my home.... what finally transformed my personal life was not a class I took or a book I read. It was something totally unplanned and unrelated to these well-intentioned, purposeful efforts to make myself ‘fit in’: a romance. " 

Ping Fu was already married with the American Richard Lynn Ewald for two years when she was 30 years old. Yet she complained about having no personal life, not knowing what American life was like, and still waiting for a romance. It took a romance with an Austrian (her second husband) for her to integrate into the American society. This means that the marriage between her and Richard Lynn Ewald was in name only; it had nothing to do with love, but had everything to do with the green card. To prevent fraudulent green card applications through sham marriages with American citizens, U.S. immigration law only approves a temporary green card initially for someone who marries an American. The official green card can be applied after two years of marriage. And it takes a few months more for the official green card to be approved. They can divorce as soon as the official green card is approved. So this type of green card marriage often lasts only three years. 

Tatlow said in her article on the International Herald Tribune that although some of Ping Fu’s experiences sounded weird, they could still be true. The article used as an example what Ping Fu described as her research in infanticide for her thesis which angered the government and led to her imprisonment for three days through a kidnapping carried out by police. Tatlow provided two "evidence": 

One "evidence" was from Ping Fu who produced a letter sent by one of her classmates in May 1982. The letter mentioned that Ping Fu suddenly left college without graduating, and the reason given by the school was that Ping Fu suffered a nervous breakdown due to breakup of a relationship. Ping Fu claimed that it was a politically motivated cover-up, and that the real reason was because she wrote an article on infanticide in rural areas due to the one-child policy which after being picked up by the newspapers, created an international outcry and caused her trouble with the authority. 

This story can not withstand scrutiny. First the timing was wrong. The letter was written in May 1982. But according to Ping Fu’s memoir, she was detained for her thesis in the fall of 1982. Earlier this month, in a reply to a Forbes reporter's question her publicist also "confirmed” that Ping Fu "left school in the fall of 1982 after being held by the government." So what was mentioned in the letter in May about her suddenly leaving school could not have been about her detention. Second, Ping Fu’s memoir also mentioned "leaving school due to nervous breakdown before graduation," but it was an excuse made up by her mother and her to avoid being assigned a job outside the city, rather than a political cover-up by the school. 

The other "evidence" provided by Tatlow was a New York Times report on April 11, 1983 which mentioned a March 3, 1983 People's Daily report saying that "the phenomena of butchering, drowning and leaving to die female infants and maltreating women who have given birth to female infants have been very serious." I do not know why Tatlow considered this as evidence. The People's Daily report was on March 3, 1983, half a year after Ping Fu’s alleged imprisonment in late fall of 1982. The title of the report was "Comrade Leader of the All China Women's Federation Responds to a Letter from 15 Women in Anhui Province, Calls on all Sectors of Society to Fight against Patriarchal Thinking and Behavior." It was a response to a letter to the editor published by the newspaper on February 23 titled "We Demand a Second Liberation" which did not contain anything about female infanticide. The newspaper report only mentioned in passing that “in the past two years, the All China Women's Federation has received many materials and letters from various places that reported the shocking phenomena of drowning and abandoning female infants and maltreating women who have given birth to female infants. This has become a serious social problem" (the People's Daily article did not use the word “butchering", which was arbitrarily added by the New York Times). Therefore, neither the time of the report nor its content were in any way connected to the so-called thesis by Ping Fu. 

Ping Fu claimed that her thesis was the first report of the phenomenon of female infanticide caused by the implementation of the one-child policy in China, and that because of the UN sanctions, the Chinese government placed the blame on her. 

In fact, prior to the time that Ping Fu claimed to have finished her thesis (1982), there were already official Chinese newspaper reports on female infanticides due to the implementation of the one-child policy, and these reports were republished by the US media: According to 1981 Executive Intelligence Reviews, China’s Population Research Quarterly and the South China Daily both reported that the one-child policy had led to the crime of infanticide (EIR Volume 8, Number 12, March 24, 1981, page 49, Volume 8, Number 13, March 31, 1981, page 54, and EIR Volume 8, Number 21, May 26, 1981, page 50). If the Chinese government wanted to blame someone, the last person they could blame was Ping Fu. Since both before and after Ping Fu’s thesis was completed, China's newspapers had been reporting infanticides, it was clearly not a sensitive topic. Why would the government grab Ping Fu and deport her? 

Tatlow claimed that before China opens all its files and allows an open debate, there would be no way to know whether Ping Fu was telling the truth. 

Are the US archives open enough? Is public debate allowed in the US? The Albuquerque police could not find any record of Ping Fu’s kidnapping. But it took only one sentence "I don’t know how they keep records" from Ping Fu to shut Tatlow up, even though Tatlow knew full well whether the Albuquerque police should have the records, and whether Ping Fu was lying about this. 

In fact, Ping Fu’s incredible China stories did not involve any state secrets, and can be exposed as lies from publicly available information. There was no need to wait for "opening files and allowing public debates" in the distant future. One should not blame everything on China not being open and free, although doing this is very politically correct. Even worse is to ignore the basic facts right in front of one’s own eyes, just for the sake of being politically correct, which is often the tendency of some Western journalists. 

