SCMP: Chinese College Threatens Libel Suit Against US Author Ping Fu

The following report was published by South China Morning Post on June 14, 2013:

Chinese college threatens libel suit against US author Ping Fu
Wu Nan in Beijing

Chinese-American author Ping Fu may soon be hit by international lawsuits for her controversial memoir Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds, which has been debunked by Chinese academics and critics. 

Fu’s alma mater, Soochow University in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, said on Friday that anecdotes in her memoirs, in which she makes claims that during her time at the university she was arrested for her college research, were “falsehoods” and called on the author to participate in a public debate to clarify the details. 

The university said that if Fu failed to respond and apologise, it would file libel lawsuits both in China and the United States against her. 

“These falsehoods have given both our school and country a poor reputation and caused our alumni and friends to feel deeply incensed,” Soochow University said in a statement. 

The university said earlier this week it had formed an investigation team to examine the controversial book, published in February, after it had received several inquiries from university alumnis and media on the memoir. A staff member of Soochow University told the South China Morning Post that the investigation had gone on for about three months and they would hold a press conference next week to announce the results, with Fu’s then teachers on hand to answer questions from the public. 

The Post first reported in February the doubts raised by academics and readers buying Fu’s book, who questioned the dramatic details in her memoir including what she called the “twisted cultural revolution experience” of studying at Soochow University. One of her controversial anecdotes claimed school officials conducted intrusive physical checks on female students’ periods, supposedly for birth control purposes. 

Other shocking claims in Fu's book include that she was sent to a labour camp at age 8 or 9 with her younger sister during the Cultural Revolution, tortured, gang-raped, and forced into child labour. 

In a 2010 interview with NPR, Fu said that she had, during the Cultural Revolution, witnessed Red Guards execute a teacher by tying each her limbs to horses and having them tear the teacher into pieces, done specifically to frighten the kids into submission.
Heated debate ensued when China’s well-known academic “liar hunter”, Fang Zhouzi, publicly challenged the accuracy and consistency of Fu’s memoirs, after the computer scientist and author conducted interviews with US media in which she occasionally changed details of her claims. Hundreds of Chinese netizens supported Fang’s campaign against the memoir, many of them leaving angry messages on the Amazon page for her book.  

Although she said that she was “shocked, heartbroken and deeply saddened by the smear campaign”, Fu later retracted some of the statements she had made to the media. 

Fu, 55, also responded to critics that her book was an autobiography and that her memories could be wrong. She was backed by her publisher Portfolio, Penguin’s business book imprint. 

Fu, a successful entrepreneur who has served on the US National Advisory Council for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, published her memoir during the time she was appointed Chief Strategy Officer of 3D Systems earlier this year. 

She declared that her story was of a life straddling two worlds in China and America, which she billed as “one person’s journey from nobody to somebody”. 

“It reflects how my past experiences influenced who I am today and how I make decisions as an entrepreneur,” she wrote. 

However her alma mater college Soochow University investigated the memoir by reviewing student records in their archives and interviewing her Fu’s teachers and classmates. They claim this investigation has confirmed facts that contradict details in the book – including records of her attendance at the university without earning a degree, records that she studied English as part of the curriculum, and that there was no enforcement of birth control measures on undergraduate students. 

“This university ultimately concludes that Ping Fu’s relevant narrative in her memoir is factually inaccurate and has damaged the image of Soochow University,” said Soochow University. “(We) reserve the right to take further action.”

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: The Brutal Killing of Teachers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Broken Fact: Fu Ping's Family Tie with Dr. Sun Yat-sen

As an autobiography, Bend, Not Break is remarkably sketchy on Fu Ping's family background. There are no names to be found, either for her two sets of parents or her siblings and relatives, except for her younger sister Fu Hong. But nevertheless, the only significant mention of her ancestry was found to contain a lie.

The Original Story
Near the end of the book, almost in casual passing, Fu Ping stated on Page 261:

As for Nanjing Father, he had been born into a political family. My great-grandfather had been killed during the uprising led by Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of modern China. Dr. Sun had raised my grandfather and grand-uncle as his own sons. 

She goes on to explain that her grandfather and his family fled to Taiwan around 1949 but her father managed to run away and stayed in mainland.

The Changed Story
Tania Branigan and Ed Pilkington of The Guardian were the first to notice this little passage and consulted an expert on Sun Yat-sen. They reported:

One of her most striking claims is that Sun Yat-sen, revered as the father of modern China, "raised my grandfather and granduncle as his own sons" – akin to a Briton being reared by Winston Churchill. Prof John Wong of the University of Sydney, an expert on Sun's life, said he had no knowledge of such wards.  

Fu told the Guardian: "That was what I was told by my family before I left China. I believe this is true. My mother says it's in history books." She then added that Sun was attentive towards them, rather than actually adopting them. 

So Fu Ping quickly changed her story from "Dr Sun raised my grandfather and grand-uncle as his own sons" to "Sun was attentive towards them" while citing her mother as the source.

The Debunking
Although Fu Ping did not mention any names in her book or to The Guardian, she appears to have disclosed them in comments on John Kennedy's blog. If the comment is to be believed, her great grandfather is Fu Cixian (傅慈祥) who indeed died in an uprising in 1900. It is also true that Fu Cixian had two sons, Fu Guangpei (傅光培) and Fu Guangzhi (傅光植). Fu Ping claimed that Fu Guangzhi is her grandfather.

Fang Zhouzi has discovered an old article written by Fu Guangpei in memory of Fu Cixian, in which Fu Guangpei remembers when he met Sun Yat-sen for the first time in 1912, 11 years after the death of Fu Cixian. Sun did not know him but asked for his age and was generally nice to him as an elder. Fu Guangzhi was not mentioned in that article. It is likely that Fu Guangzhi, Fu Ping's grandfather, had never met Sun Yet-sen in person:

一九一二年四月,孙中山先生交卸临时大总统职后,莅临首义之区视察,那时我才十六岁。先父同学刘道仁引我去见孙先生,我问刘怎样称呼? 刘叫我称大总统。我向孙先生鞠躬称大总统。刘向孙先生介绍,这是傅慈祥的儿子。孙先生抚摸着我的头亲切地说: "不要叫我什么总统,叫孙伯伯好了。孙先生问了我的年齡后,嘱我好好读书,继承父志。

Since this is about all Fu Guangpei had to say on his relation with Sun Yet-sen, it is impossible to conclude that the latter had been "attentive towards" the brothers at all, not to mention raising them as his own sons.

Meanwhile, Fu Cixian's widow did receive some financial help, but it was from his former classmate, not Sun Yet-sen:

到癸卯(一九〇三年)那年,我父同学盟友刘道仁到潜江县来找我们,说我们是学生家属已经大赦了。其时我的曾祖母和我的哥哥、姐姐都在逃难中死了,我的母亲带着我和弟弟光植,什么也没有… 刘道仁和吴禄贞给我们母子凑了五百块钱,才得以生活下去。

By the way, according to other documents discovered by Cindy Hao, Fu Guangzhi had two sons by the names of Fu Lin (傅林) and Fu Li (傅里), respectively. On the other hand, the name of Fu Ping's father is Fu Daoli (傅道里). It's not clear whether Fu Daoli was a variation of the name Fu Li.

Fu Daoli was born in 1926 and passed away in February, 2007. Fu Ping's mother lives with Fu Ping to this day. Maybe Fu Ping could ask her to clarify a little more on Sun Yet-sen's attentiveness to her grandfather?

