Bent Fact: "Broken Shoe"

The Original Story:
One "evidence" that Fu Ping knew she was raped was that she was called a "broken shoe" after the attack. On Page 77 of Bend, Not Break:

After that day, Zhang spread word that I had a new nickname, "broken shoe" -- a shameful, denigrating expression implying that you are so worn down from overuse that you're no longer worth a penny. 

At age ten, I was a ruined woman.

Shortly after, on Page 79:

I had discovered that "broken shoe" was a label customarily given to prostitutes and promiscuous women. Teasing me with it seemed to be some children's favorite form of entertainment.

Then, two years later, enter the mysterious "Uncle W" 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.

The Debunking:
This timeline does not make any sense at all.

She had already figured out what "broken shoe" means shortly after the attack, how could Uncle W would be the first one to explain its meaning? Unless Uncle W provided a different version from her previous understanding. The last paragraph seems to indicate just that. Somehow Uncle W interpreted "broken shoe" as referring to a rape victim, thus he had to add that it wasn't her fault.

What was on Page 79 is the correct meaning of "broken shoe," which had nothing to do with being raped. Uncle W was wrong, and very strangely so.

While "broken shoe" was a fairly common insult in China, the only time it applies to kids as young as Fu Ping was at the time would be a prank among their peers, either as teasing or mean-spirited curse. But for kids using this term, they were just using it as a generic insult, not in its literal meaning. Fu Ping may have been called "broken shoe," but it would have very little to do with whether she had been a victim of rape.

Questionable Fact: Fu Ping's Injury During Rape

The Original Story:
On Page 77 of Bend, Not Break, Fu Ping describes what happened after passing out during a beating and rape attack:

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. 

She was then sent home to recover for herself, which appeared to consist of purely bed-rest.

The Debunking:
Since Fu Ping has repeatedly stated that she still has the scar from that attack, we can believe that she was once beaten and suffered knife cuts over her body.

The questionable parts here are the other injuries or the lack thereof. There is no mention of any injury of sexual nature, which is quite unusual for a 10 year old being raped by a gang of 10 to 12 boys.

NUAA was not a very big school and a health clinic is not a hospital. As "xgz" had previously pointed out, it is unlikely that the clinic would possess an X-ray machine to diagnose broken bones. The fact that she did not get transferred to a hospital for treatment seemed to imply that her injuries were only superficial ones.

Questionable Fact: Perpetrators of Rape

The Original Story:
When Fu Ping tells the story of her rape, she has been inconsistent with who the perpetrators were, alternating between "a group of teenagers" and "the Red Guards". In Bend, Not Break, Page 75, she wrote:

I noticed a group of about ten teenage boys standing nearby.

In January, 2010, Fu Ping gave a Story of an Entrepreneur speech in North Carolina in which she stated:

My sister was thrown into a river to drown. I tried to save her and I was gang-raped by the Red Guards because I jumped into the river to try to save my sister.

On January 7, 2013, she told the Authors at Google program:

 I was gang-raped by a group of teenagers, broken, cut up with a knife.

Then, a week later, on WNYC's Leopard Lopate Show, she switched to Red Guards:

Lopate: So, the Red Guards raped you?
Fu: Yes. There were about 10 or 12 Red Guards. They threw my sister into the water canal. I jumped in to save her. She was saved but I was not spared.
Lopate: Now, the Red Guards were supposed to be the moral conscience of China at the time. How could they reconcile with what they did?
Fu: At that time, the Red Guards did a lot of things. Raping, killing, taking things from people. And it was encouraged. They were told that they were masters of the country. They were told that the bourgeoisie class had deprived them for better lives so they were allowed to do anything. It's kind of like the Nazis.

A couple months later, it was teenagers again in her speech at the Downtown Speakers Series in Las Vegas:

When I was 10 years old, I also experienced a very dramatic event. I was gang-raped by a group of teenagers, and i was left on the soccer field to die.

The Debunking:
Pretty much all Red Guard members were teenagers, but not all teenagers were Red Guards at the time. Fu Ping seems to be using the two terms interchangeably. But does the difference matter?

Fu Ping never stated it clearly either in her book or interviews, but it appeared that she knew at least some of the boys who attacked her. In Bend, Not Break, she described how the kids call out her and her assumed friend's name while beating her, indicating that they were local kids who knew her well. Therefore, it reasons that Fu Ping would know them and if they were Red Guard members.

If they were, why didn't she state so in her book?

In some aspects, the Red Guards in early days were indeed "kind of like the Nazis," or the Hitler Youth. They committed many brutal crimes, mostly destroying people's homes, public humiliation, and beating. Some of the beatings led to death directly or indirectly.

Just like Hitler Youth, however, Red Guards were doing such dirty deeds with a noble purpose, as they believed it was the only way to achieve a revolutionary victory. For that purpose, they did posses a special set of morality. While beating up and even killing enemies was an accepted behavior, rape was not.

This is not to say that there had been no rape committed by Red Guards. There were, especially in the later years when chaos and disillusion spread among their ranks. But those tended to be crimes committed by individuals in secret.

If the crime was not committed by Red Guards but common teenage hooligans, they would certainly be punished by the law enforcement, even when the victim was a child of "bad elements."

China traditionally punishes crimes committed by groups (perceived as some sort of organized entity) a lot more harshly than those by individuals. It's one of the reasons that gang-rape has been much less wide-spread than individual rapes. Gang rapes involving a group as large as 10 would be very rare indeed.

Fu Ping's tragedy not long involved a group of that size, it also occurred openly in the public soccer field under daylight. There were other children (who called Fu Ping out in the first place) present. Whoever sent Fu Ping to the clinic afterwards must have also witnessed it. And, by the description of the book, those rapists did not bother to hide their deeds either.

It is possible that some horrendous crimes escaped punishment in those chaotic years, but the way this crime was carried out showed an unusual degree of boldness that made it less than credible.

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.

Fu Ping's Speech at the Downtown Speaker Series

On March 1, 2013, Fu Ping gave a speech at the Downtown Speaker Series at Las Vegas. In the speech, she made a couple of subtle changes to her story. For example, she now says that she tool the Pan Am flight to US instead of United and it was not a direct flight. Instead of baby girls being killed with plastic bags, it is now pillow cases. She didn't mention the more outlandish claims surrounding her infanticide research (not even mention newspaper any more) or kidnapping.

More significantly, she used the opportunity of answering a question from the audience at the end to once again claim the "attack" she received on Amazon is a smear campaign originated from China, elevating its status to an "attack to democracy."

The speech can be viewed in its entirety here. Below is a partial transcript. Thanks to Jean and Z. Wang for helping out the transcript work.

I'm going to break this talk into three components. The first one I'll talk a little bit about
my life, which most of them are in the book. Then, I'll talk a little bit about my
entrepreneurial journey. And the third part will be what will be the future for 3D printing, sensors, and the digital world.  

So let me take you back almost 40 years, to 1966. At the dawn of Cultural Revolution, I was 8  years old. I was living with a loving family. My Shanghai papa and mama had 5 children and I was the youngest of the 6, the youngest one. i didn't know when I was little that they were not my biological parents. They were the only parents I knew. And they were incredibly loving and it's a normal family. 

When the Cultural Revolution started, I was taken away from them. That day when Red Guards came to my family to taken me away, to send me to Nanjing, which is a
city about 300 miles north of Shanghai to stay with my biological parents. That was when I was told that they were not my parents. I went to Nanjing in a very crowded train on myself and arrived only a little too late. My biological parents were put on a truck being sent away to exile also. And I was then placed in a dormitory room in a college where my dad used to be professor. It was there I found my little sister. She was 4 years old. And then for the next 10 years, I lived in a dormitory room, and taking care of my younger sister. My father was away for 11 years. I almost never seen him. My mother came back when i was 13. Life was very confusing at that time. One day I lost the parents who raised me, the parents who born me, and I became the surrogate mother to my sister. 

The first two years of the Cultural Revolution, the entire country turned upside down. Family, educated family been sent away, households are confiscated. I was out there to witness much of the atrocity scene, watching teacher being killed. Been sent to struggle sessions which I would be put on stage denouncing myself. Screaming very loud that I was nobody. That I wasn't worth the dirt beneath their feet. That was the very beginning of my education. I was supposed to be in the 1st grade. The schools were closed. I didn't have any academic education. 

But rather Chairman Mao, who was the head of communist party said that we need to study from farmers, workers, and soldiers. So I was working in the factory, many years, and also worked in the country side, planting rice, and doing some farming. Then when I was a little older, I also went to military camp to be trained on long march, shooting. So in the essence, although I didn’t have much in formal education, I learned how to make things with my hands, I built radios when I was 9 years old, I built speedometers, and later televisions, I put the lights up so on and so forth. 

When I was 10 years old, I also experienced a very dramatic event. I was gang-raped by a group of teenagers, and i was left on the soccer field to die. I had cuts on my body, probably more than 40 stitches because of a knife   It was not just the physical abuse that was hurtful. it was the emotional abuse that followed. I was called broken shoes. at 10, I was a broken woman. 