At the least, even if it is difficult to verify the truthfulness of every old story told by Ping Fu, by just looking at how she told new lies about what just happened, one can tell that she is a habitual liar without any credibility. Just a few days earlier she told the Guardian that her critics should not be called a smear campaign, now she complained to Tatlow that she was being smeared. And her complaints were filled with lies: "They tried to get my daughter’s name from the Internet"- in fact, her daughter's name is on the first page of her memoir. "They sent people to Shanghai and surrounded my house, and to Nanjing to harass my neighbors” - I reposted the photo of the mansion that Ping Fu claimed was her Shanghai home, and asked people to locate it to see if it was real. Although several people looked in Shanghai, no one was able to locate this house. How could anyone have surrounded the house? There were indeed someone who went to ask questions about Ping Fu to her Nanjing neighbors, but the neighbors did not think it was harassment. Instead they testified that Ping Fu was lying. She said that her second exhusband, Herbert Edelsbrunner, received a lot of "hate mails"- What I saw was that people who criticized Ping Fu expressed sympathy to Edelsbrunner, feeling that the credit due him was stolen by Ping Fu. Who would send him "hate mails "? Perhaps they were from Ping Fu supporters? 

Recently Ping Fu was interviewed by a local media, News & Observer (www.newsobserver.com/2013/02/23/2699216/geomagic-founder-ping-fu-says.html), which is located at the same place as her own company. In this interview she continued to lie, saying that she had been the target of internet terrorist attacks, saying that the smear campaign against her started the day after the New York Times report about the Chinese hacker army - in fact, a quick check can show that the New York Times report was later; saying that I launched a smear campaign, and that in the second or third article, I had said, "I do not care whether she is the victim (of the smear campaign), my target is the Western media" - Where did I ever say that? 

Tatlow, do you believe that you also need to politically correctly wait for China to open its files and allow public debates to decide whether Ping Fu lied about what just happened?
In 1996, Ping Fu published a memoir in China, Drifting Bottles - American Sketches (Hubei Children Publishing House), authored entirely by herself. In the Chinese memoir, what Ping Fu described about her life in China and in the United States, are exactly the opposite of what she described in her English memoir. This further proves that we are right to question her: She is a liar. In future articles, I will compare Ping Fu’s Chinese and English memoirs. I also hope that Tatlow can go to the National Library in Beijing to borrow a copy of Drifting Bottles - American Sketches, read it (Tatlow said she could read and write Chinese), and write a follow-up report - this book is publicly available now, you do not need to wait for the future.

　　《国际先驱论坛报》（《纽约时报》的国际版）记者Didi Kirsten Tatlow写了两篇关于傅苹事件的文章，一篇登在《国际先驱论坛报》上（www.nytimes.com/2013/02/21/world/asia/21iht-letter21.html ），一篇登在该报的博客上（http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/true-or-false-the-tussle-over-ping-fus-memoir/ ）。对比这两篇文章，几乎就像是两个人写的。在博客文章中，Tatlow做了一些调查，让我们得以听到傅苹是如何再次改变说辞进行狡辩的，然而在报纸文章中，Tatlow却自己为傅苹狡辩起来，采纳了傅苹团队所谓记忆错误的说法，以中国信息不公开为由声称无法证明傅苹是不是在说假话。难怪傅苹自传的共同作者MeiMei Fox在推特上推荐这篇报纸文章却无视那篇博客文章，在傅苹团队的人看来，即便傅苹回忆录充满了错误，只要不能证明傅苹是有意说谎，就是胜利。 

　　在《傅苹的“美国传奇”》一文中，我表示希望有人能去Albuquerque警察局查查有没有傅苹被越南华人绑架的记录，而且我敢肯定是找不到任何记录的，因为所谓在机场被越南华人绑架去当了三天保姆就是胡编的一个故事。Tatlow博客文章中最有价值的一点，就是她去向Albuquerque警察局查了，而且如我所料，Albuquerque警察局并没有这个案子的记录。傅苹的狡辩是，她当时没有要求起诉那个越南华人，“我不知道警察局是怎么保存记录的。”似乎她不要求起诉警察局就不会有这个案子的记录。只要有点美国社会常识的人就知道这是不可能的事。首先，绑架是重罪，即使傅苹作为受害者不与警方合作，警方也不会因此就不立案。其次，即使不立案，也会有报警、出警、审讯的记录，而且这个案子还涉及到三个被遗弃的小孩，警方需要找社会服务机构处理，更会涉及到一大堆文书，必然会有很多记录。没有任何记录，只能说明这个案子从来就没有发生过，完全是傅苹捏造出来的。 

　　傅苹对自己在采访、回忆录中的错误，除了归咎于记忆错误，还怪罪给美国记者误解了她的意思而乱写。我曾指出傅苹接下来会把共同作者MeiMei Fox当替罪羊。果不其然，傅苹将其回忆录中的一些错误怪罪给Fox与她交流不善、用词夸张、不懂中国地理和只是在互联网上找不正确的资料来用——无意中透露了这本所谓回忆录并非完全根据傅苹的回忆，而是从网上找资料拼凑而成。傅苹甚至埋怨Fox不按她的要求进行改正。我在《习惯性说谎者傅苹》中举了一个傅苹回忆录胡编乱造的例子：傅苹在其书中说，1982年中国开始实行一胎化政策后，苏州大学的全体女生每个月都要被大学官员把手指插入阴道检查有没有经血。现在傅苹改口说，她本来说的是大学官员要求女生自己把手指插入阴道检查有没有经血，Fox写错了，她改正了三次都没有改过来。 