John Kennedy: Some Vindication of Ping Fu and the Malicious Chinese Cyber Trolls "Persecuting" her with Facts

The following post was published by John Kennedy on his blog at South China Morning Post, on February 14, 2013, following a report by the Guardian. What is interesting is that Fu Ping herself appears to have commented on this post on questions of her ancestors, although the identity of the comment author can't be totally ascertained.

Last month, China's most feared fraud detector Fang Zhouzi noticed American entrepreneur Ping Fu making improbable claims in interviews as publicity for her book, "Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds" and went to work debunking them in his trademark meticulous style. 

For people familiar with China's horrendous Cultural Revolution and tumultuous early 1980s, Fang's takedown left little doubt of the veracity of Fu's wilder claims to media, some of which she then retracted, suggesting the record would be set straight if people would just read her book. 

Meanwhile, press coverage of Fu and her book was almost exclusively as uncritical as it was patronising, led by The Daily Beast, Huffington Post, Forbes as well as others. 

Exhaustive attempts were made in comment sections to explain the issue, but Fu's supporters appeared unwilling to listen. Even senior Reuters editor Harold Evans (and husband of Daily Beast founder Tina Brown) turned out to vouch for Fu, calling online appeals to reason a persecution. 

Of course by this time actual internet trolls, the ones who fabricate China's history in the opposite direction, had joined in, but all of this appeared lost on Fu's unquestioning cheerleaders who, variously, dismissed all the feedback as an attack by Chinese internet vigilantes, a coordinated smear campaign against Fu, now placed high "on the vituperative frontline of cyber hostilities between China and the West". 

Ping Fu, the woman in the picture posing with the other Red Guards, who emerged from the Cultural Revolution politically correct enough to be one of the highly privileged few allowed to study abroad in the early 1980s. 

Eventually some sense came into play via The Guardian's Tania Branigan and Ed Pilkington, who took the time to read the book. 

What did they find?

One of her most striking claims is that Sun Yat-sen, revered as the father of modern China, "raised my grandfather and granduncle as his own sons" – akin to a Briton being reared by Winston Churchill. Prof John Wong of the University of Sydney, an expert on Sun's life, said he had no knowledge of such wards. 

Fu told the Guardian: "That was what I was told by my family before I left China. I believe this is true. My mother says it's in history books." She then added that Sun was attentive towards them, rather than actually adopting them. 

In a chapter of her book titled Factory Worker, Fu describes labouring in factories for a decade until schools reopened in 1976. She describes working six hours a day, six days a week and told an interviewer she never went to school in 10 years. 

Experts on the cultural revolution told the Guardian schools mostly reopened in 1968 or 1969 and that pupils had lessons in factories to learn skills, but were not used as labour.

News&Observer: Geomagic Founder Ping Fu Says Chinese Bloggers are Tormenting her over Memoir

The following news was published by the News & Observer on February 23, 2013, which includes an interview with Fu Ping in which she accused her critics as "Internet terrorism":

The way Ping Fu tells the story, she spent years trying not to write a book. 

It was friends and editors who prevailed up on her to tell her life story as a survivor of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution. In her life they saw an inspiring Horatio Alger tale of a near-penniless exile who arrived in the United States in 1984 to become Inc. magazine’s 2005 entrepreneur of the year. 

Today Fu’s name may be better known outside the Triangle than locally. As a founder of Morrisville-based Geomagic, a 3D software imaging company, she was named by President Barack Obama in 2010 to the White House National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. 

Then came her book, “Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds,” published Dec. 31 by Penguin. It chronicles Fu’s forced separation from her family, her decade spent in a re-education center, her experience being gang-raped at 10, and her witness to Red Guards having a teacher drawn-and-quartered by horses. 

The book received favorable reviews in this country, but the reaction in China was unexpected.  

Fu’s memoir was attacked online as a blatant fabrication by a Chinese blogger, Fang Zhouzi, who mobilized legions of sympathetic followers to torpedo Fu’s reputation. He alleged that Fu was no victim but a member of the privileged elite who is exploiting Western ignorance and gullibility. 

The attacks on Fu’s credibility took place in the midst of Geomagic’s pending acquisition by 3D Systems. She says the online offensive is ongoing and could continue for years, based on the attacker’s established pattern. 

Still, in an age of faked memoirs, accusations of fakery can’t be dismissed out of hand. Fu, 54, has been forced to defend herself and validate her account. She has acknowledged that her book contains some typos and errors, but she stands by the integrity of her writing as a personal memoir. 

In a personal plea in the Huffington Post, Fu wrote that the ferocity of the barrage has caused her to relive the emotional abuse of the Cultural Revolution. “This smear campaign reveals the dark side of China,” she wrote. 

In recent months her name has circulated in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The New York Times and other media outlets in a swirling debate about memory, history, victimization and self-reinvention. Last week the Times concluded, indecisively, that “it’s difficult to establish the truth” about Fu’s account as long as China is shackled by censorship and keeps closed its historical archives. 

The Daily Beast, an online news site, decided in Fu’s favor. The news site concluded she is the victim of an organized “hate campaign” being carried out by “an army of Chinese bloggers” who may be abetted by the party and government. “The campaign has morphed into a vindictive effort to destroy her life, to have her honors and awards withdrawn, the pending sale of Geomagic disrupted.” 

Ping Fu spoke to N&O reporter John Murawski last week about her new memoir and the controversy surrounding it. Responses have been edited for length and clarity. 

Q: Where did the idea to write a book come from? 

I talked in the book that (in 2005) I went through a deep training, kind of a psychological and sociology training, and in there I got hypnotized, and I was crying like crazy, and that’s when my floodgate opened the first time. It’s called a Grinnell Leadership Training. He has a hypnotism session, and it’s deep. It’s the first time I experienced that. … I cried through three boxes of tissues. And they asked me why I was crying, and I started talking. … After I came out of the class, I was much more vulnerable and much more open, and that’s when the Inc. reporter was there. I would have never told the Inc. reporter my whole life story if it wasn’t for this session. It opened me up with the past, and it put me in this vulnerable position at the time. … I revealed whatever I remembered basically, and he wrote a big story. That event caused a lot of people following me with interviews, and I was approached by an agent to write a book. I went in, I did some research, I did a proposal, and I decided not to write it. They even assigned me a co-author. We went down that route. We spent a year doing research. We wrote a book proposal. And I pulled out. 

Q: Why did you change your mind? 

I didn’t want to write a book. It was too involved, too painful, and my daughter was too young. She was just becoming a teenager, and I didn’t want to subject her to the Cultural Revolution at that time. 

Q: How was the book idea later revived? 

Then my daughter turned 18, and she went to college. And somehow I had a lot of time in the evenings and weekends. You suddenly have an empty nest. And that just triggered me to write a book. My new co-author knows a lot about China. … She’s a ghost writer for the Dalai Lama’s book also, and she’s a Buddhist. … She takes a look at my material, and she says, “Oh my God, I’ve never seen anything like this. You should write this book. I would really like to help you. Why don’t we write a business book? It’s really easy. Let’s pick eight principles of Ping.” … The second thing that happened was I wanted to not write – again. I wasn’t sure I wanted to write a book. So I wanted to withdraw. 

Q: What happened this time? 

