Broken Accusation: Internet Harrassment and Terrorism

The Accusation
A "smear campaign". This is Fu Ping's first response to the wide spread criticism on the factual accuracy of his memoir. In an interview with International Herald and Tribute in February, 2013, she told Didi Kirsten Tatlow that,

They smear my name, they try to get my daughter’s name on the Internet, they sent people to Shanghai to surround my family and to Nanjing to harass my neighbors.

A few weeks later, she raised the bar and claimed "this is Internet Terrorism."

The Debunking
None of the above accusations are true.

First of all, Fu Ping included her daughter's name in the "Acknowledgement" part of her book. It was also included in some of the earlier profiles on her success. For example, an article from her alma mater or an interview with WNYC.

The mystery of the Shanghai Villa where her family grew up has already been documented. Indeed, curious and diligent people have walked the streets in Shanghai tried to locate it but none have succeeded so far. It is therefore impossible to "surround" it.

Furthermore, members of Fu Ping's own family, including her mother, are all living abroad in USA. Her relatives in Shanghai have so far stayed outside of public controversy. Nobody has stepped up to validate her story. As a consequence, they are enjoying their privacy and could not have been "surrounded" by outsiders.

The only possibility is about her (former) neighbors in Nanjing. A couple of them did step up to provide information that refuted her story of her childhood. Unfortunately, most of these could not be substantiated either, for the lack of evidence and their choice of staying anonymous. However, there has been no complains about being harassed either.

Broken Fact: Fu Ping's First Marriage and Love Stories

The Original Story:
On Page 95 of Bend, Not Break, Fu Ping felt sorry for herself after starting her first professional job at Bell Labs in 1988:

I was almost thirty years old and had no personal life. It had been more than five years since I'd landed in the United States, yet I still wondered, What was an American life exactly?

The Earlier Story:
From Pages 37 to 59 of her earlier autobiography Drifting Bottle, Fu Ping used an entire chapter detailing her love story while she was a student at University of New Mexico. She was torn between a Chinese Kaili (凯利) and an American Richard (理查德) and ended up leaving them both when she left Albuquerque for San Diego.

The Changed Story:
After questions were raised on how quickly she had obtained her green card, Fu Ping disclosed a secret to Didi Kirsten Tatlow of International Herald Tribune:

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

“I had a first marriage and that’s how I got my green card,” she said by telephone. She married on Sept. 1, 1986 and divorced three years later.

The Debunking:
It's not clear why Fu Ping felt the need to protect her first husband, who appeared to have passed away by the time she wrote the book.

The said marriage has since been confirmed, although it was doubtful if she was living in California at the time of marriage since she was still using a New Mexico address.

Bend, Not Break is supposed to be a book of the life struggle of an immigrant who achieved the American dream. As any immigrants knew, one of the hardest obstacles in this journey is to secure the residency. Fu Ping chose not to include this critical information in this book, leading to an obvious suspicion: was this marriage a green card fraud?

Remember, we are talking about an individual who had been honored by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services as one of Outstanding Americans by Choice.

It was also not clear whether the Richar Lynn Ewald was the same "Richard" in Drifting Bottle. But it certainly does not appear that she had had no personal life in the five years since she landed in the US.

Broken Fact: Fu Ping's Kidnapping at Albuquerque

The Original Story:
On Pages 4-9 of Bend, Not Break, Fu Ping told another bizarre story of her life, that she was kidnapped and wrongfully imprisoned by someone who sought her out at the Albuquerque airport upon her initial arrival:

When I got to Albuquerque, I found myself stranded once again. My father had given me the name of Mr. Sheng, a former student of his who was studying at the University of New Mexico and had helped my family to get me accepted there. I called him collect several times, but the phone rang endlessly... 

A car pulled up in front of me sometime later, When I looked up with hazy eyes, I saw a Chinese man sitting in the driver's seat. He rolled down the window slowly...