Fast forward 10 years, Culture Revolution was over, China re-opened university. Given that I have not had much formal education. I really wanted to go to college. I studied like mad. I was called the girl whose lights never turned off. I took the first college exam i didn't pass, the 2nd year i took it again. in 1978, I past the national exam and went to college. I really wanted to be an astronaut, but i didn't really have much choice. My father was a professor at Nanjing Aeronautics and Astronautics University before he was sent away. So when I grew up, my playground was airplanes and the slider was airplane wings. I have seen a lot of planes on the field.  But i was assigned to study Chinese literature. My mother said, oh please, don’t go study literature. A writer has no future in China. but i wasn't going to listen. I really wanted to go to school.  

So I was admitted to Suzhou University, majoring Chinese literature. I absolutely loved it. I couldn't believe that reading a novel, going to see a play or see a movie, and call that study. It was really fascinating time and China is completely changing its ideology and very open at the time. 

In my senior year, I decided I wanted to pursue graduate school. I wanted to be a journalist. I chose infanticide as my thesis topic, and i went to research the phenomenon of killing baby girls in the country side due to one child policy. In 1979, Chinese government decided that people can only have one child and they enforced one-child policy quite severally. In many countries, people, farmers, or families favor boys over girls. It's not a unique thing for China. But in China, what's unique at that time was the one-child policy. There was this policy called illegal pregnancy. You can be illegal to be pregnant for a second child if it is within 4 years of having the first child. The policy was enforced by local communities, the neighborhood communities. A lot of time, those enforcements are very cruel. 

When I went to the countryside to look at that, I saw baby girls are being killed and I saw babies being thrown into river when their embryological cords are still fresh. I saw baby girls being suffocation in pillow cases and being thrown into garbage dumpsters. What I saw broke my heart. 

Even though I was punished for missing schools and not return to college dormitories, I was possessed to do those research. So I went to many remote areas and interviewed hundreds of women. I heard many stories. I put my research in paper and gave them to my teacher. I haven't written my thesis yet. I just gave the teacher my raw material. 

Unbeknownst to me, she turned those material to the press and the material was apparently passed up and got the attention of the Chinese government. For that I was kicked out of the school. Actually I was put in jail briefly for 3 days. I thought I was going to die. They wouldn't tell me why I was arrested and I didn't know it was because of the infanticide research. I was just put in jail. There was no interrogation, no telling why I was there. 

But fortunately I was let out 3 days later. I was told to go home and wait to be told what I should do. Then I was told that I have two choices.  

One is to leave China and never talk about this again, just quietly leave. I was told to be careful what I say because my sister and family is still in China. This is fairly common in Chinese history back then, probably today also, that the threat to you is not yourself but your family. Or, I will be put in a place remote in China. I thought leaving was a better idea. 

So, it took me a year and half actually for me to get a passport to leave China. My family helped me to pull all the strings and eventually I was able to obtain visa and passport to leave China. I applied to many countries but the US was the easiest to get a student visa so I ended up coming  to the United States. How lucky I am. 

In 1984, January, I stepped on a Pan Am airline and flew from Shanghai to San Francisco, stop by Tokyo. I landed in San Francisco. I had 80 dollars traveler's check and only a few words of English. I tried to learn English when I was in China when I knew I was going to come to the United States. I tried to memorize them but somehow by the time I landed in San Francisco I only remembered 3 words. That was "help", "thank you", and... there was another word that I can't remember. 

Anyway, so I was in San Francisco. I have a traveler's check. Back then, Chinese dollar was not exchangeable with dollar so you should go to a bank, give them RMB and they issue you a traveler's check. For me to go from San Francisco to New Mexico where I got a student visa. The ticket price changed. It become 85 dollars and I only had an 80 dollar traveler's check. Because in China, it's a Communist society that the price doesn't change. I didn't know what to do. 

Of course, blessing San Francisco, there was a lot of Chinese-speaking people so one of the agents was able to explain to me the price changed. There was an American man standing behind me who gave 5 dollars to the counter so I can get my ticket. That was my first impression of an American. That taught me a lesson: when in doubt, always error on the side of generocity.  

To this day, I still haven't found that person who helped me. I was hoping someone who read to book would say, hey, that was me. Five dollars may not have meant much to me but it meant the whole world to me. 

So that's how I landed in United States and went to New Mexico. 

I enrolled in English as Second Language and I thought I was going to study comparative literature. I quickly realized that I didn't have enough English to do that. Also, my teacher who has a Ph. D. in literature couldn't find a job.  I was told to leave China and never to come back again so I don't have the luxury of studying something I couldn't find a job with. So I have to very quickly find something that's marketable. But I didn't have formal K-12 education so I couldn't quite go to study science. 

I asked around what I could study. Someone said why don't you go study computer science. It's a new field. I never heard about computer science so I asked what is that. The student said that is a man-made language used to make stuff. I was like, great, I am good with language and I know how to make stuff. That's what I am going to study. So, that's how I got into computer science. I was very lucky that it's a new field. 

Computer science of course at that time, and maybe today also, has a lot of group projects. It's not always individual projects. I wasn't the best programmer. Programming wasn't really a strong suite of mine but I quickly realized that I was a pretty good software designer. Being trained in literature, in structure, compositions, flow, I found software design to be very easy. So I end up with always having the best programmer in my group because, being a good software designer, our project always get the high scores from the professors. So that's how I got through my computer science career. 

I worked for a start up company and then I went to work for Bell Labs and then I went to work for University of Illinois at their supercomputing center. I went to the supercomputing center because they were doing graphics and visualization and I totally fall in love with that field. It's like art meeting science. 

At the supercomputing center I hired a student, his name is Marc Andreessen. Marc didn't quite like the match and geometry I was doing and decided to work on a browser. So Marc and severl other students wrote the NCSA Mosiac that became Netscape and was also licensed to Microsoft and became Internet Explorer. So he went to start Netscape and the rest was history. 

The university started to push me to start a business. They said, Ping, everything you touched turning into gold. I had no idea how to start a business. At university we have really good jobs. I love my job and also my daughter was 3 years old at the time. But one day my boss Joe Harding said, "All this talk and nobody is doing anything. I am really frustrated." So I said, okay, I will do it. So that's how I started Geomagic. 

[Talk about Geomagic and 3D technology...]

Q:  How is China like you now? What’s the potential of technology like this to solve the humanitarian crisis that factory in so many countries like China poses?

A: I certainly is on the attack by the Chinese at this point. The day after New York Time had a story broke on Chinese hacking on New York Time, I woke up with 2000 hate mail in my email. And I’m still on the attack by the Chinese. If you go on Amazon and look for Bend not Break Ping Fu, and you will see the full scale of the attack on me. They completely bombarded my book site, and if you saw the titles of five hundred comments, doesn't matter it is one-star or five-stars, they are all smear. 

You can’t see any good comments because it will... if you put a good comment, hundreds of them are gonna come and say this is not helpful. And if they call me a liar, fat liar, bitch, traitor, whatever, you will get one thousand five hundred people will say that is helpful.  

In comparison, the most helpful comment review on Harry Potter in its entire life is five hundred. And in twenty second, a smear comment on amazon will get three times more comments on this is helpful. How does that happen? It happens in twenty seconds! So someone is writing a program... notify something there. You can just go there to see it. It is incredible. 

So I look at it. My book is not available in China. None of those reviewers have read my book and they even say they have never read my book. So there are three things they really don't like me. They don't like me write about “gang rape,” “No, China has no rape.” That’s one. And they don't like I wrote about “infanticide.” “No, China didn’t kill baby girls.” It didn't matter the statistics says thirty million girls were missing. “It didn’t happen.” And of course I’m a traitor because I’m talking about bring job to United States. Actually i was talking about bring job locally ,distributed. And it is not just bring back to United States. For China, I talked about China should make product that carries Chinese Culture. And China has 1.3 billion people there, it is a huge market. It is good for China also. 

But it didn't matter, because, you know, that’s the attack. 

It is interesting, because I love Amazon, don’t get me wrong. I love Jeff. He is probably one of the most respected entrepreneur ever in my life. He is my hero. 

But I always believe failure and success go in hand in hand. Ironically a long time ago, I help to create Internet or the browsers. Today I become the victim of that technology. So the question is to the technologists here, what can we do to prevent this happen. Because those people hiding behind internet with fake ids are so cruel. The attack is so vicious and I don’t understand that phenomenon. And I don’t understand why we allow that happen. And it is more vicious to women than to men in general. It is not Chinese or American, cruelty has no nationality. But allow people to hide behind Internet to be cruel is something we should solve. Because that shouldn't happen to anyone. 