　　就算傅苹本来的意思是官员让女生自己查经血让他们看，这个故事就可信吗？并不。第一，苏州大学当时应该有上千名女生，却从来没有哪个出来说曾经发生过这么离奇的事情，反而有当时在苏州大学读书的女生出来说从未发生过这种污辱人的事。第二，计划生育政策针对的是已婚妇女，当时在校女生几乎都是未婚，根本就不会在她们身上执行计划生育。如果要查未婚怀孕的话，那也不是因为计划生育，未婚怀孕的女生会因为不道德而不是因为违反计划生育政策而受到处罚。第三，真的要查女生是否未婚怀孕的话，查月经是费力而不准确的做法。因为有那么多的女生，而她们的月经并不同步，这就意味着每天都要女生都查一遍。即使某个女生当月没来月经，也不能说明她就是怀孕，因为月经不规则是常有的是。学校查女生怀孕的目的不是为了尽早做孕期保健，而是为了强迫人流，那么迫不及待地想知道女生是否怀孕干什么呢？完全可以等到有了大肚子等明显怀孕特征后再采取行动。相信这么个普查月经（不管是自查还是他查）的人智力该有多么低下，而编造这个荒唐故事的人心理该有多么变态？ 

　　在《卫报》报道当时与傅苹同校同系的程映虹教授从未听说过傅苹主编的学生刊物《红枫》后，傅苹现在改口说，她记错了，她大学时参与编辑的学生刊物叫做《吴钩》（Tatlow错误地把它翻译成"No Hook"——《无钩》）。傅苹在书中花了相当长的篇幅来介绍她如何在大学期间组织一个叫红枫的学生社团（还附了一张社团成员合影），主编（现在改口是“参与编辑”）一份叫《红枫》的学生刊物，这份刊物当时如何在校内外闻名，1979年参加全国大学生刊物会议的代表人手一册《红枫》，拿着它去见邓小平，被邓小平拿去看，上面一篇反党文章引起了邓小平的注意，主编傅苹因此遭殃……现在傅苹告诉我们她记错了这份著名刊物的名字。傅苹声称这是一个“任何人记忆都会出错”的例子，但我不相信会有人连自己在大学时代主编的刊物的名称都会记错。何况《吴钩》和《红枫》不论是读音还是意思都没有任何相似之处，怎么会把《吴钩》记成了不存在的《红枫》？ 

　　傅苹也改口说，1979年参加全国大学生刊物会议的代表拿的不是《红枫》，而是《这一代》。我不得不要指出，傅苹又“记错”了。《这一代》是在这次会议之后才出版的联合刊物，而且是由武汉大学出的，与傅苹所在的江苏师范学院没有任何关系。事实上，江苏师范学院并无代表去参加会议。《这一代》只出了一期就被停刊，停刊的原因是里面的两首诗，而不是傅苹说的那篇“反党”文章，《这一代》上面也没有那篇题为《一个共产党员的自首》的文章。 

　　《星岛日报》在去年报道傅苹被评为“杰出归化美国人”时曾说她是靠申请政治避难获得的绿卡，因此人们怀疑她编造如何在中国受迫害的最初动机是为了申请政治避难。现在傅苹说，她是靠和美国公民结婚获得的绿卡：在1986年9月1日她在加州和一个美国公民结婚，三年后离婚。她说她此前之所以对这次婚姻只字不提是为了保护这个美国人。她在保护这个美国人什么呢？难道她已预见到她的回忆录会受到批评、揭露？她在所有的履历、采访和回忆录中隐瞒这段婚姻的真实原因可能并不那么光彩。搜索婚姻登记记录可以知道在1986年9月10日有一个叫Ping Fu的人和Richard Lynn Ewald结婚，但不是在加州，而是在内华达州的拉斯维加斯——那里是结婚和离婚的天堂，手续极其简便，在美国影视、文学作品中，跑到拉斯维加斯结婚往往被当成结婚不严肃的表现。傅苹这段她才到美国两年多就结上的婚姻对她来说就像几乎不存在一样，这是她在回忆录里自己表露出来的： 

　　“我几乎30岁了，却没有个人生活。自从我抵达美国5年多已经过去了，但是我还在疑惑，究竟什么是美国生活？如果我要把这个国家当家的话我还有很多要学习和体验的。……最终转变我的个人生活的，不是我上的某门课程或我读过的某本书。而是某种完全没有计划的，与有意让我自己‘融入’无关的东西：一次罗曼史。” 

　　傅苹30岁的时候已与美国人Richard Lynn Ewald结婚了两年，她却还在抱怨自己没有个人生活，不知道什么是美国生活，还在等着来一次罗曼史，与一个奥地利人（她的第二任丈夫）的罗曼史才让她融入了美国社会。这说明她与Richard Lynn Ewald的婚姻名存实亡，与爱情无关，而与绿卡有关。为了防止靠与美国人假结婚骗取绿卡，美国移民法规定与美国人结婚后一开始只能获得临时绿卡，结婚两年后才能申请转为正式绿卡，等正式绿卡批下来又要过几个月，拿到正式绿卡就可以离婚了，所以这种绿卡婚姻往往只持续三年。 

　　登在《国际先驱论坛报》上的Tatlow文章说傅苹的某些经历虽然听上去很怪异，但是有可能是真的。它举了傅苹说她由于其研究杀婴的大学毕业论文激怒了政府，被公安绑架囚禁了三天一事。Tatlow给出了两条“证据”： 