I’m an introvert. I never really wanted to write a book. I don’t have a strong incentive to write a book. … It’s a lot of work. So half-way through it, I don’t like what the book is. 

Q: How did the book project evolve? 

I needed to change the voice. I needed to write this book like I’m sitting on the kitchen counter telling the story to my daughter. So that evolved into adding more of the past into the book. So it’s at that point that I committed to writing the book – because I suddenly I felt like it’s a book worth writing. … I was also trying to show in this book the in-between spaces where the opportunity lies. So the two worlds are China and America, which have different ideologies, but at end the two big countries have a lot of similarities. Two mothers, one is very loving, one’s very analytical. And two fields of study, art and science. And what happened when I combined those – I was trying to show the opportunity lies between the extremes. It end up to be a business memoir because more than half of it is about business, entrepreneurship. 

Q: Did you expect Chinese nationalists to attack your credibility? 

This caught me totally by surprise. I thought maybe there would be some negative grumblings, but I never expected anything like this. 

Q: How do you explain the intensity of the attacks against you? 

Forbes did an interview with me, and Forbes translated that interview in Chinese. The translation had some errors in there. … But what really happened is the Forbes article comes one day after The New York Times broke the story about the (Chinese) hackers. My attack comes one day after. 

Q: What do you think is Fang Zhouzi’s motive? 

He even said in his second or third posting, he said, “I don’t care about Ping being the casualty, what I’m going after is Western Media.” So he mobilized a lot of people to assault every media outlet that’s here. 

Q: How did the attacks operate? 

I’ll give you an example on Amazon. My book probably had 37 five-star, all-good reviews the first week I was on a book tour. Within a week the amount of smear they had showered me with was twice as much as Michael Jackson’s book, “Untouchable.” The whole site is smeared. If customers don’t know me, why would they buy the book? It’s entirely negative reviews. 

Q: How did Fang Zhouzi affect your book sales? 

Tanked, totally. Totally tanked. I was selling 1,500 copies a day before this started. 

Q: And after the attacks? 

Just few copies a day. 

Q: What’s your take on this experience? 

This is Internet terrorism. It’s people hiding behind the Internet being extremely cruel to me. They try to smear my reputation, damage my personal life. They’ve done so many things. My ex-husband’s email from Austria and my daughter’s email from college, they put it on Internet and tell people to send them hate mail. 

Q: Has it affected your personal life? 

I have my security software coming up much more often. It used to be twice a year saying it’s catching something. Now I get it three times a day. It will jump up and say some malicious thing wants to get into your email. There’s high activity of something trying to get into my computer. So my assistant had changed all of my passwords, they came to my house and changed everything. 

Q: Do you ever wish you had stuck to your initial instinct and not written this book? 

I don’t regret writing the book, but I don’t like the experience because I’m reliving what happened to me when I was 8 years old. I’ve been publicly denounced, publicly humiliated, which is what happens in the Cultural Revolution. I don’t like those people bringing the Cultural Revolution to America. Who gave them the right to invade my privacy? Or attacking other people, or suppressing other people’s opinion? Who gives them a right to try to silence me in this way? 

Q: The critics claim they are suppressing lies and promoting truth. 

I always said it’s not about absolute truth. It’s a memory. Who can get 50 years of memory right? It’s a memoir. It’s what I remember. It’s my experience. It’s my story. I have a right to tell my story my way. I’m not writing a history book, I’m not an investigative journalist. I’m not a scholar of the Cultural Revolution. 

I wasn’t trying to be perfect. I was trying to be authentic and honest. 

Q: How do you explain so many people joining this online campaign against you? 

I must have stepped on some nerves, obviously, otherwise it wouldn’t have created this much emotion. What I learned is a lot of time when I read those very hurtful comments, those people are telling their own story. They’re angry. And somehow they use this forum to express their own anger or their own hurt. It isn’t even about my story. It makes me think that the Cultural Revolution has been over for many years, but it’s still very fresh in people’s minds. I have gone through the Grinnell Leadership, and opening up, and talking about it, and writing a book. It’s a healing process. And it was painful for me to write it. Those people have not gone through that. So through my book, it’s bringing out the anger, the frustration that maybe they experienced in their life. So I want to extend my compassion to them. 

I am still trying to get a handle on what happened.

Fang Zhouzi: Fu Ping's Two Memoirs in Two Worlds

The following post was published by Fang Zhouzi in his blog on February 27, 2013. It compares Bend, Not Break with an earlier autobiography, Drifting Bottle, Fu Ping published in China in 1996.

　　傅苹在去年年底出的英文回忆录《弯而不折》其实是她的第二本书。在1996年她已出过一本中文回忆录，不过是在国内出的（湖北少年儿童出版社出版），书名叫《漂流瓶——旅美散记》。这两本回忆录描述的傅苹生活截然不同。在把它们进行比较之前，我们先要说明《漂流瓶》的体裁不是虚构的小说，而是回忆散文：书的副标题叫“旅美散记”，书前的内容提要称“这部散文真实、生动地记叙了一位中国留学生的旅美经历”，书中附有很多张傅苹及其家人、朋友的照片以证明其所写都是真人真事，后记还交代了文中提到的真人真事的现状，傅苹在今年1月接受美国电台采访时说她在中国出的这本书是介绍她在美国的生活（http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/2013/jan/14/bend-not-break-china-america/ ）。 

　　虽然这本回忆散文主要内容是关于傅苹的美国生活的，但是也时不时地会提及其在中国的生活。从这些回忆中，我们看到了一个与其英文回忆录完全不同的傅苹： 

　　一、傅苹从小在南京长大 

　　傅苹在其英文回忆录中声称自己从小就寄养在上海姨妈家里，把姨父、姨妈当爸爸、妈妈，直到8岁时文革爆发被红卫兵赶回南京，才知道南京有其亲身父母，而且与亲身父母的关系一直不好，内心还是把姨父、姨妈当成“上海爸爸”、“上海妈妈”。 

　　但是在中文回忆录中，傅苹没有一个字提到上海姨妈、姨父，也没有一个字提到自己小时候在上海生活。相反地，她说：“我是在大学校园长大的，校外那条有名的南京御道街是古代皇帝经过的道路，所以才叫御道街。”（p.15）“这是午朝门，离我家很近，我小时候常在这儿玩呢。”（p.88） 

　　近日傅苹接受《博讯》采访时声称：“自己的亲爷爷在傅苹出生前到了台湾，傅光培是她曾祖父傅慈祥的长子，因此傅光培是她的‘户口’意义上的祖父。”并附了一张她几岁时傅光培抱着她在宿舍楼照相的照片。如果傅苹是被上海姨妈、姨父收养的，由于姨妈、姨父都与傅光培无血缘关系，在当时在任何意义上傅光培都不是其祖父。 

　　二、傅苹从小在父母身边生活，并和其他小孩一起受教育 

　　傅苹在其英文回忆录中声称，她在1966年被赶回南京后，她的父母都被送去改造，她和妹妹单独生活了5年，到1971年时她母亲才回家，而她父亲则等到1976年四人帮倒台后才回家，在文革期间她父亲一直在东北伐木。在十年间傅苹没有在学校受教育，而是在工厂制作收音机和计速仪，一周工作6天，一天工作6小时，每天学习2小时毛主席语录。 