The man, who turned out to be "a Vietnamese refugee of Chinese descent," took her instead to his own apartment and locked her inside with two young boys of his with little to no food. It was only on the third day they managed to have their cries of help heard and police arrived. Citing fear and confusion, Fu Ping chose not to cooperate with the police:

The police tried to get me to press kidnapping charges against the Vietnamese man. I refused. I simply begged them to set me free. Eventually they gave up and put a call into UNM on my behalf. They got directions for where on campus to take me: the International Student Center. 

I arrived at the University of New Mexico in a squad car.

The Questioning:
On February 20, 2013, Didi Kirsten Tatlow wrote on International Herald Tribune:

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

The Debunking:
Cindy Hao, who was also credited for the report by Didi Kirsten Tatlow above, actually did the investigation with the Albuquerque Police Department. She had described Fu Ping's story to the police who searched their database for a police report but found none. Cindy Hao asked if there would be a police report for such incident if the victim did not press charges, the police answered, "Absolutely."

Other people have also inquired and received same responses from the police office.

Kidnapping, imprisonment, and endangerment of the lives of not only Fu Ping but 2 young children is an extremely serous crime. It is inconceivable that the police would not pursue the criminal just because one of the victims refused to press charges. And even so, there would have been a police report for the rescuing and investigative effort, as they said, "absolutely."

Besides this obvious problem, there are also several tell-tales that this whole story was made up:

The Vietnam man claimed that his wife just walked out of him so he needed someone to look after his children. So, what was he doing at the airport picking up a random stranger? Was he so nice to have just given his estranged wife a ride there? If he cared about his children, would he be locking them up with a victim of his with no food for days?

Fu Ping described the place as "government-subsidized housing for refugees," which tends to be condense and crowded. It's hard to believe that they had to yell from a window for three days before someone heard them.

Then, in her earlier autobiography Drifting Bottle, she described a normal arrival at Albuquerque with no drama whatsoever. In fact, on the third day in that book, she was already dining with her local contact Kaili (凯利) -- very likely the "Mr. Sheng" -- and complaining that Kaili failed to contact her earlier (Pages 37-38). She would not be making the complain if she had been locked up for those three days.

One of the main themes of Drifting Bottle is her suffering and struggle in the US as a foreign student. While it could be justifiable that that earlier book did not contain her childhood and college suffering in China for political reasons, the same could not apply for not including the kidnapping story that happened on her first day in America, if it indeed happened.

Broken Fact: Public Reporting on Population Control and Infanticide in China in the 1980s

The Original Story:
On Page 255 of Bend, Not Break, Fu Ping made further claims on the impact of her infanticide research:

My findings wound up as the editor's comment in the Shanghai newspaper, which called for an end to the madness. The editorial comment was then picked up by China's national paper, the People's Daily in Beijing. It was the first time a Chinese official newspaper acknowledged that peasants were killing baby girls. The news spread to the international press, who used this acknowledgement as evidence of China's violations of human rights, prompting cries from the UN for economic sanctions. I unwittingly had set off a chain of events that, like toppling dominoes, resulted in a worldwide shaming of my country and its new leadership.

The Changed Story:
After no related editorials were found within the time frame of her research, Fu Ping clarified as:

Why does nobody else in China know that the UN placed sanctions on China in 1981? And how do you know that? 
A: I heard about the sanctions in China while awaiting my passport. I was told that the UN was unhappy about this issue. A quick web search shows that the American-based journalist Steven W. Mosher wrote about female infanticide in China in 1981. His book, called Broken Earth, was published in 1983 -- the same year I was waiting for my passport. Knowing this, it makes sense that I was asked to leave quietly. Anything else would have drawn more attention to the issue. According to the Los Angeles Times, Mosher successfully lobbied George W. Bush to cut UN funding for China. His story and the timeline are consistent with my experience. 