　　一个“证据”是傅苹出示了她的一个同学在1982年5月写给她的一封信。信中提到傅苹突然没有毕业就离校，校方说是傅苹由于失恋而精神失常。傅苹声称，那是一个政治掩盖行为，实际上她由于写了一篇关于一胎化政策导致农村普遍杀溺婴的论文，被报纸报道后，国际舆论大哗，给她带来了麻烦。 

　　这个说法经不起推敲。首先是时间对不上。这封信是1982年5月写的，而傅苹在其自传中声称她由于论文遭到关押是1982年秋天的事，本月初傅苹的公关人员答复《福布斯》记者的采访时也“确认”傅苹“1982年秋在被政府扣押”。所以5月份信里提到的她突然离校不可能指的是她被关押。其次，傅苹自传中也提到了“因精神失常不毕业就离校”一事，但是是她妈和她为了避免毕业被分配到外地而编造出来的一个借口，而不是校方的政治掩盖行为。 

　　Tatlow给的另一个“证据”是，《纽约时报》在1983年4月11日报道说，1983年3月3日《人民日报》的报道称“当前残杀、溺杀、遗弃女婴和虐待生女婴的妇女的现象非常严重，已成为一个严重的社会问题”。 

　　我不知道为什么Tatlow会把这当成证据。《人民日报》的报道是1983年3月3日，距离傅苹说她被监禁的时间1982年秋晚了半年。该报道标题是《全国妇联负责同志就安徽十五名妇女来信发表谈话 呼吁社会各方面与重男轻女的思想和行为作斗争》，是对2月23日该报刊登的一封反映生女孩的母亲在农村遭到歧视的读者来信《我们要求第二次解放》的回应，来信中并没有涉及溺杀女婴的内容，该报道也只是顺便提了一句“近两年来，全国妇联曾不断收到各地寄来的材料和群众来信，反映当前溺弃女婴和虐待生女婴的妇女的现象十分突出，已成为一个严重的社会问题”（《人民日报》的原文并没有“残杀”一词，那是《纽约时报》擅加的）。所以该报道的时间、内容无论如何与傅苹的所谓论文扯不上关系。 

　　傅苹声称，她的毕业论文是中国首次报道中国由于实行一胎化政策导致杀女婴现象，由于引起了联合国制裁，中国政府才怪罪到她头上。 

　　实际上，在傅苹声称其完成论文的时间（1982年）之前，中国报刊都已正式报道过实行一胎化政策导致杀女婴现象，而且被美国媒体转载：1981年Executive Intelligence Reviews报道说，中国《人口研究》季刊和《南方日报》都报道一胎化政策导致杀女婴这一犯罪行为 (EIR Volume 8, Number 12, March 24, 1981, page 49, Volume 8, Number 13, March 31, 1981, page 54, and EIR Volume 8, Number 21, May 26, 1981, page 50)。中国政府要怪，怎么也怪不到傅苹。既然在傅苹论文完成的之前和之后，中国的报刊都在报道杀女婴的事，可见这并非敏感话题，怎么可能因此去抓傅苹并把她驱逐出境？ 

　　Tatlow声称，在中国开放档案和允许公开辩论之前，没法知道傅苹说的是不是事实。 

　　美国档案够开放了吧？公开辩论也是允许的吧？但是Albuquerque警方找不到傅苹被绑架的记录，傅苹一句“我不知道警察局是怎么保存记录的”不也让Tatlow不敢说她说谎？虽然Tatlow应该很清楚Albuquerque警方该不该有记录。 

　　事实上，傅苹的中国传奇故事根本不涉及国家机密，根据现有的公开资料就可以认定傅苹说谎，哪里用得着去等遥遥无期的“中国开放档案和允许公开辩论”？你不能把什么事都归咎于中国不开放、不自由，虽然那样做很政治正确。更不能为了政治正确，就无视眼前的基本事实，虽然某些西方记者习惯这么做。 

　　退一步说，就算傅苹所说的陈年往事的真实性难以给出确切的答案，那么看看傅苹对刚刚发生的事是如何造谣、说假话的，也可以认定这是个没有信用的习惯性说谎者。她前几天才向《卫报》说她不应该把对她的批评称为抹黑行动，现在又对Tatlow控诉起她是如何遭到了抹黑了，但谎话连篇：“他们试图从网上得到我女儿的名字”——其实她女儿的名字在其自传的第一页上就有；“他们派人到上海包围我的家庭，到南京骚扰我的邻居”——我在网上转了傅苹声称是其上海老家的豪宅照片，请人去找找看那究竟在哪里、有没有这样的豪宅，虽然有多名网友去找过，到现在也还没找着，怎么去包围？的确有人问了傅苹在南京的邻居关于傅苹的事，但是邻居并不觉得是被骚扰，反而作证说傅苹在说谎；她说她的第二任离异丈夫Herbert Edelsbrunner收到了许多“憎恨信件”——我看到的是，批评傅苹的人如果提到Edelsbrunner都是同情他的，觉得他的功劳被傅苹霸占了，谁会去给他寄“憎恨信件”？难道是傅苹的支持者寄的？ 

　　傅苹近日接受其公司所在地一家媒体News & Observer的公关采访(http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/02/23/2699216/geomagic-founder-ping-fu-says.html )，继续造谣，说她遭到了互联网恐怖主义攻击，说对她的抹黑行动是在《纽约时报》报道了中国黑客部队之后的第二天开始的——其实只要稍微查一下就知道《纽约时报》的那篇报道是后来的；说我发动了抹黑行动，说我在第二或第三篇文章里说“我才不在乎她成为（抹黑行动的）受害者，我的目标是西方媒体”——我在哪篇文章里这么说过？ 