　　但是在中文回忆录中，傅苹一直就在父母身边长大。请看她回忆的一段小时候趣事：“记得小时候，老师最喜欢给我们出的作文题就是《我的理想》。当然啦，做作文的时候必须正儿八经地咬文嚼字，写得文采飞扬。所以，文章中的理想总是写得很崇高的。在家里就不一样了，有一天，我忽然对爸爸妈妈宣称，我的理想是做一个开三轮车的司机。这可把他们吓了一跳。中国的父母都希望自己的子女长大干大事业，有出息，所谓望子成龙嘛。这种小三轮车是很多个体户跑单帮用的，行动起来不但蹦蹦蹦地吵声不断，屁股后面还冒着黑烟，我们叫它‘放屁虫’。”（p.15）接下来她提到这种三轮车是开在南京御道街上的。 

　　《我的理想》这种作文通常是小学生写的，长大想当三轮车司机这种不懂事的理想也是幼儿园或小学生才会有的。所以这里说的“小时候”应指的是上小学的时候，也就是说，傅苹受过和同时代人一样的小学教育，写过相似的作文，而且当时爸爸妈妈都在身边听她讲述理想。 

　　三、傅苹从小没有吃过苦 

　　傅苹在英文回忆录中把自己的童年描写得悲惨无比，受到红卫兵的虐待，10岁时遭到十几个红卫兵的轮奸、毒打，在工厂当童工。 

　　但是在中文回忆录中，傅苹写自己为赚钱去给一个美国家庭打扫卫生，擦地板很辛苦，受了雇主的气，按理说这和她上述的悲惨童年比根本不算什么，但是她却说：“我在我的国家也是教授的女儿，被父母宠爱，何曾吃过这般苦，可是苦又算得了什么，气才真正受不了呢。”（p.11）这说明傅苹从小就是娇生惯养的教授女儿，何曾吃过什么苦？ 

　　四、傅苹没有被越南华人绑架 

　　傅苹在英文回忆录中，声称自己刚到美国，抵达目的地新墨西哥州阿尔伯克基市时，在机场被一个越南华人绑架去给他的子女当“妈妈”，被关了三个晚上，第四天才被警察救出。 

　　但是在中文回忆录中，傅苹在美国遭到的最大苦头就是打工，最大的奇遇就是谈三角恋爱和在高速公路开车爆胎，遇见的最悲惨的事是同屋的中国留学生摔断了腿却住不起医院，但对这段被绑架历险记只字不提，相反地，还说她到阿尔伯克基市第三天，就去和一个在南京时的邻居凯利约会去了，并抱怨说：“我来了三天，他才迟迟地与我联系，似乎有点过于冷淡。”(p.38)即使她记错了时间，把第四天记成了第三天，那么她那三天里处于与世隔绝的状态，凯利想要联系她也联系不上，她怎么会去怪他过于冷淡呢？可见她到阿尔伯克基市就一直处于别人能联系上她的正常状态，所谓被绑架，是胡编的。 

　　五、傅苹刚到美国时英语口语相当不错 

　　傅苹在英文回忆录中，声称她刚到美国时只懂三个英语单词，因为语言不通没法做任何交流，连飞机上的饭都不敢向美国空姐要。 

　　但是在中文回忆录中，傅苹两次提到她在国内时背过英语九百句，而且背熟了，一到美国就全派上了用场（p.2, p.7）。她去语言学校报到时，能用英语介绍自己“你好，我的名字叫傅苹”，能对叫简爱的老师说比较复杂的英语：“简爱，这名字真好，我很喜欢那本文学名著。”能用国内学的英语应付分班考试：“在国内学的一点点英文似乎可以应付一大半的考试题，我暗自得意起来。”（p.2）根据考试的结果，她被分到了中级班。(p.4) 

　　那么对这两个截然不同的版本，我们应该相信哪一个呢？在中文回忆录的前言中，傅苹说她父母亲帮助校对誊抄，即该书关于其国内的生活部分的真实性是经过她父母认可的。其对她小时候生活的回忆，对她在美国学习、打工的介绍，与其他人的经历相似，没有离奇之处（关于她在美国的经历可能有夸张的地方，但也不算太离谱）。所以很显然，她的中文回忆录要比英文回忆录可信得多。 

　　那么会不会是因为要在中国出版，所以不敢直写悲惨故事呢？她在英文回忆录里的那些离奇故事，父母文革期间受迫害，自己和妹妹相依为命，到美国时只会三个英语单词，在美国遭到绑架等，都不是什么敏感、犯忌的内容，没有必要回避。如果真的发生过，并写下来的话，不影响其出版，只会增加该书的可读性。 

　　所以傅苹自己也很清楚，她胡编自己在中国的生活，很难骗过中国人，用中文写作时，就要老实得多。她当时在学校工作，没有经商、没有名气，也就还没有编造自己的人生传奇的动机。但是等到她创建了公司，有了名气，面对美国人时，就可以迎合美国人对中国的想像信口开河编造自己的励志故事了，在这种时候美国人、美国媒体很容易骗。她没有料到的是她在英文世界的这些信口开河会引起中国人的注意，她17年前在中文世界出的回忆录还会被挖出来，两个世界的回忆录放在了一起，明明白白地揭示了一个骗子的真面目。

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。

William Poy Lee: Bent & Twice Broken: Penguin China-bashes to Protect Ping Fu's Flawed "Memoir"

The following post by William Poy Lee was published on the Red Room on February 25, 2013:

On January 20, 2013, Tina Brown's The Daily Beast/Newsweek recommended Ping Fu's new memoir, Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds.   Ms. Brown then double-barreled her recommendation on NPRs Word of Mouth feature, Tina Browns' Must-Reads: Hidden Lives. 

But then, as the Chinese New Year rolled out, a long, hot string of firecrackers exploded in outrage at Ping Fu's apocryphal Cultural Revolution memories.  Not a way to start the Lunar New Year! 

For those of you who may not know about Ping Fu or her memoir, Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds, here's what Amazon.com says, in part: 

Book Description
"Ping Fu knows what it's like to be a child soldier, a factory worker, and a political prisoner. To be beaten and raped for the crime of being born into a well-educated family. To be deported with barely enough money for a plane ticket to a bewildering new land. To start all over, without family or friends, as a maid, waitress, and student. 

Ping Fu also knows what it's like to be a pioneering software programmer, an innovator, a CEO, and Inc. magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year. To be a friend and mentor to some of the best-known names in technology. To build some of the coolest new products in the world. To give speeches that inspire huge crowds. To meet and advise the president of the United States.
It sounds too unbelievable for fiction, but this is the true story of a life in two worlds." 

                      China's Rambunctious Netizens Overwhelm Amazon.com
Then along comes the Facts Calvary - China's ever alert netizens (those outspoken citizens of the internet). Unexpectedly placing Ping Fu's narrative of her wretched childhood as a Red Guard detainee under a microscope...they mostly decide these chapters are, well, “too unbelievable…" 

China's netizens are the same cast of vigilant e-iconoclasts who are a thorn in the side of Chinese officialdom. Mostly young, the netizens with the most followers, often in the millions, are in the mid-40s, 50s, and 60s. They network together to uncover facts and even pioneered a bizarrely named collaborative investigative technique, the “human–flesh search engine,” where unrelated netizens rapidly search for, share and verify information on corrupt officials, hit-and-run drivers, bogus academic credentials, and more benignly, the identity of celebs in random photos.  And then blog, network, tweet and retweet their findings to millions throughout China.  