Didi Kirsten Tatlow of the International Herald Tribune concurred on the clarification:

By 1983, state news media were reporting on female infanticide. “At present, the phenomena of butchering, drowning and leaving to die female infants and maltreating women who have given birth to female infants have been very serious. It has become a grave social problem,” People’s Daily reported on March 3 of that year, according to a New York Times article dated April 11. 

The Debunking:
Once again, timeline should play a significant role here. Fu Ping's research and thesis, if actually existed, happened in early 1982. She was then supposedly arrested in the fall of 1982 and told to leave the country. Therefore, newspaper reporting in 1983 or later had absolute no relevance of her misfortune.

However, Fu Ping's research in 1982, if indeed publicized, was not the first public report of the issue either. According to Fang Zhouzi's research, as early as 1981, right after the one-child policy started, a couple of Chinese newspaper and magazine had already reported the criminal practice of killing baby girls influenced by the policy. The reports were even picked up by the American activist magazine Executive Intelligence Reviews in its Volume 8 issue of that year.

Of course, Fu Ping can plead innocence of now knowing these early reports that she honestly thought those phantom editorials were the first. But the more important thing here is, given the early open and public report, why would Fu Ping get into the kind of political trouble she said she endured if her work wasn't ground-breaking at all?

UN might not be happy with China. But anyone with political common sense would know that UN could never impose economic sanction to China, a member with veto power. In 1983, neither George W. Bush or George H. W. Bush was in power. There was indeed a policy change in the US to cut its funding for UN. That would be, at best, US sanction against UN, not UN against China.

Even if we accepted all of Fu Ping's clarification, the socalled international outcry on China's human rights would be a contribution made by the American Steven Mosher. What did that have to do with her own story?

Broken Fact: Fu Ping's Dropout from Suzhou University

The Original Story:
On Pages 253-258 in Bend, Not Break, Fu Ping describes how her graduation thesis got her in trouble in school:

During my senior year, I selected a somewhat obscure research for my thesis: China's one-child policy... 

One day in the fall of 1982, as I innocently walked across campus making preparations for graduation...[her story of being kidnapped and detained by government, to be debunked later] 

"I want to leave university, claiming a nervous breakdown," I declared. My parents didn't question the decision; Uncle W had shared with them the advice he'd given me during the Red Maple Society scandal two years earlier. They feared that, given the black marks on my personal record, I would likely be sent to a far-off corner of China for some obscure job upon graduation. Such an outcome would force to relinquish my residence in Nanjing, and I might never be able to return to a city again. It would be better if, by pleading mental illness, I could avoid losing my residency.

The Debunking:

While many of Fu Ping's stories in her book suffer from unclear or inconsistent timeline issues, none is more serious between her senior year in college and her leaving China in January of 1984. Since she needed to make the case of her "deportation," she had to muddle up the close to two years gap between her thesis and her "exile."

The above is a glaring example. We now know that she entered college in the fall of 1978. Therefore, she was scheduled to graduate before the summer of 1982. In those years, time spent in China's colleges were very strict. There is no way that she was still on campus "making preparations for graduation" in the fall of 1982 and then decided to leave the school.

So, did Fu Ping actually dropout Suzhou University? She did. Just not in the fall of 1982 but some time in that spring. In an interview with Didi Kirsten Tatlow of International Herald Tribune, she provided a letter from her former classmate which stated that she "left university abruptly, without graduation," because of a nervous breakdown. The letter was dated May, 1982.

Suzhou University has also confirmed that Fu Ping left school on March 16, 1982.

The last paragraph from her book cited above probably gave the true reason for her dropout, while faking the nervous breakdown. Suzhou University, a teacher's college, is a low-tier college whose mission is to train elementary and middle school teachers. Their graduates were assigned to teaching jobs all over the province, most of them might end up in quite remote areas. While favoritism definitely existed in the job assignments, this applied to the majority of graduates, not just those with "black marks."