They are not just attack me, my family, my colleagues, but anyone who go voice something authentic get attacked. This is attack to democracy.

xgz: Inconsistencies in Ping Fu's Gang Rape Story

The following post was posted by xgz on his The Daily Kos blog on February 8, 2013:

This diary is a part in a long series reviewing the book Bend, not Break: A Life in Two Worlds by Ping Fu. Please read part I, part II, part III, part IV, part V, and part VI for background. 

The gang rape story is a much hyped key part of Ping Fu's Bend, not Break: A Life in Two Worlds. Although most readers who lived in China during that period would first react to this story with disbelief, it is generally considered a personal experience that someone who was not there cannot possibly disprove. Furthermore, it was such a horrific and gruesome crime, a reader would instinctively want to skip this part in the book, let alone challenging it. 

My previous exchange on this website with some of the commenters about the rape episode was not based on her book's description (because I did not have the stomach to read this part), but rather on the reports in the media. It turns out that those reports in the media were not accurate, and painted a very different picture than the actual story told in the book. 

It is a difficult decision whether to go into the rape story. On the one hand, it is true that most rape victims are reluctant to come forward. Any barrier to reporting would aggravate the problem. On the other hand, lying about rape is just as bad, if not worse, because it cheapens the suffering of the real victims, and makes it harder to help the real victim. After much deliberation, I decided that truth is more important, and I should not be desuaded by political correctness. 

It was hard to bring myself to read the actual account of the crime, and I am not going to analyze those. There are inconsistencies in the parts of the story before and after the crime that would cast serious doubt on what really happened.

During the Cultural Revolution, Ping Fu and her younger sister lived in the dorm of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA). The dorm building was close enough to the edge of the campus of NUAA, that they could walk to a canal around the old city wall of Nanjing, across the street from the campus. Here is how the episode began (page 75):

One lazy, hot summer afternoon, as I lay resting in our room, I heard the voices of several children screaming outside, "Hong is in the river! Hong is in the river!" One of them called to me, "Ping, your sister is drowning!"

This is where the first doubt arises. The river was outside the campus, across the street. (Here I removed the original discussion of whether this was a set up or not because now I realize that the original argument is not as solid as I first thought). Thanks to a netter familiar with this area of Nanjing, we know now that the river is about one kilometer away from NUAA. It was impossible for Ping Fu to have heard screams from the river if she was inside NUAA. If someone were to run from the river to NUAA dorm to get Ping, a round trip would have taken ten minutes. By then either her sister would be dead, or would have already been saved. 

The only logical explanation that neither Hong was dead nor she was saved after the time it took for Ping to get there, would be that this was a trap to lure Ping Fu out. Such an elaborate trap means that the perpetrators knew Ping Fu very well. But the problem is, Ping Fu did not identify a single person in name. She named everyone both before and after this event, but hid the names of all the perpetrators. 

After the whole ordeal of severe beating and gang rape, Ping Fu woke up in the health clinic of NUAA (page 77):

The next thing I remember, I woke up in 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 scars to this day.

It is highly doubtful that a health clinic in NUAA in 1968 had the X-ray equipment needed to diagnose the broken tailbone (and to make sure that she did not have other serious injuries). It is also highly unlikely that someone who sustained such serious injuries and was unconscious would be treated only at the clinic. She would have been sent to a hospital. 

If one believes that she was only treated at the clinic, then one must accept the possibility that she was not seriously hurt. She may have been beaten but not raped. 

To assume that people who brought her to the clinic, and those who treated her, did not report the crime, would be quite callous. It would be effectively accusing all these people to be part of the coverup of the crime. I cannot believe that's what happened. 

In Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai, her daughter was raped by a rebel faction leader (造反派头头, these people are generally lumped together with the Red Guards in the west), and he murdered her in order to cover up the crime. In the official report, the daughter was said to have committed suicide. This leader was brought to justice more than ten years later, and received a suspended death sentence for this crime. Nien Cheng was not satisfied with this sentence, and believed that he should have been sentenced to death. 

The reason that rapists often murdered their victims during the Cultrual Revolution, was that they knew that the punishment for rape was death penalty. Everyone knew this. That's why that no one reported the rape of Ping, depite so many people knew about it, was so incredible. If this story was true, then it was not an indictment of the Cultural Revolution, but an indictment of every Chinese, those who covered up the crime, and those who still refuse to believe it today.

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？

Ping Fu on APM's Marketplace

On January 4, 2013, Fu Ping had a brief live interview on American Public Media's Marketplace program, hosted by Sarah Gardner. In this short conversation, she reaffirmed that she had no formal schooling for 10 years during Cultural Revolution and repeated the myth of three English words.

The interview can be heard in its entirety here. Below is a transcript:

Gardner: This is the Marketplace from APM. I am Sarah Gardner. If you ever doubt the resilience of the human spirit, check out the new book by a woman named Ping Fu. She is the founder and CEO of a 3D software company called Geomagic. She has been honored by the White House. She has been the Entrepreneur of the Year. And the American government has named her the Outstanding American. All this, after surviving a hellish childhood in China during the Cultural Revolution after her parents have been sent away to a reeducation camp. Her new memoir is called Bend, Not Break -- A Life in Two Worlds. Ping Fu, welcome to the Marketplace.
Fu: Thank you for having me.
Gardner: You said the Red Guard used to force you to recite the words "I am a bug. My life is worthless." Did you believe it at the time?
Fu: After I repeated it many times that I was a nobody, I started to believe it.
Gardner: You essentially had no formal education from the time when you were 8 years old until about the time you were 18. Were you learning anything during that time?
Fu: I did learn a lot of things when I was working at factories. So, I think myself as a maker because I learned how to build radios, TV sets, speedometers for cars.
Gardner: You faced a lot of adversity during that time. I mean, you were gang-raped when you were 10 by some teenager boys and Red Guards. Your sister almost drowned  You saved her. How did you survive all that?
Fu: I think it was my sister, you know, I felt responsibility to take care of her. Without her I don't know what I would do. I probably would be killed or be much careless about protecting my own life. With the little girl next to me, I have to survive.
Gardner: Now, eventually after the Cultural Revolution, universities are opened up again. You said you had a ferocious apatite for learning. What did you do?
Fu: I was like a sponge. I wanted to be an astronaut but I was assigned to study Chinese literature. That turned out to be such a blessing. I couldn't believe that reading literature, watching movies, talking about play... you call that study. I want to learn anything and everything that is in front of me.
Gardner: Then you came to this country and you knew three words. What were they?
Fu: help, thank you, hello.
Gardner: Help, thank you, and hello. Amazing. You did get your degree in computer science in this country. You became a leader at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. You are now the CEO of a 3D computer software company whose clients included NASA. Now, that's like the amazing immigrant story.
Fu: I live such an amazing life in two drastically different worlds. I never imagined I would arrive at where I am. Being a little girl wanting to be an astronaut, I couldn't even study that field, and to end up to provide technology that helps secure the safety return of astronauts  I feel like life came to the full circle. I am living in the American dream.
Gardner: When you look back to the hardships of your childhood, how do you think they allowed you to get to where you are today?
Fu: When I grow up, I learned a lot about self-learning, and I learned a lot about adopting to changes, and I have to have a lot of resilience  All those things, self-learning, adopting to changes, and the enduring power of resilience, are the qualities of successful entrepreneurs.
Gardner: What is your best advice for young people in this country who want to become entrepreneurs?
Fu: First of all you have to understand who you are, authentically, and then understand why you want to do what you do. Some people think they want to start a company because they didn't like the work they do, that's the wrong reason. Or if you just want to make money, that's not the reason either.
Gardner: So, making money isn't a good reason to become an entrepreneur?
Fu: I don't think so. I don't think you make money just because you want to make money. You make money because you create value.

Fu Ping's 2010 Speech at UNC

Sometime around Janurary, 2010, Fu Ping gave a speech, "Story of an Entrepreneur", at the Kenan Institute at University of North Carolina. The speech was uploaded to YouTube on January 21, 2010, from the institute's official account.

In this speech, Fu Ping told her life story besides her entrepreneur experience. In this version,

1. She asserted that she never went to school during the 10 years of Cultural Revolution, but "I went to countryside plant rice fields. I worked in factories and I was in the military learning how to shoot." [it's curious how a "bad element" child could be allowed to join the military at that time.]
2. She stated that it was a family relative who "engineered an escape" while she was in prison for her infanticide research, no mention of Deng Xiaoping's involvement.
3. She stated that "Within two weeks out of jail I was given a passport." [She would later admit that she spent another year in China, "because it was hard to get a passport."]
4. She also provided a more detailed description on how the original idea for Mosaic browser came about.

The entire speech can be viewed on YouTube in five parts: one, two, three, four, and five. The following is a partial transcript relevant to her early life:

I was born in China in 1958. Unfortunately when I was 8 to 18, which was supposedly from elementary to high school, China started the Cultural Revolution. So I didn't have a chance to go to school. My aunt and uncle actually raised me in a very loving family. In 1966, I was taken away from them. I thought they were my parents. And sent back to Nanjing. I was in Shanghai. I was sent back to Nanjing where my biological parents were. When I was just arriving at Nanjing, it was too late. My parents were put in a truck and sent in exile. I only saw them away and the last word I remember from my mother was "Please take care of your sister." I was 8 and she was 4, with no parents around. That day was such a fateful day. I lost the mother who raised me, the mother who born me, and I became the surrogate mother to my sister. 