Three well known investigations include identifying an official who ostentatiously displays expensive wrist watches publicly. Netizens pooled news photos of "Brother Watch" flashing two dozen high end watches, unaffordable at his salary, and he was promptly fired.  Similarly, netizens outed an "Uncle House," who owned over 20 houses on a limited salary.  

Finally, Twenty year old Guo Meimei initially claiming to be the General Business Manager of the Red Cross Society posted photos of her luxury car, expensive stand-alone villa, and trendy clothes. Through the human flesh search engine technique, netizens established links between her and Red Cross upper management and later thwarted her attempt to flee to Australia by bombarding the Australian Embassy to deny her a visa. 

These netizens are same net-savvy Chinese who post on-line one-step ahead of Chinese censors on any number of hot topics and who also contributed to the dissident artist Ai Wei-wei's income tax evasion fine. 

                                       ZhouZi Fang, Lone-Ranger Myth-Buster
In particular, China's most illustrious, incorrigible, myth-busting investigator and the pit-bull scourge of fellow professors and CEOs with specious scientific credentials, the biochemist and science writer, Zhouzi Fang, picked up his own magnifying glass and could not verify Ms. Ping Fu's recounting of the circumstances of her forced exile from China. Fang is the joint winner of the 2012 John Maddox Prize for science, an award jointly sponsored by Nature Magazine and a British foundation, Sense About Science. 

Further, ZhouZi Fang questioned Ping Fu's lurid account of witnessing a female teacher's execution by being drawn-and-quartered by four Red Guards astride four horses. Fang pointed out the 4-horse method was Western, that the ancient Chinese used 5-horse-drawn carriages.  Confronted with Fang’s findings and cultural differentiation, Ping Fu subsequently admitted this dramatic execution never happened, but attributed it to sincerely held "emotional memory." 

                            Lin, Outraged First Position Amazon Blogger
But the Amazon.com netizen who really catalyzed the Chinese blogosphere reaction is a native-born Chinese person named Lin, now resident in the United States. On January 31, 2012, Lin's outraged and yet well-presented point-by-point critique of the book, posted on Amazon.com, raised factual, cultural, and historical issues. She writes in Chinese and English...or I should say in a localized version of English called Chinglish. It's not quite  Elements of Style, but understandable. 

Over the years, I have read English postings by ostensibly paid or blindly patriotic Chinese bloggers.  You can usually sniff them out by their sweeping jingoism. But Lin's bi-lingual critique rang authentic, even if not every point might withstand the exchange that would and did follow, and even as replete with Chinglishy misspellings and grammatical errors. Here's Lin first two paragraphs: 

I don't believe her story
我不相信她的故事 

As a Chinese, I lived through that period of time in China. I have similar family and educational background as hers and suffered during Culture Revolution as a child. I think her experiences in China mostly, if not all, are fabricated, imagined, overly exaggerated or deliberately miss leading.
作为一个中国人，我经历过那个时代。我和她有着类似的家庭，教育背景，我们都在童年经历了文化大革命的磨难。我认为她大多数（如果不是全部的）在中国的经历是伪造的，想象的，过度夸大和故意误导.   

For days, Amazon.com kept Lin's post in first position in the readers' comments section. As the book sank from a high rating of 5 towards the low rating of 1, pressure was placed onAmazon.com to place the newest post first, which would effectively bury Lin’s critique. Amazon's initial position was Lin's comment would sit tight -  it garners the most “helpful” ratings. 

Lin's post should stay in first position - it is thoroughly helpful to understanding and analyzing the furor. However, as of Sunday, February 17th, 2013, Presidents Day weekend, Lin's post has chronologically slid down to Page 5...and counting. You can still read the mesmerizing complete bilingual posting on http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_9450a80f0101gctt.html 

Note that Lin does not seek to bury the brutality of the Cultural Revolution, but insists that any recounting merely be factually accurate. And isn’t this what distinguishes a work of memoir from a work of fiction or partial fiction…the litmus test of James Frey’s discredited  A Million Little Pieces and Greg Mortenson's fabrications inThree Cups of Tea? 

Well, by President’s Day Weekend, the smoke and furor thinned somewhat.  My guess is this is but a lull between rounds of a PR boxing match that will go the full twelve.  But here is what I could make out that Sunday: 

1. Ping Fu, as author, has admitted to a number of critical factual errors unacceptable in a memoir. A key one revolves around the dates of her dramatic departure from China and more dramatic arrival in America. She ascribes them to an unknown editor, that they will be corrected in a second edition. 

2. Ping Fu has admitted to one particularly memoir-sinking fabrication - of being forced to watch four Red Guards on horses drawing and quartering a female teacher on a university field. She now ascribes this false memory to "emotional memory:" 

"To this day, in my mind, I think I saw it. That is my emotional memory of it. After reading's Fang's post, I think in this particular case that his analysis is more rationale and accurate than my memory. Those first weeks after being separated from both my birth parents and my adoptive parents were so traumatic, and I was only eight years old..."   Huffington Post/Books, posted 02/01/2013, 10:36 pm, by Ping Fu. 

The obvious problem is just what other chapters are false emotional memory? And what other childhood stories - even events with verifiable dates, places, and names – may have been emotionally distorted? 

3. The strident Chinese netizens have invaded America's blogosphere. Like the Allies' landing in Normandy on D-Day, they aim to see this through. In doing so, they question the fairness of American institutions such as publishers and media, unexamined biases towards modern China and Chinese, and the penchant of American publishers and the reading public to literally buy the worst unchecked narratives of China, turning them into best sellers. In fact, Bend, Not Break made the NY Times extended best seller list. 

And you know what, Americans can’t stand this invasion into our sacred homeland blogosphere. 

4. Penguin is not recalling the book, admitting at most to minor errors correctable in the second edition.  Following the debacles of A Million Little Pieces and Three Cups of Tea, inspirational "truthiness," even if sincerely held or authentically felt, is no longer a defense. If it is not a memoir, you pull it off the shelves. If you keep it on the shelves, then place a big, fat, red FICTION sticker on it. You can also later republish it as fiction, as unpalatable as that may be. Or republish it as memoir when corrected and re-vetted.

                     New School Penguin: The Best Defense is An Offense
Bend Not Break still is a good read, as I can attest, even as flawed. It will be a better read when subject to the gauntlet of a newly stringent, factual due diligence. (In the spirit of full disclosure, my memoir, The Eighth Promise (2007), Rodale, went through a thorough fact and libel check, checking newspaper archives at UC Berkeley, colleague and family recollections, readers of the Advance Readers Copy, the publisher, and the publisher's legal firm). 

Given the errors, you would think the good old school literary name of Penguin, would owe up, correct the book and reissue it. 

Penguin has done none of the above. Instead, it has doubled down on its investment, deciding that the best defense is offense and in this, the offensive strategy - and offensiveness - of China-bashing. In doing so, the PR strategy conflates all Chinese critics of her book into a modern mob, reminiscent of Ping Fu's childhood Red Guard tormentors, and that China is once again persecuting Ping Fu.  Never mind that China has no official position on her book. Never mind also that quite a few American readers, like me, are critical of Ping Fu’s large and small errors – and the nagging suspicion that this was not a factually well-vetted memoir and possibly even somewhat carelessly written by the co-authors, the second being a Meimei Fox.  Never mind also that in defending Ping Fu’s individual right to express herself, Penguin’s PR offense now dismisses legitimate individual critiques as part of a racial feeding frenzy. 