Furthermore, as a teacher's college, students enjoyed free tuition, meal and board by the policy at the time to encourage enrollment and training of school teachers, which was suffering a huge shortage. By accepting such an offer, graduates were required to accept their assignments and serve as teachers.

Fu Ping feared losing her city residency so much that she chose to not fulfill her obligation by faking a mental illness. For justification, she might have made up the entire tale of her thesis research on infanticide.

Questionable Fact: Synchronized Political and Romantic Troubles

The Original Story:
The phantom political trouble Fu Ping experienced in her second year in college had another consequence, as she described on Page 252 of Bend, Not Break:

I also knew for sure that I now could not form a romance with anyone. Soon after my troubles, my dearest friend and classmate, Jin Lin, announced that his family had introduced him to a girl from a Red Army family whom he intended to marry after graduation. No one in our group of friends knew that he told me this with a deep sense of regret -- not because the girl was an unsuitable wife for him, but because he had hoped that we might have a chance someday. I was touched and wished him well, encouraging him to proceed with the engagement and keep his distance from me. I had to push Jin Lin away to spare us both the trouble that would have come from his romantic involvement with someone as black as I.

She went on to explain that Uncle W suggested her to declare that she had "gone crazy" and drop out of school but she did not follow his advice.

Two years later, she would get into political trouble again with her supposed infanticide research thesis work (we will get into that next). She did drop out of school that time, citing mental breakdown. Interestingly enough, as an evidence for that trouble, she provided Didi Kirsten Tatlow of International Herald Tribune a letter from a former classmate, as Ms. Tatlow reported:

Ms. Fu sent me a scanned copy of what she said was a letter from a fellow student, dated May 1982. In the hand-written letter, he mentions that Ms. Fu left university abruptly, without graduating, as all the others were finishing their theses -- under mysterious circumstances that classmates gossiped about but didn't understand.  

He writes that college officials were saying that Ms. Fu had a nervous breakdown after being jilted. A classmate was named as the former boyfriend.  

Ms. Fu said in the interview that this was a cover-up and that in reality she was in political trouble, that her thesis had been secretly passed by a sympathetic teacher to a newspaper and traveled up the chain. Eventually, she said, it caused a national and international scandal about the abuses of the one-child policy.  

In the letter, the classmate wonders if the story about the jilting was true. He writes that he spoke to the jilter “for about an hour” about Ms. Fu, but the man was distant and “He says he was also a victim.” 

The Debunking:
After being jilted by Jin Lin around 1980, Fu Ping did not say anything of her personal life for the rest of her college life in Bend, Not Break. It was as if she indeed "knew for sure" that she was doomed on the romantic front and avoided it entirely. In the book about her political trouble in the senior year, there was no mention of romance or classmates.

Which makes the letter she showed Didi Kirsten Tatlow rather curious.

In this 1982 version, the classmate who wrote the letter was not sure if the jilting story was true, but he spoke to the jilter who did not deny it. For the officials to use it as a cover story, there had to be at least some truth behind it. Thus, Fu Ping had two romantic relations that broke apart for political reasons.

It is not unusual that a person's romantic failures coincide with their political troubles, as the latter usually asserts tremendous pressure on relationships. The question is why Fu Ping mentioned only one in her book.

We don't know if the 1982 jilter is (also) Jin Lin. [Upon inquiry, Ms. Tatlow refused to disclose this information, citing ethics.] If Jin Lin had reconciled with her and only to dump her again in the face of another political trouble, it would have been a much bigger, more interesting, and more dramatic story that warranted more pages in the book. The same is also true, but to a slightly lesser extent, that a different boyfriend did the same thing.

Or, could it simply be the case that Fu Ping used the same romantic misfortune in two separate occasions of her life, two years apart?