　　Tatlow，你认为要傅苹在这些刚刚发生的事情上撒谎，也需要政治正确地等到中国开放档案和允许公开辩论之后吗？ 

　　傅苹1996年在中国出版了一本她本人一个人写的自传《漂流瓶——旅美散记》（湖北少年儿童出版社出版）。在这本中文自传里，傅苹叙述她在中国和在美国的生活，与她现在在英文回忆录里所说的，截然相反，更证明了我们对她的质疑是对的：这是个骗子。在后面的文章中，我就把傅苹的中文自传和英文回忆录做个对比。我也希望Tatlow能去北京国家图书馆把《漂流瓶——旅美散记》借来读读（Tatlow说她能读、写中文），写一篇追踪报道——这本书是公开可借的，不用留待将来。

IHT: True of False? The Tussle over Ping Fu's Memoir

On February 20, 2013, International Herald Tribune published the following article written by Didi Kirsten Tatlow. It's one of the two articles by the author on the subject on the same day.

According to this article, Fu Ping disclosed for the first time that she had an earlier marriage which was never mentioned in either Bend, not Break or her earlier memoir Drifting Bottle. She also blamed her coauthor Meimei Fox for some of the "errors" in her memoir.

Cindy Hao, who was credited as a contributor to this article, also contacted the Albuquerque Police Department's Records Office and got an affirmative answer that there had been no records on Fu Ping's alleged kidnapping incident.

Did Ping Fu, a prominent Chinese-American businesswoman and author of a recent memoir, “Bend, not Break,” make up her horrible experiences during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution in order to gain United States citizenship? Did they help her become an American by claiming political asylum? 

That’s what her critics, many of them fellow Chinese-Americans, say. It’s an accusation that can stick. As a recent New York Times investigation showed, claiming persecution has spawned an immigration industry involving lawyers prepping clients to make false asylum claims. 

As I write in my Letter from China this week, Ms. Fu is being accused of making up a lot of things in her memoir. She’s also a successful entrepreneur: the U.S. government honored Ms. Fu, the founder of the software company Geomagic (in the process of being sold to 3D Systems), with a “2012 Outstanding American by Choice” award. 

Ms. Fu is on the board of the White House’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and is a member of the National Council on Women in Technology, according to the Web site of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. 

Ms. Fu, who says in her memoir she was “quietly deported” to the U.S. in 1984 for writing about female infanticide while still a college student, denies the accusations. But until now she hadn’t explained in public how she became an American. 

In an interview with the International Herald Tribune, she said, apparently for the first time, the reason she kept quiet was she was trying to protect her first husband, an American, whom she does not mention in her memoir. The marriage took place while she was living in California, she said. 

“I had a first marriage and that’s how I got my green card,” she said by telephone. She married on Sept. 1, 1986 and divorced three years later. Until now she had kept silent because of a “smear” campaign against her online, mostly by fellow Chinese who accuse her of lying, which extended to real-life harassment, she said: “They smear my name, they try to get my daughter’s name on the Internet, they sent people to Shanghai to surround my family and to Nanjing to harass my neighbors.” She said the accusers, who are “angry” for reasons she doesn’t really understand, contacted U.S. immigration authorities to challenge her award and her citizenship, as well as shareholders of 3D Systems to warn them she was a “liar,” and not to buy Geomagic. Her second husband, Herbert Edelsbrunner, whom she has since divorced, received many “hate e-mails,” she said. “I just don’t want to hurt innocent people.” 

If a first, unpublicized marriage might lay to rest one contentious issue, there are others. Some were the result of exaggeration or unclear communication with her co-author, MeiMei Fox of Los Angeles, she said. 

In the interview, she volunteered an example of an error: a widely criticized account of the ‘‘period police,’’ the authorities who checked a woman’s menstrual cycle to ensure she wasn’t pregnant in the early days of the one-child policy. To stop women substituting others’ sanitary pads for inspection, they were sometimes required to use their own finger to show blood. Through a misunderstanding with Ms. Fox, Ms. Fu said this was portrayed as the use of other people’s fingers — an invasion of the woman’s body. 

Ms. Fox “wrote it wrong,’’ she said. ‘‘I corrected it three times but it didn’t get corrected.’’ Women used their own finger to show blood, she said, but the mistake went into print anyway.
In general, Ms. Fox may have ‘‘just made some searches on the Internet that maybe weren’t correct,’’ Ms. Fu said. 

Chiefly the errors involved use of the words ‘‘all, never, any,’’ that generalized unacceptably, Ms. Fu said. And, ‘‘She doesn’t know China’s geography,’’ she said. 

At the beginning of her memoir, Ms. Fu writes of being kidnapped by a Vietnamese-American on arrival in the U.S. state of New Mexico and locked in his apartment to care for his very young children, whose mother had left, in a bizarre incident. A spokeswoman at the Albuquerque Police Department’s Records Office, where the alleged kidnapping took place, said she could not locate such an incident in their records. Asked about it, Ms. Fu repeated that she did not press charges as, fresh from China, she was terrified of all police, “So I don’t know how they keep records, if there is no criminal charges or record.” 

And in an e-mail to me, she admitted she made mistakes about a magazine she said she helped edit, called Wugou, or “No Hook,” produced in 1979 by students at her college, then called the Jiangsu Teacher’s College (later it changed its name to Suzhou University, she said.) It was not that magazine but another one, This Generation, that was taken to a meeting in Beijing of student magazine writers from around the country, she wrote in the e-mail. “A good case that shows everyone’s memory can be wrong,” she wrote. 