To Ping Fu's credit, she initially tried to respond to Lin personally, offering to take their discussion off-line. Lin refused, insisting the author post her responses on her Amazon's author section where all could read it. 

Then, Ping Fu  agreed to be re-interviewed by a now more skeptical Forbes Magazine writer, Jenna Goudreau (Forbes.com – January 31, 2013).  Incidentally, Goudreau's initial glowing interview, posted on-line in Forbes China, independently generated its own furor from Chinese netizens. 

As we know, Goudreau's second Forbes interview did not go so well for the book's efficacy. 

On February 2, 2013, Ping Fu came fully on board with the PR line. The basically admirable Ping Fu now denies the investigative merits of ZhangYi Fang and the individuality of the netizen Lin, whose Amazon post kicked off the furor, by relegating all comments as  "…smear campaign…" and elsewhere as a "…smear campaign that reveals the dark side of China..." Sad, But Not Broken, Huffington Post, Posted 02/01/2013 10:41 pm.   

She ends this Huffington Post submission by the oxymoronic defense of her individual right to erroneous self-expression in the factual genre of memoir, so long as the emotional memories are authentically felt, even if false memory. 

"I am human. This is a human story. I have made mistakes in my life, as we all have. That doesn't make the story untrue. This is my life. I carry the scars. This is my story. I tell it, authentically, in the book." 

I would have felt better if Ping Fu had said instead, "I tell it, factually, in my book."   

In my estimation, this posting has the rhetorical slipperiness of PR handlers. At the time, I felt that if left to her devices, Ping Fu would do differently and might do better. 

But then, that same day, Ping Fu tweeted links to two articles, in the first tweet that the Washington Post had been targeted by Chinese hackers and in the second tweet quoting Google's Eric Schmidt opinion that "...China is the world's 'most sophisticated' hacker.'"
Her #tag is @pfgeomagic. There is no explanation of how public-minded Chinese netizens transparent outrage are connected to paid clandestine government hackers. 

Tina Brown's The Daily Beast/Newsweek also doubled down on the side of Bend, Not Break. An article entitled The Persecution of Ping Fu,  by Sir Harold Evans (posted Feb. 11th, 2013 4:45 a.m. EST) simultaneously canonizes Ping Fu and is a hit piece against her Chinese critics: "…a vituperative campaign led against Ping Fu led by an army of Chinese bloggers…”  His prose gets even more purple.  

Interestingly, Sir Evans makes no mention of Zhangzi Fang, co-winner of the 2012 John Maddox Prize and investigative debunker, his researched findings, or of Ping Fu's admission that the execution by drawing and quartering never happened. 

As for Lin, the former No. 1 position Amazon.com poster, Sir Evans’ sole concern seems to be how to check off her gender box - "Male, female or hermaphrodite..." He never addresses any of Lin's critiques or Ping Fu's subsequent admissions of error. As an aside, Lin is a mother of two who lives in the US. 

Sir Evans then misrepresents the role of the so-called human-flesh search engine as a Chinese method of subjecting people to “…lacerating personal attacks…"  Unfortunately it does sound like an app made for zombies, and Sir Evans, a skilled rhetorician who should know better (he is an editor-at-large for Reuters and author of The American Century), plays off this and never mentions its more usual collaborative use against corruption. 

Sir Evans also seems to confuse all Chinese Americans as those who have recently immigrated from the People’s Republic of China, i.e., first generation and ostensibly feeling quite a bit of loyalty to the Good Old Motherland.  He may be surprised to know that millions of Americans of Chinese heritage are as far along as third, fourth, and even fifth generation – like me. 

The Guardian Weighs In 

Then on February 13, 2013,  The Guardian, an English newspaper, sensibly did what The Daily Beast/Newsweek could just have easily done - they interviewed academic experts in Sydney, London, California, and Beijing, on the cultural, historical, and factual controversies raised by Lin and echoed by fellow Chinese netizens. The Guardian article casts doubt on several new assertions: 

1. Sun Yat-sen, the George Washington of China, "...raised my grandfather and grand uncle as his own sons."; 

2. Children like her were forced to work 6 hours a day, 6 days a week in a factory;  

3. Deng Xiaoping sat down with leaders of student publications including her magazine, Red Maple; and 

4. Infanticide occurred on the large scale alleged by Ping Fu. 

                                                               Is the Jig Up?
I had emailed The Daily Beast's rave review onto a young Chinese woman friend currently spending a year at Columbia University researching American media and auditing related classes.  She majors in Economics and American Studies. After gobbling up the book, this lecturer at the prestigious Beijing Foreign Studies University enthusiastically ordered three copies to gift to friends in China. She then happily weibo'ed  her 2-thumbs-up to her following in China. Weibo is of course the equivalent of Twitter in China. Later, she even defended her belief in Ping Fu over the Chinese blogosphere. 

And how did my young Chinese Professorial friend take the continuing denouement? 

I truly thought that this book is a great inspiration and consolation for those who struggle in their life. Yet, without authenticity, this won't work. Why doesn't Ping respond to those questions one by one, with facts and evidence, or at least for those unprovable, a reasonable explanation?” 

                                           Those Invading Chinese Netizens
Welcome to the globalization of the blogosphere.  It may surprise Americans that Chinese actually care about how Americans view China or that Chinese are endlessly fascinated by American culture and society, that they watch complete seasons of American TV series (Sex and the City, Friend, Prison Break, and Desperate Housewives) and the latest  movies. Because of mandatory English as a second language, many of the younger generation read, write and speak English (although generally in a Chinglishy grammatical style as I can attest from four years of teaching.)   No wonder that Chinese netizens can so freely flow over into our blogosphere.  And when Americans equally make it a point to learn Chinese, we’re return the favor. 

But for now, my fellow Americans, read the comments on both Amazon.com and B&N.com. Yes, there is now angry, lynch-mob ire - which Penguin's defenders focus exclusively on. But there is also many good faith, meritorious postings, which Penguin now seeks to discredit through China-bashing.  In actuality, quite a few questioning posts are by fellow Americans, like me. I early on rated the book a "3" due to concerns of accuracy. 

Most recently, there is a counter-campaign by posters of top 5 ratings on Amazon.com. So,  the blogosphere had momentarily boiled down to an East-West divide, pithily captured in this Amazon.com posting: 

            1.0 out of 5 stars A Memoir Dividing Two Worlds, February 16, 2013
                                    By Lenny - See all my reviews
1-star: Some of Ping Fu's stories told in her book don't seem to be true.
5-star: It is a very inspiring book! 

1-star: Some of Ping Fu's stories are not true and my doubts are supported by the evidence provided by many reviewers.
5-star: She is a courageous woman! 

1-star: There are discrepancies between the book and her interviews with different media outlets.
5-star: Ping Fu's book is honest and fascinating. 

1-star: Ping Fu claims that she became a factory worker in China when she was 10 years old, but recently she made contradictory statement by saying "I also did not say I was a factory worker."
5-star: You are jealous of her success and fame. 

1-star: Ping Fu has admitted that the description of Red Guards killing a teacher by tying the victim to four horses for dismembering during the Cultural Revolution was an "emotional memory" and probably wrong.
5-star: I truly enjoyed reading her book and will give it to my children to read. 