Broken Fact: This Generation and Deng Xiaoping

The Original Story:
On Pages 251-252 of Bend, Not Break, Fu Ping described in amazing detail how her Red Maple Society got into trouble by publishing an article that caught Deng Xiaoping's attention:

Toward the end of my second year at Suzhou University, our group was invited to attend a conference in Beijing with the publishers of literary magazines from ten other universities. Since we were not ranked a first-tier school, this was a tremendous honor. The Red Maple Society slaved for weeks to create what we considered our finest magazine yet. And in doing so, we took a huge risk: we choose to include an article written by a student titled "A Confession of a Communist Member," which compared Mao's Little Red Book to the Bible... 

We made a special cover for this issue, and I spent many nights had printing copies. We then sent our representative from our inner working group to Beijing for the conference and distributed the publication around Suzhou. But the meeting never happened. The government decided at the last minute to ban the gathering of the ten universities  deeming it illegal. Instead, it was announced that China's de facto leader, Deng Xiaoping, would receive the representatives for a private meeting. 

This was when things went terribly wrong. Every representative who attended the special meeting with Deng had a copy of the Red Maple Society's current magazine in hand. Deng asked  to see what people were reading. One student from Beijing University passed him a copy of our magazine with its pages opened to the "Confessions" article, which was considered daring and controversial. 

"A Communist member questions his own party?" Deng asked with his eyebrow raised after quickly skimming the article...

To prove her tale, she provided a couple of pictures showing the magazine they produced, named Wu Gou:

The first picture shows the cover while the second picture is the Table of Content page, with the "Confessions" article being the first item.

The Changing Story:
Tania Branigan and Ed Pilkington of The Guardian also looked into this tale and reported:

Perry Link, an expert on modern Chinese literature at the University of California at Riverside, said student magazine representatives met in 1979, but added: "I do not believe for a moment that Deng Xiaoping ever came near the group."  

Neither he nor others knows of a representative from Fu's group, Red Maple, attending. Fu said she believed the article was selected for This Generation, the joint publication from the meeting, but Link's copy shows it is not included. 

Didi Kirsten Tatlow of International Herald Tribune also reported Fu Ping's clarification on this matter:

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

[Note: Didi Kirsten Tatlow made a translation error above: Wu Gou does not mean "No Hook," but a hook-like weapon used in the ancient country of Wu, close to where Suzhou is.]

The Debunking:
There are many parts of Fu Ping's story as well as her clarifications that are false. Indeed, the only parts that are true are her statements that Suzhou University is not a first-tier school and that they had published an issue of magazine that contained the "Confessions" article. Alas, neither of which is even helpful to her tall tale.

First of all, once again, her timeline is all wrong. As Professor Perry Link stated, student magazine representatives did meet in Beijing in 1979, on July 15 of that year in fact. This makes it at the end of Fu Ping's first year in college, not "second year." But wait, Fu Ping's Red Maple Society was founded only in the fall of 1979! Oops. Big Oops.

Suzhou University, named Jiangsu Teacher's College at the time, was indeed not a first-tier school. It would be quite remarkable for them to get an invitation to that meeting. The fact is that it wasn't. No school from Jiangsu province attended the meeting. (Incidentally, there was a magazine named Red Maple represented in that meeting, but it was from Jilin University in northern China where red maple trees are much more prominent than Suzhou in the south.)

For those who can read Chinese language, here is a detailed account of what happened at that time from someone who was actually there.

The group had a productive meeting in Beijing and encountered neither Deng Xiaoping nor any political trouble. They then returned to their respective campuses and founded the journal This Generation. If Deng Xiaoping were going to meet them at that time, there would have been neither Wu Gou nor This Generation for him to pick up and pick upon.

However, Fu Ping's tale of Deng Xiaoping's involvement is not entirely made up either. The above account also remembered that, on January 16, 1980, Deng Xiaoping did make a speech criticizing the magazine This Generation, labeling it a counter-revolutionary propaganda, with a copy of that magazine in his hand. Consequently, This Generation ceased to exist after her very first edition.