I was the youngest in that generation of what they called "black kids" -- black by birth as our parents are bourgeois. If you are educated or if you are entrepreneur, you are bad. Children of educated parents are called black bastard, or black elements. We were treated extremely poor and teachers were killed right in front of us kids to scare us. My sister was thrown into a river to drown. I tried to save her and I was gang-raped by the Red Guards because I jumped into the river to try to save my sister. So, the life during the Cultural Revolution was unimaginable for us kids without parents and for us being called black. I am sorry. I always get emotional when I think about that time. 

Fast forward 10 years. The Cultural Revolution ended the year I was supposed to graduate from high school. I actually never went to school during those 10 years. I went to countryside plant rice fields. I worked in factories and I was in the military learning how to shoot.  

10 years later China ended Cultural Revolution and allowed people to go back to school. I passed the national exam and went back to school. I didn't have a choice as I was assigned to study Chinese literature. I really liked school and studying Chinese literature even though it wasn't my choice. I loved it. In my graduation thesis, I chose a humanitarian topic because I realized that at the time China was enforcing the one-child policy. Baby girls are being killed in the countryside because, being still primarily an agriculture society, people want boys. Later I knew -- now I know -- during that time when I was in college, 30 millions of babies were killed. When I did my research, the subject was normally being suppressed. When my research came out, the government and some newspapers actually supported it so they reported it. That was the first time China admitted that killing was existed. So the news was immediately covered by the international press. I became the scapegoat when UN imposed sanctions to China for human rights violations  I was thrown into jail in a black room with no windows. I thought I was surely going to be killed. I didn't know why I was arrested at the time. All I wish was a quick and painless pill. I thought it was so cruel because my life was just turning around. I was able to go to a university. 

But I was kind of lucky that one of my grandfather's friends engineered an escape for me from China. I was not secretly escaped but kicked out since my report was really a humanitarian issue. He was from Taiwan and China wanted Taiwan to return to China so they agreed to kick me out of China.  

In 1982, very few Chinese were able to come to the States. It was considered lucky that I was able to leave China and come to the United States to study. But I did not plan it and I didn't speak any English. My life plan did not include leaving my family in China and come to the United States. Within two weeks out of jail I was given a passport and told to leave.  

So I came to United States. I didn't speak English and I didn't study any math or science. Or I had was Chinese literature and I couldn't live from that. I need to find a more marketable skill. That's what lead me into computer science, which leads me to Geomagic. 

In early 80s, computer science happen to be a new field. People who studied it in college don't know how to program, unlike today it's like a second skill. But at that time I felt that I was good at language and computer science is a man-made language. So I studied computer science and one thing led to another I landed a job at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. I tell you that was the best job of my life. Actually one of our employees in the audience who was my student there and followed me all the way here. That was a job that you can just dream about what science and math can do and you don't have to worry about profit and loss. We had a 40 million dollars annual budget and I was managing 10 million dollars in industrial relationship and 30 million federal government. So, we could actually do anything we wanted. I just happened to hire this student his name is Marc Andreessen. He didn't really want to work in heavy math and wanted something simpler. So I said, "how about a browser?" He said, "what browser?" So we talked about a multi-media browser. One of the reasons is our group actually worked on telnet, imaging software, Apple computer as well as server. So we had a big database and we had Internet and multi-media. It was pretty natural idea to have a graphic user interface that people can navigate something. Another reason is I was managing public domain software. Everyday I spent a lot time to tell people the Internet domain account. I just got tired of typing that. So I thought would it be nice to have a graphic user interface to tell people there is an image on it and, when they click on it, they can get there. It was a very simple idea. At that time it was hard-coded and it was not as complicated as today. But anyway, once Netscape went public, it became history.

Fu Ping's Interview with WNYC's Leonard Lopate

On January, 14, 2013, Fu Ping was the guest on WNYC's Leopard Lopate show in which they discussed extensively her life and book. Among the highlights:

1. Fu Ping stated that "I went to research that and I saw hundreds of baby girls being killed right in front of my eyes. I saw girls being tossed into the river when their embryonic cord still fresh." [She had since claimed that she misstated.]
2. Fu Ping claimed that she became a factory worker starting from age 8, which provided her "root" in manufacturing.
3. In this version, the original idea of developing the Mosaic browser came from Marc Andreessen instead of Fu Ping herself.
4. They discussed the earlier, Chinese version her her autobiography. The host expressed surprise that she was able to publish it in China.
5. In this version, the three English words Fu Ping knew when she arrived in America was "hello", "thank you", and "help". 

The half-hour interview can be heard in its entirety here. Below is a transcript:

Lopate: Ping Fu has not only helped develop the web browser Mosaic, advised President Obama's administration on entrepreneurship  she is also the founder and CEO of the Geomagic, a leading 3D digital reality solution company. But before all of this, from the ages of 8 to 18, she endured the Chinese Cultural Revolution as a political prisoner, factory worker, and sexual abuse victim. Ms. Fu talks about her journey from the troubles of her youth in China to the frontier technology in America in her memoir Bend, Not Break. It's published by Penguin Portfolio. I am very pleased to welcome her to our show today. Hello.
Fu: Hello.
Lopate: What part of China were you born in?
Fu: I was born in Nanjing, a city south of Shanghai.
Lopate: Famous in most people's mind because of the terrible things happened there during the World War II.
Fu: That's right.
Lopate: Is that where you spent the childhood yours?
Fu: No. I was sent to Shanghai on 11th day after I was born in Nanjing to be raised by my aunt and uncle.
Lopate: Was there a reason for that? Did you know at the time why they take you from your parents and sent to your aunt and uncle?
Fu: My Mom is a working woman and she didn't want children. So my aunt picked me up and raised me.
Lopate: And Shanghai was still considered the Paris of the East in 1966?
Fu: Yes, I think it has always been considered as the Paris of the East.
Lopate: Well, Shanghai is an odd city. It almost felt for a while it's out of the loop. How fast did Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution reforms reach Shanghai?
Fu: Shanghai was the target because the Gang of Four, who was responsible for a lot of the propaganda and atrocities of China, was in Shanghai.
Lopate: And Shanghai was seen as the most westernized city, probably the one that needed to be cleansed the most?
Fu: That's correct.
Lopate: Let's look at your title for a moment. It refers to part of the three friends of the winter. The book is called Bend, Not Break, based on the quality of the bamboo. Why did you pick the bamboo instead of the other friends of winter, the plum blossom and the pine tree.
Fu: My Shanghai Papa said that I need to be bamboo, as if he knew that atrocity was waiting for me.
Lopate: So you had to learn to bend without breaking.
Fu: Yes.
Lopate: Is that something that stayed in your mind throughout your childhood?
Fu: It was. I thought my Shanghai Papa was very wise to pick the bamboo because he knew that I would be killed if I stand too straight.
Lopate: Well, then the Red Guards took you from that Shanghai home and put you alone on a train back to Nanjing. You were just 9 years old.
Fu: I was 8 and I arrived in Nanjing just a little bit too late, when my biological parents were sent to exile.
Lopate: Why were they sent to exile? Were you one of the people who had to deal with the fact that your parents and their families had been merchants or had some wealth before the revolution?
Fu: Yeah, my Mom come from an entrepreneur family and my Dad is educated. He was a professor. So both of them were targets.
Lopate: I would assume that would also apply to your Shanghai family?
Fu: Yes. Shanghai Papa was from a banking company. Shanghai Mama would stay home. So she did not get to send exile.
Lopate: So here you are at Nanjing. Your parents are sent into exile. Who did you live with?
Fu: I was live by myself and was my little sister. She was 4 years old.
Lopate: You just lived in a school dormitory?
Fu: Yeah, they put us into the emptied university dormitory which is kind of a ghetto for all the "black elements" kid.
Lopate: Sometimes you found a little surprises at your door. What were they?
Fu: We didn't have any food. Sometimes I find food left out of the door for us.
Lopate: Did you ever find out who gave that extra food?
Fu: One of the person who were giving us food was our neighbor's son. I only found out after Cultural Revolution was over (Lopate: when he could admit it.) Yeah, they had to risk their lives to do that.
Lopate: So, could you describe your daily routine when you were living in this student dormitory?
Fu: In the beginning it was a lot of chaos. We were put into "bitter meal" sessions or denunciation sessions that go on stage and condemn ourselves and our families.
Lopate: But you were 8 or 9 years old. How much could you even know about your family?
Fu: I didn't. I just mimic what other people do and try to not get in trouble. Otherwise, they hit me.
Lopate: And then at 10 you were sent to work in a factory?
Fu: I started factory pretty early, I think even at 8. Soon after. A few months after.
Lopate: Were you getting any schooling at this time?
Fu: Not official, not the academic study. I did learn a lot by doing things.
Lopate: Well, what kind of factories were you working in?
Fu: When I was 8, I was there peeling plastic covers to separate them and then I started to build radios around 10.
Lopate: So, do you think that experience is as awful as it was working in a factory at 10? Is it the source of your interest in technology?
Fu: I think that certainly was the unconsciousness behind my mind to start Geomagic in the manufacturing sector and combine technology with manufacturing as well to do with that experience.
Lopate: You were 10 years old working in a factory. Were you alone or were there other kids who were in the same situation?
Fu: There were hundreds of "black kids" being in our sector...
Lopate: "Black kids" because your names were blackened?
Fu: No, we were told our blood was blackened. We had a black lineage. So we were born with black blood.
Lopate: Even though, when you cut yourself, it turned out to be red.
Fu: Right. But...
Lopate: Which is the color of the Communist Party. I doubt they can explain that.
Lopate: There was a man named Wang. He was really important to your life at that time.
Fu: Yes, he was my supervisor at the factories. He gave me a lot of encouragement and taught me that I can do things that I thought I couldn't do.
Lopate: So, despite the harshness of your life there were strangers who express kindness to you.
Fu: Yes, often I've seen kindness in people, even in my tormentors.
Lopate: You said you had black blood. Were there punishments people with black blood automatically received?
Fu: Yes. Because we were stripped with all rights, we had no rights and were nobody. We have no rights to go to school and no rights to take a decent job. We can't even fall in love with people who has red blood.
Lopate: You were publicly humiliated, weren't you?
Fu: I was told to scream out of my lung that I was nobody. I was gang-raped at age of 10 and then being publicly humiliated as a "broken shoe". So, at 10, I was a ruined woman.
Lopate: So, the Red Guards raped you?
Fu: Yes. There were about 10 or 12 Red Guards. They threw my sister into the water canal. I jumped in to save her. She was saved but I was not spared.
Lopate: Now, the Red Guards were supposed to be the moral conscience of China at the time. How could they reconcile with what they did?
Fu: At that time, the Red Guards did a lot of things. Raping, killing, taking things from people. And it was encouraged. They were told that they were masters of the country. They were told that the bourgeoisie class had deprived them for better lives so they were allowed to do anything. It's kind of like the Nazies.
Lopate: And you were keeping a journal at the time. That didn't help when they found the journals?
Fu: Yeah, my journal was the only friends I had. I didn't have anybody to talk to so I wrote a journal on the backside of the Communist propaganda and hoping that it wouldn't be discovered. But it was discovered when I was 13. It was burned right in front of me.
Lopate: So, you developed a sense of shame about your family's wealthy background. How long did that last?
Fu: I think that last almost entire life. I am getting better now. Sometimes it will still catch up with me.
Lopate: You are an entrepreneur. Your family have been entrepreneur  So you must see at some level that there is almost a generic reason for you being the way you are.
Fu: I do believe I was born with good genes, good temperaments. But I do, with that kind of experience I do have doubts in my head. I had to consciously working on it.
Lopate: You can never really recover from the trauma of that kind of situation in which you received sexual abuse. But how long before you were able at least to try to pick up the pieces and try to move on with your life?
Fu: When I was 13 or 14, one of my uncle, Uncle W who I wrote in the book, brought me some western literature. I read them at night. I wasn't caught by reading those literature  That opened a different world for me. Then when I got older, I started to question the authority's message. I started to develop my own independent thinking.
Lopate: You were admitted to Suzhou University, even though you barely received a formal education. How did you get into the university if you had black blood?
Fu: After the Cultural Revolution was over in 1976, China was going to reopen universities in 1977. Many of us studied to pass the national exam to get into universities and I did pass the national exam.
Lopate: What did you study at the university?
Fu: I want to be an astronaut but I was assigned to study Chinese literature. So that's what I studied.
Lopate: Then you were deported? What have you done?
Fu: Yeah, I was doing my graduation thesis research and I heard that there were baby girls being killed in the countryside due to one-child policy. I went to research that and I saw hundreds of baby girls being killed right in front of my eyes. I saw girls being tossed into the river when their embryonic cord still fresh. So I wrote a report and that got picked up by Chinese newspaper, then got picked up by international newspaper. That caused a outcry for human rights violation in China and I got in trouble.
Lopate: So, were you thinking of yourself as an activist journalist at the time?
Fu: No, I was just trying to graduate. But I did care about that issue. What I saw broke my heart. So I raised the issue to the national consciousness.
Lopate: It's still a problem for people in China who want to write about things you observed. You can't call yourself a journalist but you can blog about what you observe and perhpas getting in trouble.