1-star: Many reviewers had a similar life experience to that of Ping Fu's in China but they do not believe many of her claims.
5-star: An excellent book! 

1-star: You need to come up with solid evidence to prove those doubts on Ping Fu are groundless and wrong. You are not doing a very good job in defending her.
5-star: You must have been hired by the Chinese government to carry out this smear campaign against her. 

1-star: As a friend of Ping Fu's, is it possible that you might have a bias?
5-star: "Haven't you got an iPad to make or something?" "I will leave you all bending and not breaking the english language." 

1-star: Many reviewers think Ping Fu has knowingly made up sensational stories for her personal gain, and they think she is a liar.
5-star: Free speech must triumph! 

                                                             Conclusion
The controversy over Ping Fu's memoir is a big story. But the much bigger and more troubling story is how the Penguin Group refuses to conduct a fresh, independent factual due diligence, and then, as it now seems inevitable, to do the right thing – recall, correct, and reissue. 

It may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, for a book recall of this size.  Consumers may even file class action suits for refunds, as some did against “A Million Little Pieces.”  But it's the ethical step. 

But despite The Guardian revelations, both Ping Fu and Penguin are still spinning. Ping Fu's new take is she now realizes her Chinese critics were not smearing her, but were merely reciting their own Cultural Revolution stories, not questioning hers. She actually hopes "...we can heal together." 

As of today, February 25, 2013, it turns out Ping Fu had a first American husband she never mentioned.  Also, her memoir describes a dramatic 3-day kidnapping on her first day in America. Later freed by Albuquerque, New Mexico police, she reported her ordeal through a translator. Local police have not been able to find a confirming incident report to date. 

Adrian Zackheim, publisher of Penguin's business imprint, Portfolio, opines that there are only "...minor mistakes..." that will be corrected in the second edition. 

And you know what, it looks like Penguin is getting away with it. 

I look forward to Ping Fu’s next book: “Conscience: Leased-Out But Not Sold.” 

                                                              - The End -
William Poy Lee is the author of a memoir, The Eighth Promise, an independent writer, and member of the California bar. He has resided in Beijing for over 3-1/2 years where he teaches English, tries to understand Modern China on its terms while measuring it against his Western values and sensibilities, and has fun. He taught English to university level Tibetans in Lhasa during the summer of 2010. 

Special Thanks to Xiu Chen for her spot-research and knowledge of modern China, especially of the lively Chinese blogosphere.

Fang Zhouzi: The Depravation of Sir Harold Evans

The following post was published by Fang Zhouzi on his blog on February 21, 2013 and was immediately translated into English by xgz. This post is a direct response to Sir Harold Evans' article on The Daily Beast.

Harold Evans is a famous British journalist. How famous is he? In 2000, he was named one of International Press Institute's 50 World Press Freedom Heroes of the past fifty years. In 2004, he was knighted by the Queen for services to journalism. When he was a young man, he was a well-known British investigative reporter. He was the first to report many of the headline events of the day, and earned his reputation for his sense of justice and his daring reporting. Later he emigrated to the United States, served as editor-in-chief for the Atlantic Monthly, and then for U.S. News and World Report. Currently he is editor-at-large for Reuters. His wife Tina Brown is also a heavyweight of the U.S. press, an editor for both Newsweek and the Daily Beast. 

This greatly respected sage of the Western press, recently wrote a commentary on the Daily Beast titled "the persecution of Ping Fu." In this commentary he denounced the criticism of Ping Fu's memoir by world-wide Chinese community as a persecution of her. Evans' wife Tina Brown has been an important supporter of Ping Fu. She had promoted Ping Fu's memoir on the National Public Radio in the United States. Her newspaper, the Daily Beast, has also been heavily promoting the book. This newspaper was among the first to publish a report of the criticism of Ping Fu, but it quoted the criticism out of context in an attempt to label the criticism as an organized smear campaign, in clear violation of journalistic ethics. Evans had himself conducted an interview of Ping Fu on behalf of Reuters, but never questioned the legend-like stories told by Ping Fu. So it is no surprise that he would come out again and continue to speak on behalf of Ping Fu. What is surprising, however, is the horrific writing style and journalistic incompetency displayed by him that is completely at odds with his sagely image in the field of journalism. 

Evans focused on the large number of one-star reviews on the Amazon website of Ping Fu's memoir Bend, not Break. Initially, Ping Fu's memoir received mostly five-star (highest) reviews, written by Americans. At the end of last month, hundreds of negative reviews, most apparently written by Chinese Americans, began to appear and pulled the average rating to less than 2 stars. This seemingly unusual phenomenon actually has a very simple explanation: at the end of last month, I began to criticize Ping Fu's memoir (Note by translator: on microblog, a Chinese version of twitter), which attracted attention to this book. Because I have a lot of followers on microblog (Note by translator: Fang Zhouzi has a few million followers on microblog), it is not surprising that a few hundred of them who are also Amazon users would go there and write negative book reviews. But this was not how Evans thought. He intentionally made no mention of my name in the article (Why is it intentionally? Because previous reports about the incident, including the The Daily Beast reports and Ping Fu's response either named me explicitly, or referred to my article implicitly, so it is impossible for Evans to not know), but attributed the emergence of a large number of negative book reviews to two possible reasons: 

1. Sockpuppets. Evans claimed that, one only needs an e-mail account to post a book review on the Amazon website. Thus, a person can use multiple mailboxes to register more than one account, posing as two people, 20 people, or even 100 people writing different book reviews. He complained bitterly about Amazon's "openness" and its ineffective handling of complaints. As a former investigative reporter, Evans did not even bother to check the basic requirements set up by Amazon to post book reviews there. It takes more than an email address to post book reviews on Amazon. One must also have purchased something through the Amazon website (not necessarily the book being reviewed). Through the purchase, the user will have already left a real name and address with Amazon. Although book reviews can be posted with a pseudonym, but the identity of the reviewer is real. It is very hard for a user who post comments on Amazon to have two accounts, let alone one hundred accounts. 

Lin was the first negative reviewer of Ping Fu's memoir on Amazon, and continued to add the most detailed discussion to her review. Her review had the most comments and was rated most useful by readers, thus was automatically placed at the top of the web page. This brought special attention from Evans, who attacked Lin with the horrible line "Male, female, or hermaphrodite." Lin herself said in her book review that she is a woman, and this can be easily verified by Amazon. Evans also claimed that although the book review written by Lin was negative, she gave a fake five star. There had been some negative reviews that gave five stars for irony, but Lin's review had always been one-star. It is clear that Evans did a very sloppy journalistic work. After repeated complaints from Ping Fu's PR team, Amazon deleted Lin's review on grounds of being "visually disruptive." Lin later posted a new review with an ironic five-star, but this was well after Evans published his article. 