Fu Ping probably heard of this story and thus conveniently substituted This Generation with her own Wu Gou and claimed the story for herself. When that was exposed, she quickly pivoted and claimed that she "believed the article was selected for This Generation." Her belief proves to be as erroneous as her facts.

Perry Link is once again correct that the only issue of This Generation did not include the article Fu Ping mentioned from Wu Gou, as seen in its table of contents below:

This Generation got into political trouble because of her own contents, having nothing to do with Fu Ping's little group or journal.

Questionable Fact: The Mysterious Shanghai Villa

The Original Story:
In Bend, Not Break, Fu Ping stated that she spent her early childhood in Shanghai and lived together with the Shanghai family in a "grand home," as described on Page 9:

Our family house was peaceful rather than showy, a three-story and three-section villa connecting to a courtyard with a front gate that opened onto the main street of our neighborhood. Surrounding the complex, a stone wall decorated with an ornate iron fence shielded the serene interior from the unpredictable outside world.

And she has a photo to prove it:

Curiously, however, she provided no photo of her family with the house.

On Page 10, she provided a few more details on the location of the house:

1. it is close to the famous Nanjing Road and the headquarters of the Soviet Friendship Society
2. Streetcar Number 24 passed nearby

Later in 1967, Fu Ping made a sneak visit back to Shanghai (Page 118):

I didn't know the villa had been confiscated by the government and divided up. But I found Shanghai Mama in the one room that had been left to her and Papa, on the second floor.

Much later, in 1993, when Fu Ping made her first visit home from America, she found her Shanghai family still lived in the same house (Page 110):

Shanghai Papa complained to me about our villa, where he and Mama continued to live. At the start of the Cultural Revolution, they had been forced into one room. The house had been co-occupied by a newspaper agency and several other families. Slowly the government returned a few more rooms to them, but never the entire house.

The Debunking:

Fu Ping's description of the house being divided up and occupied by others rings true -- it was a common practice during the Cultural Revolution.

The problem? Nobody has been able to locate this house. The headquarters of the Soviet Friendship Society had later become the Shanghai Exhibition Center, which is indeed close to the Nanjing Road. Yet, according to many people who had walked the neighborhood, there was no sign of a house like Fu Ping described.

Could the house have been demolished since then? A house with such a stylish character that had survived to at least 1993 will be more than likely to be preserved. Besides, as recently as February 20, 2013, Fu Ping was quoted by Didi Kirsten Tatlow of the International Herald and Tribune in a complain about her critics:

They smear my name, they try to get my daughter’s name on the Internet, they sent people to Shanghai to surround my family and to Nanjing to harass my neighbors.

Well, it is of course impossible to surround her family in Shanghai if no one could locate the house they live in. But taking at face value, Fu Ping's above accusation clearly indicated that at least some members of her Shanghai family (her Shanghai parents have since passed away) are still living in that villa.

Then, where is this mysterious villa?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Additional reporting by Cindy Hao in Seattle.

IHT: Ensnared in the Trap of Memory

On February 21, 2013, International Herald Tribune published the following letter by Didi Kirsten Tatlow on Fu Ping's book. This is one of the two articles the author published on the same day.

In this letter, the author mentioned an article on People's Daily on March 3, 1983, seemingly justifying Fu Ping's claim of (in)fame. But that was half a year after Fu Ping's alleged arrest.

BEIJING — “I remember we heard a nightingale together, on the boulevard near the Sacred Heart convent. But there are no nightingales in North America.” So wrote Mary McCarthy in “Memories of a Catholic Girlhood,” challenging the reliability of memory. 

Reviewing the book in 1957 in The New York Times, Charles Poore said, “We all add to our memories of childhood appropriate bits of what we have read or heard since then.” 

The fallibility of memory may partly explain the fracas surrounding “Bend, Not Break,” a recently published business-cum-personal memoir by Ping Fu, born in 1958, of growing up in China during the Cultural Revolution, moving to the United States and founding a successful software company called Geomagic. 