Fu: That is still true. The freedom of expression is still not quite allowed in China.
Lopate: So you left China. How old were you?
Fu: I was 25 when I left.
Lopate: Have you ever returned?
Fu: I did return in 1993 after I became a US citizen.
Lopate: You came here knowing how many words of English?
Fu: I tried. I only remember three when I landed here, which is "hello", "thank you", "help".
Lopate: Then you ended up going to the University of New Mexico.
Fu: They were the one who issued me a visa for English as a Second Language. That's my first landing point.
Lopate: You had to support yourself.
Fu: I worked. I cleaned house and I worked as a waitress and tried to get through school.
Lopate: Have you brought any money with you?
Fu: No, I was penniless. I only had 80 dollars as traveler's check to buy a transfer ticket from San Francisco to New Mexico and I told that story in my book. When I got to San Francisco I was 5 dollars short for the ticket. In China, price never change and in United States price do change. In this case it went up. I couldn't buy my ticket. There was an American man standing behind me who gave $5 to the counter. That's my first impression of America. People are generous and warm.
Lopate: Although you had experienced some generosity in China as well.
Fu: That's true.
Lopate: So, you have studied literature. Now in New Mexico. Did you continue to study literature or did you move to computer programming?
Fu: I couldn't study literature because my English was too poor. I didn't have formal K-12 educations so I didn't know what to study. Somebody told me to check out computer science which was a new field in the early 80s. I asked, what's that? The person said, it's man-made language that makes stuff. I thought, great! I am good at language and I know how to make stuff. That's what I am gonna study. So I ended up studying computer science which is a great field.
Lopate: How did you get involved with the Mosaic browser?
Fu: I was at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. I hired this student whose name is Marc Andreessen. We were doing supercomputing applications at the time. Marc and some other younger programmers came to me with this idea of writing a browser. I supported them to do that.
Lopate: How did the browser work?
Fu: At that time, we actually tried to write a browser that helps us to manage the public domain software so we don't have to type in the network address all the time. That was also hard-coded. Then we found gopher and WWW from Switzerland so we decided to make it more smart. Marc came up with this idea of what is called inline imaging which can be configured to take you somewhere. That is what made the browser much more popular.
Lopate: That led to some degree the Internet boom, didn't it? It made it easier for a lot of people like me to be able to use the Internet.
Fu: Right. We worked on a lot of Internet technology like telnet, imaging software, and collaboration software. Browser is what made it really popular. In fact, the browser brought down the entire university network one day because a lot of people were trying to access our site and at that time the Internet couldn't handle that kind of volume. That's when we knew that something really, truly remarkable is in hour hand.
Lopate: It's always a problem of doing something like this and making money from it. You were probably tempted to make it a lot more expensive than it turned out to be.
Fu: We gave Mosaic out for free because we were a federal center. Everything that we developed was put into the public domain. Marc left the university after graduation to start the Netscape with Jim Clark who was a big sponsor for our center. I stayed behind, went to Hong Kong to help them build a mini-supercomputer center.
Lopate: Were there other research teams at the time developing browsers?
Fu: There wasn't any other team developing graphic-based browser. We did have licensee. So like Microsoft licensed Mosaic into the Internet Explorer.
Lopate: So you say you went back to China?
Fu: I went to Hong Kong.
Lopate: At that time still under the control of Britain or had it already been given back to China?
Fu: That was right before Hong Kong went back to China so they are still not being controlled by the export policy. They can still do supercomputing center in Hong Kong.
Lopate: Did it feel odd that you are kind of in both worlds?
Fu: Yeah, going back to Hong Kong is kind of my way of half way of getting back to my roots. I still wasn't comfortable to go back to China. Hong Kong is a neighbor to China so it's trying to go back to my lineage.
Lopate: At this point you were working with groups but what led you to be come an entrepreneur?
Fu: I call myself a reluctant entrepreneur. When I came back from Hong Kong, Netscape went public. University went crazy. They wanted to find the next killer app so we had a lot of people talking about starting a company but nobody started one. My boss Joe Harding said, "I am so sick of all the talk, no actions." I raised my hand and said I will start one.
Lopate: That's what led to Geomagic?
Fu: That's what led to Geomagic. When I first went out to start a business I did not know what I should do. There was an Internet high. I was wanting to do something that has value. I think it's kind of natural for me to try to combine the Internet technology which I was writing sick of it with manufacturing which was how I grew up. I just combined the two and started Geomagic.
Lopate: But I would think you would face challenges other people may not face. First of all, that field was much feeling like a boys club. On top of all you are also an immigrant. So, did that make it harder? Or, in some ways did it make somewhat easier?
Fu: It was hard in the beginning and I made a fatal mistake because of that. I went to an investment conference, walked in with all these men with black suits. I felt very out of the place. So my decision was to hire a CEO to help me run the company rather than me running it. That was more of a woman not having the confidence at the beginning  And being an immigrant and don't have the experience. I should have just run it myself but I didn't know it at the time.
Lopate: Well, your co-founder of Geomagic was your husband Herbert.
Fu: Yes. He decided to stay in the university as a professor right after we started the business.
Lopate: So, he could have joined you in the business but he didn't?
Fu: He didn't want to. He is a really a mathematician.
Lopate: At the time when you started Geomagic, your daughter Xixi was only 3. So, on top of everything you were starting this company and being the mother of a very young child.
Fu: Yeah, at the beginning I thought I didn't want to start this business because I thought my daughter was too young. Now looking back I think I am blessed because I have a daughter. She was the only one that could take me away from work. So I didn't eat a lot of French fries and working into the middle of the night because I had to go home.
Lopate: So, doing this have led you into a lot of other things, consulting with the President for example. When did you decide that you want to write a memoir?
Fu: I thought about writing it in 2006. Then I stopped because I thought my daughter was too young to deal with that. I decided to write it when she turned 18, which is earlier this year.
Lopate: So you had more time on your hand. She went to school, I assume. You wrote with Meimei Fox. Did you talk in Mandarin or in English when you were working on the book?
Fu:  We talk in English. Meimei can speak Mandarin also. She was born in Hong Kong although she is American.
Lopate: Was it painful to recall some of the traumatic experiences in your early life when you were writing?
Fu: It was painful sometimes. Sometimes I just want to forget it. It certainly brings back all the memories I had already put away.
Lopate: Maybe some people who had been victims of sexual abuse don't talk about it. They just pass over that part of their lives because in many cultures they wind up becoming the blamed rather than the abusers, like what is being played out in India for example. Did anybody ever give you a hard time about it?
Fu: In China certainly that's considered to be shameful and considered something you will not want to talk about it. In America I think it's still a little taboo to talk about it. But I decided to tell my story.
Lopate: You described reading the journals of your grandfather after you took a trip to China in the 90s. Who gave them to you?
Fu: My Shanghai Papa gave it to me before he passed away. He wanted me to see my blood was red after all.
Lopate: Your Shanghai Papa is not your real father. He is the uncle who you lived with for a while?
Fu: He is the uncle who raised me from 11 days to 8 years old before I was taken away.
Lopate: How did reading the journals make you feel about your socalled family history which gave you black blood?
Fu: The journal was very interesting. In the journal there was a newspaper article about my grandfather from the father and mother side married their first children to raise money for their local school during the second world war. It's also a journey of their entrepreneurship in China in the 30s. But I didn't know any of those and they run such a parallel track of my current life it's very enlightening to read them.
[...]
Lopate: You wrote another book, didn't you, that was published in China in 1996 before this one? What was that one about?
Fu: When I was at Hong Kong I wrote a book about my first 10 years in United States and my experience as an immigrant and student.
Lopate: Is it only published in Hong Kong?
Fu: That was published in mainland China.
Lopate: Didn't you have a tense relationship with the government authorities at that time?
Fu: I did. But that book was strictly an immigrant and student experience story. There was nothing political so it was allowed to be published. Also I think in the early 90s China just started economic development, a lot of people want to read that material.
Lopate: Although were you honest when you wrote in that book "I will never be an entrepreneur because business people hate their jobs and love money. I love my job and hate money"? Did you really think like that?
Fu: At that time I did. That was two years before I started my business. That's amazing.
[...]