But bigger questions about the scale of the online vitriol from parts of the Chinese and Chinese-American community remain. “I really haven’t known China for 20-something years, and it didn’t occur to me that what I wrote would generate so much anger,” she said. In the last years, “as China got stronger, nationalistic views got stronger,” she said, making a “civil conversation” about disagreements apparently harder. 

Additional reporting by Cindy Hao in Seattle.

xgz: Ping Fu's Time Travel Machine

The following post was published by xgz on his The Daily Kos blog on February 4, 2013:

Ping Fu's new book, Bend, not Break: A Life in Two Worlds, stirred a huge controversy because of its conflicting and sometimes nonsensical description of her life in China. In the face of mounting criticism, she has insisted that all of the inconsistencies were the faults of the reporters and news media who used the words such as "labor camp" and "child soldier" which distorted the meaning of her book. She urged people to read her book to see that she did not lie about her life in China. 

So now I am going to read for you a few excerpts from her book and let you see for your own eyes what a liar she is.

What characterizes Fu's autobiography is the incredible out of place, out of time feeling one gets for anyone who had experienced China during the periods covered in her book. In other words, what Fu described in her book is a China that no Chinese would recognize. She transplanted stories from other places or other time periods into her story. She must have a time travel machine. 

Let us look at her college years to begin our analysis. 

She stated that towards the end of her second year in college, which would be the end of 1979, she joined a student club called "Red Maple Society" which published something that got into trouble with Deng Xiaoping himself (an incredible story already, but let's suspend our disbelief for now and see what happened). On page 251:

The government decided at the last minute to ban the gathering of the ten universities, deeming it illegal. Instead, it was announced that china's de facto leader, Deng Xiaoping, would receive the representatives for a private meeting. 

This was when things went terribly wrong.

After the unsuccessful meeting in Beijing, news went to Suzhou, and her club and herself got punished by university officials (page 252):

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.

After going through all the repercussions of the this unfortunate turn of event, Fu continued on page 253:

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

What's wrong with this scene? Well, this was 1980 by now. And 1980's China was not like this at all. What Fu is describing is more like 1970 than 1980. 1980 was the year that Deng finally took control of the power in China, squeezing out the former party boss Hua Guofeng. Deng did this with the help of democratic forces in China. Although by 1979 he already started to crackdown on the democratic advocates and arrested Wei Jingsheng, he still left college campuses largely alone. And that year he rewarded the democratic forces with the first and only (partially) democratic election in China. I know because I was there. I was on the campus of Peking University in 1980, and was really excited to see people like Hu Ping and Wang Juntao (both are now dissidents living in New York) to campaign openly on campus against party endorsed candidates. At the end Hu Ping won the election in our district. (For a detailed analysis of the 1980 election in China, see B Womack 1982, "The 1980 County-Level Elections in China: Experiment in Democratic Modernization."  Asian Survey 22:3 (March), pp. 261-277.) In my view, the election of 1980 was the biggest thing that happened in China during my college years. Yet during this period Ms. Fu was having a 1970's flashback at Suzhou University. 

Then her story went from strange to bizarre. She talked about how university officials would check all female students to see whether they had their periods to make sure that they were not pregnant (page 254):

At our school, officials would confirm that all female students were menstruating each month by checking their sanitary napkins. When they discovered that some women were cheating by bringing in their friends' soiled pads, the officials began inserting their fingers into our vaginas to check for blood.

In a culture that viewed women's virginity before marriage as paramount, any official who dared to do this would immediately lose her job. In reality, the way the university officials controlled students at that time, was by not allowing marriage, sex, or even any contacts between male and female students at all. We lived in separate dorm buildings. The dorm buildings for female students always had ugly old ladies as guards. The gates were locked during the night. They did not need to check for pregnancies because they already controlled everything else. Ping Fu did not seem to have lived in China in the 1980s. 

Then there was this kidnapping that came right out of a 007 spy movie (page 255):

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 bounded my wrists together tightly. "Don't scream," a menacing male voice whispered as I was escorted into a nearby car.

There are so many things wrong with this scene it is comical. First of all, there was really no need for the police in 1982 to make secret arrests in this dramatic manner. If they wanted someone to quietly go with them, all they had to do was to show their id and say "come with me". No one would have resisted. Kidnapping would actually draw more attention. Second, the police in 1982 was not that rich. They could not afford to give their potential captives a car ride. They would have used a military style jeep. In fact, in her interview with Reuters, Fu did say it was a jeep. It is a mystery why she changed it into a car in the book. Third, the time of the year was not consistent. She took the college entrance exam in 1977. The school started in Feb of 1978. Since at that time all of Chinese universities had four year programs, she should have graduated by the spring of 1982. So it made absolutely no sense for her to think about graduation in the fall of 1982. She must have had another time travel. 

Then, after this kidnapping episode, she went home to Nanjing and declared (page 258),

"I want to leave the university, claiming a nervous breakdown."

So this was how she quit the university without graduation. And she was forced to exile to the US. But there is this one big problem. She did graduate from Suzhou University with a BA degree in Chinese Literature. I contacted University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Ping Fu got her MS degree, for her degree information, and this was their reply,

We had a student by that name graduate with an MS from UIUC May 1990 and her Advisor was Jane Liu.  She also obtained a BA in Computer Science & Economics from the University of CA, San Diego in 1988 and a BA in Literature from Suzhou University-China in 1982.  Her original application file indicated she attended the University of New Mexico from 1984 to 1986, but no degree was awarded.