Ms. Fu, too, has her “nightingale” moment, in Nanjing. Red Guards, she writes, had sent her there from her childhood home of Shanghai (where she was staying without a residence permit, with relatives) to live at the university where her father taught. (In her narrative, her parents were banished to the countryside soon after she arrived.) There she was forced by Red Guards to watch a teacher “quartered by four horsemen on the soccer field.” 

Details like that have produced a storm of opposition from some Chinese, especially in the United States, who accuse Ms. Fu of lying. 

The Cultural Revolution was bad for many, they agree, but it’s important to be accurate. Ms. Fu’s story simply isn’t. 

“I personally feel that it is very important to use facts and rigid analysis instead of fabricated stories to bridge various knowledge and cultural gaps between China and the outside world,” Kevin Tu, who is Chinese and lives in the United States, wrote in an e-mail. 

“While I can easily enjoy reading books such as ‘Mao’s Great Famine”’ — Frank Dikötter’s account of the brutality of the Great Leap Forward — “I just couldn’t accept the fact someone like Fu Ping intentionally misbehaved for personal gain,” Mr. Tu wrote. 

Accusations are flying in online forums. Calm voices are hard to find. 

Other things the critics don’t believe: that she was “quietly deported” to the United States in 1984 for writing a university thesis about female infanticide; that she was gang-raped by Red Guards. 

On that last point, Ms. Fu said by telephone from the United States, “They are in denial.” 

Rape happened during the Cultural Revolution, she said. She stands by her statement that she was told to leave, though she agrees “deported” wasn’t a good choice of word. 

And Ms. Fu has since said that the quartering by horse was an “emotional memory,” something Ms. McCarthy explored. There may be more admissions to come. “If I have made any factual errors, I’d be more than happy to correct them in the next printing,” she said. 

Her critics will be glad to hear that. Perhaps what’s needed to calm the storm is for Penguin, her publisher, to appoint a fact-checker. 

Yet the difficulty is that the instant something sounds bizarre, closer investigation finds kernels of possible truth. 

She writes that state agents abducted her after they heard about her infanticide paper and that she was detained for three days in stinking conditions. Such things still happen in China. 

Ms. Fu sent me a scanned copy of what she said was a letter from a fellow student, dated May 1982. In the hand-written letter, he mentions that Ms. Fu left university abruptly, without graduating, as all the others were finishing their theses — under mysterious circumstances that classmates gossiped about but didn’t understand. 

He writes that college officials were saying that Ms. Fu had a nervous breakdown after being jilted. A classmate was named as the former boyfriend. 

Ms. Fu said in the interview that this was a cover-up and that in reality she was in political trouble, that her thesis had been secretly passed by a sympathetic teacher to a newspaper and traveled up the chain. Eventually, she said, it caused a national and international scandal about the abuses of the one-child policy. 

In the letter, the classmate wonders if the story about the jilting was true. He writes that he spoke to the jilter “for about an hour” about Ms. Fu, but the man was distant and “He says he was also a victim.” 

By 1983, state news media were reporting on female infanticide. “At present, the phenomena of butchering, drowning and leaving to die female infants and maltreating women who have given birth to female infants have been very serious. It has become a grave social problem,” People’s Daily reported on March 3 of that year, according to a New York Times article dated April 11. 

If it’s difficult to establish the truth, there’s a reason: 37 years after the Cultural Revolution, it’s still impossible to research, discuss or publish about it freely in China. Censorship is harsh — there are well-known people who have much to hide about what they did, some say. Guilt lingers. The result is confusion, despite a deep well of personal memory (memory again!). The field is open for denial, exaggeration and shame. “Proof” is often merely recollection, Ms. McCarthy’s unreliable friend. 

Is Ms. Fu telling the truth, but people just don’t know it? Or are “nightingales” singing in a self-dramatizing narrative? Until China opens its archives and permits open debate, we won’t know. Not for sure. Because even “experts” on China are often wrong. The facts just aren’t available.