Fu Ping's Interview at Google Program

On January 7, 2013, Fu Ping attended the "Authors at Google" program hosted by Chade-meng Tan. In this interview, she and the host retold her life's story to some extend. Most notably, in this interview, Fu Ping described

1. How Deng Xiaoping personally intervened her case when she was "thrown in jail" after her research of female infanticide was made public.
2. How she never saw fractions before while attending a calculus class as a computer science graduate student. [She would have taken match exam for college entrance in China even if she somehow skipped GRE to get into the graduate school here.]

Also of interest is that, in this version, the only three English words she knew when she came to America were "hello", "help", and "thank you".

Below is a partial transcript of her interview. You can view the entire interview on Chade-meng Tan's blog here.

Tan: Well, my friends, thanks for being here. We are honored today to host somebody who I look up to: Ping Fu. Ping Fu is a 3D pioneer and a remarkably successful entrepreneur  As co-founder and CEO of Geomagic, she was named as Inc. magazine's Entrepreneur of the Year in 2005. Before co-founding Geomagic, she managed a team that created the NCSA Mosaic which later became the Netscape browser and which of course gave us the Internet boom. So, Ping was there, right at the beginning, of the Internet boom. With a name like "Ping", I thought it would be involved with the Internet. Sorry, engineer joke for those on the Youtube. Ping was also named an Outstanding American by Choice and she advises the White House on innovation and entrepreneurship  But more than her success and her talents, what I most admire about Ping is how she deals with adversity after adversity in her life with amazing resilience and more importantly with kindness and compassion. Her new book, her latest book  is her autobiography, Bend, Not Break, available in Google Play and all other major bookstores. In the next hour, Ping and I will talk about the exciting roles of 3D technology and Ping's fascinating life story. And with that, let's welcome Ping Fu.
Tan: So, let me begin with a question. You have lived a fascinating life. If you would boil down your life story to a few sentences, how would you describe it?
Fu: My life is truly an American dream story. I would say that I have lived three lives (for the price of one). I lived in China during Cultural Revolution and then been exiled. I arrived at United States fresh off the boat, poor immigrant try to look for a new life. And I did go through all the new immigration story and later started a business and become an entrepreneur. That's why I said, there was three chapter of my life. But really it shows the human spirits of the adaptability to change and the power of resilience.
Tan: You are very modest. You describe your life as very normal but your life is extraordinary. And I will give you a sense of how extraordinary it is: when I read your book, the first few chapters made me wanting to cry. Your early life to me is horrendous. You were taken away from your parents at age of 8, and you had to fend for yourself and your baby sister, Hong, at the time, and you were gang-raped at 10. You were hungry, you were beaten, endured abuse for years. And then as an adult, you were put in prison for documenting female infanticide, and then exiled from your own country. And then, as if that is not bad enough, when you arrived at the United States, your first experience in the US was getting kidnapped. What I want to know is this. So, first I would like to invite you to tell us the audience your early life experience. More importantly, I want to know how you manage to preserve your goodness, your kindness, and your compassion despite such a horrible experience.
Fu: Thank you Meng. That is a very mindful question. So let me first bring you back to 1966. That was at the dawn of China's infamous Cultural Revolution. Mao decided to turn the country upside down so all schools were closed. I was 8 years old. I was raised by my aunt and uncle who I thought were my biological parents. I had 5 older siblings and I was the youngest one in the family. So, one day I heard noise in our courtyard. I already knew the country kind of turned upside down so I thought they came for my mother who was my aunt. But they came for me. That was the day the Red Guard came to my house and told me that my mother was not my mother. And I was screaming and crying and said, no no no. I tell my mother, you are lying. I am your child. Just weeks ago you told me I was your favorite. I wasn't even given a chance to give her a hug. I was ripped away from the only family I knew and put on a train from Shanghai South station to Nanjing which is where my biological parents lived. I arrived just a little bit too late. When I arrived in Nanjing, all I saw was big dusts down the street and thousands of people, chaos, you can smell blood. My biological parents were put on a truck being taken away, sent far far away in exile. My mother, at the back of the truck, screamed out my name, "Ping, please take care of your sister." A little bit later of that day I was putting into a dormitory, led to a second floor to a room. There I found my little sister, 4 years old. The room was dusty, full of garbage. It did not even have a bath. The only shining place was this concrete floor where she kicked her legs and polished that place. She was crying probably for hours. Her eyes were red shot. I thought she was going to go blind. That was my first day. I lost the parents who raised me. I lost the parents who born me. And I became surrogate mother to my little sister. Then, little did I know Cultural Revolution would last for 10 years. And I was in that ghetto, one room without washbasin, for the next 10 years. I gone through a lot of atrocities you will see in the book. When I was 10 years old, my sister was thrown into a water canal outside of the wall. I jumped in and tried to save her. I did save her but didn't spare myself. I was gang-raped by a group of teenagers, broken, cut up with a knife. I still had 40 stitches on my body. Almost died. But the physical injury was not the most hurtful thing. What was most hurtful was the emotional abuse that followed. At 10, I really did not understand anything. I just thought I was beaten badly. The rumor went around and I had a nickname "broken shoes," which means that you are so worn out nobody would want you. So, at 10 I was a ruined woman. I had no adults to turn to, no psychologists to talk to, no one to help me. Many times I thought about dying. I thought this life is not worth living. But I had this little sister that I have to take care of. I couldn't just die. I have responsibilities. I think, if I didn't have her, I would have treated my life much lighter.
Fu: So, let me fast-forward to end of Cultural Revolution, that was literally 12 years later. China reopened universities in 1977. I studied to try to pass the national exam to get into a college. I did pass and I did go into a college. I was known the girl whose lights are never turned off. My life turned around. China started to change. When I was in college, I studied Chinese literature. I actually wanted to be an astronaut but I didn't have a choice. During the last semester before I graduated, I thought I was going to go to a graduate school so I wanted to do a thesis. China was imposing the one-child policy. I heard there were wide-spread killing of girls in the countryside. So I decided to choose that as a topic. That research being aired in some of Chinese newspapers where Chinese government was calling to stop the killing. But that was the first documentation from China that admitted wide-spread killing was happening. That news being picked up by international newspaper and UN posed sanctions for human rights violation. So this was embarrassment for the new government. At the time, Deng Xiaoping has already taken over China. Cultural Revolution was over. So this was embarrassment for the new government and I got into trouble and was thrown in jail. But it was only 3 days. I was lucky that Deng Xiaoping has asked what happened to the reporter. They said, "Well, we threw her in jail." And he said, "Why? This is not Cultural Revolution any more." But he didn't give any other instructions so nobody knew what to do with me. I was let out. Two weeks later, I was given a passport and told to leave the country and never to come back again. Not to apply for political asylum because my parents and sister were in China. I applied many universities in many countries and I ended up in the United States.
Fu: So your question is how did I live a life like that and remain to be, to see good, to be kind, the preservation of goodness. So when I was little, my uncle, who I thought was my father, had taught me many of those human principles. He told me that you don't want to treat other people the way you don't want to be treated. He also told me that, if you are straight, you are not worried about that your shadow is not. Another thing he had me memorized is what's called three friends of winter. Bamboo is one of it, which is what I write in my book. He told me that, "Ping, you need to be bamboo, bending with the prevailing wind but never breaking." When I was going through Cultural Revolution, I know that, if I don't focus on goodness, then I couldn't live my day. So even in the darkest time, there are human kindness from different places. I would find food left out of my door. Even though people don't dare to be associated with us, people secretly tried to help us. There will be beauty always in ugliness if you want to seek for it. I also found that being good help me to survive. Because if you are good to others, it makes it very hard for others to be cruel to you. So I just continued to focus on that.
Tan: Thank you. So you came to America and survived a kidnapping. I remember reading that you came only knowing 3 words of English, which is "hello", "help", and "thank you".
Fu: [nodding] Very useful 3 words.
Tan: I would add "where is the toilet" [laugh] You came basically crippled in language. Then you went to graduate school and you switched over to computer science. What you say is because you realized mistakenly at the time or you were told that computer science is a different language. You think since I am crippled in English, with a new language I will be in a fair playing field. For those of you who are wondering how Chinese immigrants are such engineers... [pointing to his head]
Fu: [laugh] That's the reason.
Tan: What's even more fascinating is that, when you went to class for a master in computer science and you went to a class not knowing basic mathematic concepts like fractions. You wrote that you saw teacher writing on the blackbord with numbers and a line between them and you are like, what's that? How is like to be in that situation?
Fu: That's a very good question. Like Meng said, I came here and thought I was going to study comparative literature. Yet my English was too poor. I can't study science because I didn't go through K to 12 educations. I asked around. Somebody said, oh ya, there is a new field called computer science and I said, "What's that?" They said, it's a man-made language and you learn that to make stuff. I thought, oh great. I am good with language and I know how to make stuff. That's how I got into computer science. Because I didn't go to formal education or studying mathematics in classroom, when I went to study computer science, the first class I took was calculus. I was okay with new concepts when the professor was teaching. If it's new I can follow. But when he put fraction on the blackboard, I just never seen anything like that. When I asked the professor, he said go back to high school. I took it very literally. I went to get high school math and I couldn't find it. I went to middle school class and couldn't find it. I found it on second grade's math books. So I bought, actually I borrowed, the entire math textbook from first grade to high school. I studied that at night and studied calculus during the day... First semester I almost failed the math class, but by the second math class -- I think was multi-variable calculus, the professor thought I was the sister of an Olympic math champion. That's how I arrived.

Fu Ping's 2010 Interview with APM's The Story

On March 9, 2010, Fu Ping had a lengthy interview on American Public Media's The Story radio show hosted by Dick Gordon. It's one of the occasions that she discussed her life story with her own voice. The story she told in this interview is consistent with her current version, but there are a few interesting details:

1. The only three English words she knew when she came to US was "thank you", "help", and "excuse me".
2. In her Shanghai home, They had nannies for each of the children.
3. When the Red Guards picked her up at Nanjing train station, they took her home in a military motorcycle. [as opposed to car or Jeep in other versions]
4. People were getting shot dead on the street as they drove by.
5. They witnessed the killing of two teachers, including one by four horses.
6. When she was 10 or 11, she was sent to work in a "collective farm" while her sister, who would be 6 or 7 at the time, lived alone in the dorm.
7. Fu Ping had no formal schooling before 18 but apparently had help from older students in studying.
8. News story based on her thesis research of infanticide was first published in Wenhui Daily (文汇报) and then picked up by People's Daily.
9. Someone at Albuquerque arranged her visa to study in University of New Mexico. [as opposed to she didn't know why she was sent there.]
10. No mention of the alleged involvement by Deng Xiaoping in her political case
11. No mention of the kidnapping tale while discussing of her arrival at US. [might have been interrupted by the host.]

The interview can be heard in its entirety here. Or you can read the relevant transcript below:

Gordon: About 30 years ago, a college student from China arrived in the United States. She wasn't here because she wanted to be. She has essentially been kicked out of China because she embarrassed the government there. Ping Fu had a visa and a place at the University of New Mexico. But she didn't even have enough money to get a cab from the airport in Albuquerque.
Fu Ping: I took basically a English phrase book and hecticly remember some of the useful words. By the time I get here, I can only remember three. [laugh] I can't remember many.
Gordon: which were?
Fu Ping: which is "thank you", "help", and "excuse me".
Gordon: "help" would be a good one.
Fu Ping: "help" was a good one.
Gordon: Ping Fu had come through some terrifying times in China's Cultrual Revolution before her arrival in the US. She is now, however, the Chief Executive Officer of the US high-tech firm Geomagic. I am Dick Gordon. This is The Story.
[Program break and discussions of Geomagic and 3D imaging technology]
Gordon: ...Although she was born into an affluent family in mainland China, she suffered some of the worst deprivations of the Cultural Revolution before making her way to this country. When she was very small, she was raised by her aunt and uncle in Shanghai.
Fu Ping: I was the youngest and the most beloved little girl. I think my brothers and sisters tease me sometimes but I don't want to believe it.
Gordon: tease you for not really being their family?
Fu Ping: Right. They say, oh you were not born by Mom. I would go and hold onto her legs and say, "Mom, I am born by you, right?" She would say, "yes, of course." But my biological Mom come to visit sometimes. So my aunt always told me that I am so special it takes two mothers to born me.
Gordon: You bought that
Fu Ping: I bought that.
Gordon: There were nannies for each of the children. As Ping Fu recalls it, it was a very privileged life. But this was also the early sixties of time, just before the Cultural Revolution when the wealthy people in China were being persecuted.
Fu Ping: When I was around 7, I know something was happening out there and I was too young to really understand the political changes but I can sense it. So my uncle already started to prepare me for the change to come and he taught me this three friends of the winter, which is bamboo, pine tree, and there is this flower that blooms in February. So he said, "Ping you must be bamboo that you bend in the prevailing wind and you never break."
Gordon: Ping Fu would soon be tested. When she was 8 years old, the Red Guards came to her house. They took her from her aunt and told her "that woman is not your mother. We are taking you away. You will go to Nanjing to be with your real parents."
Fu Ping: There was three Red Guards. They were holding my aunt away from me. My uncle was not at home. I was screaming and crying and said "They are lying. They are lying. Tell me you are my mother." I was crying and then she cried and she said, "Ping, don't fight. They are right. I am not your mother." And I scream and I said, "You are lying. You are just lying. You told me hundreds of times that you are my mother." And she went silent. She had her hand out and try to hold me. I mean, they deprived me a hug from the mother I knew. So they just took me away. And then I just heard her saying, "Don't fight, don't fight, they will hurt you. Just don't fight." That's all what she was telling me.
Gordon: what does it feel like?
Fu Ping: The last thing I remember, she was kneeing down on the floor with one of her arms reaching up. I always remember that hug... they did not let me have. And then I was at the train station. The train was so crowded, with so many people, literally you can't jam into the door. So the Red Guards literally took me and throw me in a window and from the window they stuff me into the train.
Gordon: This train was going to Nanjing.
Fu Ping: Yes, the train is going to Nanjing from Shanghai.
Gordon: Why did they care about a 7 or 8 years old girl, where she was going to live?
Fu Ping: I think, during the Cultural Revolution, they want to make sure that they have everyone registered. So, since my birth registration is not at Shanghai, they probably had a name call or something and found out I wasn't there. And I heard people calling my name and I looked out and it was a Red Guard, It wasn't my parents.
Gordon: These Red Guards, were they older soldiers, younger soldiers?
Fu Ping: They are usually teenagers, usually I would say between 14 to 18, middle school to high school age. Some of them are late teens but generally Red Guards are middle school to high school.
Gordon: So they are calling your name at train stop.
Fu Ping: Yeah, they have this name call. They have a list of who is coming. I went down to follow them. They put me in a motorcycle, kind of like a military motorcycle. So we are driving on the street and I see blood, killing, people get shot, just driving by. It was at the begining of the Cultural Revolution. Then when I arrived, they dumped me right in the street. There are a lot of people in the street outside, looking. I don't know what is going on then very soon I saw trucks coming. On the truck there are a lot of people on it. And I heard other people are saying those are the people who get sent away. And suddenly I heard my mother's voice. She was calling me "Ping, Ping" from one of the truck. Then I saw both my Mom and my Dad on the truck waving at me. It turns out that I arrived too late. They are taken away.
Gordon: Did you get to go over where they went?
Fu Ping: No. The truck just move very slowly and they move by me. And my Mom said, "Take care of your sister." I was 8 and I remember when they came to Shanghai to visit me with this little girl. I do remember that but I can't even remember how my sister look like.
Gordon: She wouldn't have too long to wait. The next thing that happened, Ping Fu was taken into an old university dormitory...Ping Fu was about to begin a 10 year period as the caregiver to her little sister.
Fu Ping: I got led to this one room and there was a little girl sitting on the floor crying. The room looks like a trash can basically. There are newspapers, cans, broken things everywhere and it was very dirty and very dusty except this one place where she is kicking her legs. It's kind of shinny. She was crying and the minute she sees me she crys, "Mom! Mom!" And I keep saying, "I am not your Mom!" Just that one day I lost Mom that raised me and the Mom who born me and I became sorrogate Mom to my sister.
Gordon: You were 8 years god. Your sister is how old at the time?
Fu Ping: She is 4.
Gordon: Were you cared for? How did you live then?
Fu Ping: No. The first day, the room did not have a bathroom, didn't have a wash basin. I want to go bathroom and I couldn't find anything. And my sister actually knew it was outside of the building. So even though she was 4, apparently somebody took her there. So, she led me to the bathroom. There is no kitchen either. There will be a stove you burn coal outside of your room. In the hallway everybody has a coal stove outside of their room. So I kind of watched the neighbors to see how they lit their stoves.
Gordon: And you have to make your own food on this coal stove?
Fu Ping: We have to make our own food. The first few days we didn't because we didn't have any food so we just kind of starving. And then the nanny distributed some rice so we can cooked our own food.
Gordon: You were managing a household, for the two of you.
Fu Ping: I was managing a household, yes.
Gordon: How did that work out?
Fu Ping: Well, I did learn very early on to manage the household because I have to take whatever is given to me and split half with my sister.
[program break]
Fu Ping: 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.
Gordon: I listen to you telling these stories and I don't really know how you made it through. Do you ever think about that? Do you ever think about how is it you made it through and remain balanced?
Fu Ping: Back then I think the beginning was very difficult and many times I wanted to die but I had a little sister. So some, maybe the human nature has this instincts because she keeps calling me Mom. And because I had good Mom took care of me so somehow I felt that I had the responsibility for her. My mother also said on the truck to take care of your sister. I was already 8 and I was already being educated as a Confucian  If she wasn't there I probably would have done something stupid and get killed or something. I felt the responsibility for her. I think that was one. The second thing I made it a little easier was it was not just us. There was a lot of us. So there were like, probably, 50, 60 of us in the dormitory  And there was certain comfort on other people suffer the same way you suffer -- I don't know what it is.
Gordon: There was some time later when the Red Guards threw Ping Fu's sister into a pond. Ping went in to get her. Ping said that that so infuriated the Red Guard that they took her off to a soccer field where she was so brutally gang-raped that she passed out. She woke up in a little clinic that was nearby. The amazing thing is that Ping can still look back on some moments of that time and laugh. When she was 10 or 11, Ping was sent to a collective farm. Her sister stayed at home in their dorm room.
Fu Ping: So the first few years, if I have anything nice I will bring it home and she will always try to fight to get more. She was always so hungry and bored. I remember she will...once a week I will bring a little bit meat or egg. Usually we just had vegetables and rice. And I also learned how to pick wild vegetables. And whenever I have meat, she would drop her saliva in there, think that I will be grossed out so. Basically she will go like "Oh, it's so good" and then spit on it, having her saliva dripping in it.
Gordon: hoping that you would not want to have it.
Fu Ping: Right. I had the worst food so I didn't care. [laugh] Her saliva is just fine. [laugh] So that didn't work. Later, when we grew older, we would talk about this. That's when she told me. She said, I was hoping you would gross-out so I can have more. It didn't work!
Gordon: This life went on until Ping Fu was 18. There was no formal school but the older students and intellectuals were also locked out by the government who would work with the younger children. By the late seventies, Ping was able to take the required test to make it into a university. She studied literature and she did well. Ping might have avoided further trouble but for her thesis in her senior year she happened to choose a subject that landed her in serious trouble. This was the time when China's one-child policy. Most parents wanted a son and Ping's work explored the killing of infant girls.
Fu Ping: I heard whims of people are killing baby girls in the countryside. Of course I understand in China the farmers want boys. So I thought that would be a good one to pick as a thesis to do a report on that. Because it is not political. That's why I thought. Because I didn't dare to do any subject that is political. But what really got me in trouble was the teacher actually took some of what I wrote and submitted to the newspaper because everybody had good intention of calling for a stop
Gordon: So was this a college paper or was it the People's Daily?
Fu Ping: This was.. People's Daily picked it up from a different newspaper, the Shanghai Wenhui Daily, which is the biggest newspaper in Shanghai at the time. And People's Daily supported it too so they re-reported the same thing.
Gordon: But this is the paper that belongs to the Communist Party. So if they are embracing your research you must think this is great.
Fu Ping: Yeah, well, at the time there is no authorship. When China is just coming out of Communist so newspapers usually just says what the editor says. It doesn't say who reports it. So this is the first time the Communist Party admited there is a wide-spread killing. It's in 1981. All the newspapers picked it up and UN started sanction on China for human rights violation. That's when nobody wanted to say they did it. So it goes down to look for the scapegoat as where the source come from.
Gordon: So what happens to you?
Fu Ping: I was on campus one day and somebody put a black bag over me and literally carried me like a sack and put me in a car and driven some distance. I was only in a jail in a room where there was no light, no food, no water. For 3 days. No explanation of why I was arrested. I thought, oh my God, I am dead. But it is sad to me now my life has just turned around. Because I absolutely loved to be in a university and loved the learning. It seemed to me my life has turned around and China is changing. I didn't understand it but then I lived so many years with so many things that are not understandable. So many people got killed with no reason. So it wasn't even that strange to me.
Gordon: Ping Fu only spent a few days in that jail but when she was released she was told to leave the country. Her father was able to get her a visa that would allow her to study at the University of New Mexico. She was never even been in a plane. She spoke no English. She landed in Albuquerque but got not enough money to take a taxi to the university.
Fu Ping: That was actually the first time the reality set in. Because when I came over, it was fun while in the airplane. First ride, smiling stewardess who takes care of me, first time to feel air conditioning, constant temperature. I mean, everything was new, everything was exciting. And then in Albuquerque at the airport suddenly I got hit that I didn't know where to go and I have no money. I don't even know how to get to the university. The guy who helped to get my visa has left the city. I have one suitcase and that's all my belongs in there. Just cloths and some towers and things like that. I sat on that suitcase and cried. I don't know what to do. [laugh]
Gordon: in the airport?
Fu Ping: I sat outside of the airport and [unclear]
Gordon: When you newly arrived in the west, was there one person you met or one thing that made you think, OK I can do all right here?
Fu Ping: Yeah, I was waitressing in a restaurant and I met this black waitress -- her name is Alba -- she of course told me a lot about black history, the discrimination, civil war. So we had a debate on who is more black whether black by skin or black by genes. We were friends and she was always trying to help me whenever she sees I may be discriminated by the restaurant manager because I was too nice or I didn't know the rules. She will stand up for me. And once she found out that I was riding my bike 45 minutes each way to the restaurant on top of my study she insisted to give me a ride every day including on her day off. I was so very much touched by her kindness and she taught me when in doubt, always error in generosity.
[Discussions on how Fu Ping entered computer programming and entrepreneurship.]