She had a BA degree from Suzhou University in 1982 as indicated in her application form. Did Ping Fu the author of Bend, not Break live in a parallel universe? 

Finally, let me end with a couple of jewels in the book. First, page 3:

The farthest I had been from Nanjing, the city of my birth, was Suzhou University, where I had studied journalism and literature.

This is what happens when you tell too many lies. You cannot keep track of all the lies that you have told, and somewhere you let it slip the reality, which conflicts with everything else you say. Here Ms. Fu finally told a truth. The truth was, that she never went further than Suzhou before leaving for the US in 1984. The distance between Shanghai (where Fu was supposedly living before the Cultural Revolution) and Nanjing (her birthplace) is about 350 kilometers, but the distance between Suzhou and Nanjing is about 220 kilometers. In fact, if you take a train from Nanjing to Shanghai, there is a stop in between for Suzhou. This sentence on page 3 may have let the truth slip through the web of lies weaved by Fu. It tells us that the story in Shanghai before the Cultural Revolution may have been a tale. She lived in Nanjing all along. 

The second little jewel is also on page 3:

I landed in San Francisco fourteen hours later, jet-lagged and emotionally drained.

That was a direct, nonstop flight from Shanghai to San Francisco, on Jan 14, 1984, the date she arrived in the US. And on the flight there were American flight attendants, who did not speak Chinese. United Airlines was the only US airline that has direct nonstop flights from Shanghai to San Francisco, when it was started in 1999. Did Ping Fu travel forward in time to catch the United flight? 

This book should be categorized as a science fiction.

Fang Zhouzi: The Habitual Liar Fu Ping

The following post was published by Fang Zhouzi in his blog on February 5, 2013. It focuses on Fu Ping's claimed infanticide research, a bizarre tale she told in her book that, when she was in college, school officials would put their fingers in female students vagina to make sure they are experiencing periods (and therefore not pregnant), as well as her experiences of child labor and being gang-raped.

　　傅苹除了捏造她在文革期间的悲惨经历，也捏造她在中国开始实行严格的计划生育政策期间的见闻，因为她很清楚，计划生育是除了文革之外，最容易触动美国人神经的另一个中国丑闻，不管如何地夸大其词，美国人也会信以为真。她那一批留学生中，不少人就是以违反了计划生育政策遭到迫害为由在美国申请政治避难的。 

　　傅苹上个月接受美国电台WNYC的The Leonard Lopate Show采访时，说她在做大学本科论文时，亲眼看到几百名女婴被杀死，有的是刚生下来就被扔水里淹死。（http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/2013/jan/14/bend-not-break-china-america/ 12:15） 

　　傅苹一直说，她之所以会去调查杀婴的情况，是因为中国开始实行一胎化计划生育政策。一胎化政策始于1980年9月25日中共中央发表《关于控制我国人口增长问题致全体共产党员共青团员的公开信》，号召“每对夫妇只生育一个孩子”。傅苹毕业于1982年6月，据她的说法，在她毕业之前经历了其论文内容被国内报纸广泛报道、国际舆论谴责、她被监禁等重大事件，这些都是在其论文完成后发生的。这样算来，傅苹做调查、写论文的时间最多也就一年多（实际上本科生一般都是在最后一个学期写毕业论文的，我们姑且相信傅苹很早就准备毕业论文），她亲眼看到几百名女婴被杀死，也就意味着几乎每天都有人在她面前杀死女婴。 

　　虽然中国自古以来就有溺杀女婴的陋习，但是自1949年以后这已被当成犯罪，即使没有完全绝迹，也是很罕见的地下行为。就算上个世纪80年代初实行一胎化政策（其实某些地区的农村实行的是一个半政策，即第一个是女孩的可再生一个）后刺激了杀女婴，那也是偷偷摸摸的行为，怎么可能有那么多人当着傅苹的面堂而皇之地杀婴？所谓溺杀女婴，指的是“旧社会”的一种做法，婴儿刚生下来时发现是女孩就把她淹死，然后谎称生下死胎。在医院生产显然不可能再这么做，在家中生产倒不排除这种可能，难道那些产妇临盆时都会通知傅苹上她们家去看如何把女婴杀死吗？ 

　　请问这是不是傅苹又出现了把想像当现实的“回忆错误”了？ 

　　傅苹在其书中说，1982年中国开始实行一胎化政策后，苏州大学官员查所有女生的月经，强迫她们每月上交卫生巾。有些女生上交了朋友用过的卫生巾，官员们就把手指插入“我们的”阴道检查有没有血。 

　　正如许多人指出的，在当时卫生巾还没有引进到中国。傅苹也许会狡辩说她用“卫生巾”的说法只是为了让美国读者容易理解。即便如此，这种每月检查月经，还要手插入阴道的做法，在当时中国大学校园绝对不可能发生。需知当时的中国在性方面还是极为保守的，当时的女大学生绝大部分都没有任何性经验，怎么可能允许让官员对身体进行这种侵犯？不要说有实质的实施，即使有此规定，也要舆论大哗了。全校女生那么多，月经又并非都同时发生，那么是不是天天都要有一大批官员忙着检查女生有没有来月经？所有女生都要查，而不是针对个别女生的，那就是一个全校学生都知道，因而在社会上也是众所周知的，那么怎么没有第二个江苏师范学院的女生反映曾经发生过如此不可思议的怪事？ 

　　请问这是不是傅苹又出现了把想像当现实的“回忆错误”了？这个人是不是得了某种受迫害性妄想症？ 

　　对一个已习惯于张口就说假话的人来说，把她在不同场合对同一个事件的说法做个比较，就不难发现其前后矛盾之处。例如，2010年1月，傅苹在演讲中说她在文革十年（1966～1976）实际上没上过学，而是去农村种水稻。（Fast forward 10 years, Cultural Revolution ended the year I was supposed to graduate from high school. I actually never went to school during the 10 years. I went to countryside planting rice fields.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulq55Z9O3bc 10:40） 上个月她接受PBS采访，却说她因为太小没被送去农村劳动，而是去工厂生产收音机和计速表。(I was assigned to work in a factory. Some of the older kids gets to send to the countryside. But I was too young to do that. So I went to the factory to build radios and speedometers. http://video.pbs.org/video/2330983908/ 7:22） 现在她又“澄清”说自1972年起学校复课，她就认真读书。这三种截然不同的说法都是她亲口说的，她要我们相信哪个？ 

　　傅苹在其“澄清”中实际上都已推翻了此前她在访谈中的所有惊人的说法，只坚持两点：她10岁时被红卫兵轮奸，她大学毕业前夕被秘密囚禁3天。她的共同作者Meimei Fox的嫂子、宾州州立大学研究中国古代历史的副教授Erica Brindley说，这是很个人的经历，你们没法推翻它。这也许就是傅苹至今仍一口咬定它们发生过的原因。但是如果仔细推敲她有关这两件事的具体说法，也是令人难以置信的。 

　　我们先来看她所谓在10岁时遭到红卫兵轮奸一事。在所有采访中，她都淡定地谈论此事，说是在她十岁那年，她妹妹被红卫兵扔进河里，她跳下去救出妹妹，激怒了红卫兵，10～12名红卫兵在光天化日之下轮奸了她，她醒来的时候，人在医疗室里。更令她伤心的是，这件事发生后，她被人叫做“破鞋”。 

　　我们认为傅苹说的这事不可信，并非如她说的认为“中国不会发生轮奸这种事”。中国当然也会发生轮奸这种暴行，在上个世纪七、八十年代我就见过因轮奸被判死刑的判决。但是在所有其他人有关文革暴行的回忆中，从没有过红卫兵在光天化日之下强奸女孩的叙述，更何况是十几个人参与的轮奸，更何况是十几个人轮奸/幼女。文革期间当然可能发生强奸，但是在一个极其重视女性“贞洁”的国家，即使在文革期间，强奸/幼女也是严重的犯罪。十几个人公然轮奸/幼女，而且广为人知（傅苹说她因此被称为“破鞋”），在当时也会被判死刑，却没有受到任何惩罚，可能吗？ 

　　有人也许会说，因为傅苹是黑帮分子的子女，所以再怎么折磨她都不用承担法律责任。傅苹虽然在各种采访中都声称自己是黑帮子女，其实她父母是南航的普通教师，连“地、富、反、坏、右”都算不上，根本不是黑帮。即使是黑帮子女，在文革期间被打死了也许没人管，但是被十几个人轮奸则肯定是不会被放过的。十几个人轮奸/幼女这种骇人听闻的事情，在中国历史上从没有记录发生过，傅苹是中国历史上最骇人听闻的轮奸案的唯一受害者，还是撒了个弥天大谎？为什么当时南航的其他教师子弟没有听说过傅苹曾经被轮奸？ 

　　我们再来看傅苹毕业前夕囚禁了三天一事。傅苹在PBS接受采访时说，在她的论文被中国报纸报道的那一年，碰巧美国人Steven Mosher也出了批评中国计划生育的Broken Earth一书，引起了国际舆论对中国违反人权的谴责，所以她就被抓了。 

　　在我没能找到中国报纸对她的论文的报道后，傅苹现在“澄清”，她的论文从未被中国报纸报道，等于自打了一嘴巴。Steven Mosher关于中国计划生育政策导致强迫人工流产（不是溺婴）的研究的确引起了中国政府和国际舆论的注意，但是Broken Earth一书是1983年9月出版的（http://bookmooch.com/detail/0029217008 ），成为畅销书并引起舆论注意是1984年（1984年9月开始出平装本）。而傅苹自称是在毕业前夕被抓，即1982年，那显然发生在Broken Earth书出版之前，与它无论如何都扯不上关系。 

　　傅苹声称，她被抓后，担心自己会被判死刑，但是由于邓小平过问了一下“那个写论文的学生现在怎么样了”，她被关了三天就被释放了，并被命令离开中国。（她接受谷歌的采访，http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4vRtvswO8s 从10：30开始） 

　　居然连邓小平都知道她，还亲自过问？她据称是被关在南京，邓小平的随口一句话是怎么得到如此快速的传达和执行的？她是怎么知道邓小平过问的？又是某个匿名人士告诉她的，还是仅仅是她的想像？如果连邓小平都知道她，保护她，谁还敢动她，她还用得着被迫离开中国？ 

　　我们也许无法用直接的证据推翻傅苹在10岁被轮奸和毕业前夕被秘密关押3天这种“个人的经历”，但是在能够核实的其他问题上都已证明了傅苹说谎，我们为什么要相信她独独在这两条没有证据的惊人事情上说了真话？