2. A "hate campaign" by Chinese nationalists in the United States or organized by the Chinese government. Evans cited a large body of data to prove that there are people who are hired to post on internet forums, the so-called wumao (Note by translator: these are the people who are hired by the Chinese government to post comments in support of the government. For each post they receive a payment of 0.5 yuan renminbi. This amount is pronounced wumao in Chinese. Thus these people are called wumao). The existence of wumao is not a secret. But one cannot be like celebrities on Chinese microblogs who accuse anyone disagreeing with them of being wumao. If one is to prove that critics of Ping Fu are all wumao, then at least a few questions need to be answered: Why would the Chinese government go through the trouble of organizing such a multinational campaign? Ping Fu is not the enemy of the Chinese government. Quite the contrary, she frequently visited China in recent years to give speeches (for example, she gave a speech at Nanjing University on July 10, 2009). The company she founded, Geomagic software, has a branch in Shanghai. Chinese media had previously published multiple reports touting her (for example: "MoCho · Wisdom Woman" 2009 10 "U.S. Nouveau Riche Fu Ping: My Success Relied on Chinese Wisdom", "Shenzhen Special Zone Daily" 2012 February 24, "Chinese American Woman Entrepreneur Ping Fu Receives the Title of "Distinguished American", "China Business News" March 14, 2012 "Ping Fu, Chinese Woman Entrepreneur's Wonderful Life"). Ping Fu's memoir wrote about her miseries while in China, but that is not a sensitive topic. There are better known books on Amazon that present much darker descriptions of China. Why did none of those books receive such a treatment? There is simply no motivation for the Chinese government to take any action against Ping Fu or her memoir. 

Even if the Chinese government for some strange reason wants to discredit Ping Fu, how can it organize such a thing? Those who wrote negative book reviews on Amazon website were mostly overseas Chinese, in particular Chinese Americans. The website where people can post book reviews is in the United States; reviewers must have bought something from Amazon, and the review must be written in English. Spot checking a few negative book reviews, one can easily see that most of the reviews were written by Chinese Americans who had lived in the United States for many years. The level of English writing in these reviews cannot be reached by someone who have not lived in the United States. How could the Chinese government command so many overseas Chinese, many of whom are already U. S. citizens? These Chinese Americans, regardless of their political ideologies, gave overwhelmingly negative reviews to Ping Fu's memoir, and rebuked her lying. Almost no Chinese Americans supported Ping Fu (not counting one or two "whatever Fang opposes, I support" type of Fang detractors). Since when did the Chinese government have such a strong appeal? In addition, there are also non-Chinese scholars who questioned the truthfulness of Ping Fu's memoir (see the Guardian report). Can the Chinese government command these scholars too? I have not seen any influential person or website to call upon people to post negative reviews. On the other hand, Ping Fu and her team had repeatedly called on supporters to post positive reviews and send complaints to Amazon. 

Evans complained that after Penn State professor of Asian history, Erica Brindley, posted a comment in support of Ping Fu on the Amazon website, she was subject to a "human flesh search" (Note by translator: searching for real identity through google). Evans did not tell the reader the result of the "human flesh search": Erica Brindley is the sister-in-law of Ping Fu memoir's co-author MeiMei Fox. Dr. Erica Brindley spoke as a "PhD from Princeton University", and a sinologist. But what she said did not jibe with her position. This inconsistency prompted the suspicion of a conflict of interest. The "human flesh search" proved such a conflict. In this case, "human flesh search" is entirely justified. This would be similar to when Harold Evans was speaking on behalf of thalidomide victims, if someone spoke in support of thalidomide manufacturers, he would have investigated whether these people had conflict of interest. Evans also complained that when someone by the id of Van Harris spoke in support of Ping Fu, he was subject to personal attacks. First of all, it was Van Harris himself who carried out personal attacks against critics of Ping Fu (I have also been personally attacked by him, although I did not even have any exchange with him), and he also threatened critics. This person is a freelance graphic designer in North Carolina, and is possibly connected to Ping Fu's company which is also located in the same state. 

Evans said that any memoir would inevitably contain errors, and welcomed people to point out those errors. He said that he could not tolerate critics who were trying to destroy Ping Fu's credibility, and even her life. The problem is, we do not believe that the large number of critical errors in Ping Fu's memoir are just lapses in memory. They are intentional lies. If someone builds her reputation and fortune through lies, shouldn't the justice be to remove her credibility and such life? 

By speaking for a liar and abandoning journalistic professionalism, Evans behaved not as a competent journalist, and miles away from the hero of journalism. Such an unusual performance from him, is only possible because of his ignorance of China, his arrogance and prejudice against criticism - prejudice against Chinese in particular. Imagine if another ethnic group, say if Jews exposed those who fabricated their own tragic stories during the Holocaust (such fabrications have happened before), would Evans dare to accuse without basis those critics to have taken payments to engage in a smear campaign? Obviously not. Why did he do this to Chinese? It is racist prejudice at play. To him, Chinese are born without any sense of justice, without independent thinking. They only take orders from the government, and only do things when paid. Even if you have lived in the United States for many years, even if you are already an U.S. citizen, in Evans' eyes, you are still a Chinese nationalist ready to pledge allegiance to the Chinese government - such an accusation by Evans et al., is the real smear campaign in this whole affair.

　　哈洛尔德·伊万斯（Harold Evans）是英国著名的新闻人，著名到什么程度呢？2000年他被国际新闻协会评为50年来50名世界新闻自由英雄之一。2004年他因为在新闻领域的贡献而被英国女王封为爵士。在他年轻的时候，他是英国著名的调查记者，首先报道过多起著名事件，因为正义敢言而名噪一时。后来移居美国，担任过《大西洋月刊》《美国新闻与世界报道》等杂志的主编，目前为路透社的非在编编辑（editor-at-large）。其妻子是美国新闻界的重量级人物，《新闻周刊》和《野兽日报》的主编蒂娜·布朗（Tina Brown）。 

　　就是这么一位西方新闻界大佬，最近在《野兽日报》发表了一篇评论《傅苹的迫害》（http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/11/the-persecution-of-ping-fu.html ），把世界华人对傅苹回忆录的批评称为是对傅苹的迫害。伊万斯的妻子布朗是傅苹的重要支持者，曾在美国公共电台推荐傅苹回忆录，其主办的《野兽日报》也力推过傅苹回忆录，并在傅苹受到批评时最先发表报道，违反新闻道德，用断章取义的手法把对傅苹的批评称为有组织的抹黑行动。伊万斯本人曾代表路透社采访过傅苹，对傅苹的“传奇故事”毫不怀疑。因此他在这个时候出来继续为傅苹站台，并不意外。意外的是他在其站台文章中体现出来的拙劣的文风和低下的新闻素养，与其新闻界大佬的形象完全不符。 

　　伊万斯主要针对的是亚马逊网站上傅苹回忆录《弯而不折》（Bend, not Break）后面的大量的1星（最低）书评。傅苹回忆录原先在那里基本上都是美国人撰写的5星（最高）书评，在上个月月底开始出现了几百条由华人撰写的负面书评，把它的平均分拉到了不到2星。这个看上去不寻常的现象本来有一个很寻常的解释：因为我在上个月月底开始批评傅苹回忆录，引起了我的广大读者对这本书的注意。我的读者群这么大，有几百个亚马逊用户因此去发表负面书评，根本就不足为奇。但是伊万斯不这么认为。他在文章中故意对我只字不提（为什么说是故意呢？因为此前有关这个事件的报道包括《野兽日报》自己的报道以及傅苹的回应全都点名或不点名地提到我的作用，他不可能不知道），把大量负面书评的出现归为两个可能的原因： 

　　一、水军发的。伊万斯声称，在亚马逊发书评只要有一个电子信箱即可，一个人可以用多个信箱注册多个帐号，冒充两个人、20个人、100个人发书评。他对亚马逊的这种“公开性”很不满，而且抱怨亚马逊处理投诉不力。作为曾经的调查记者，伊万斯甚至懒得去查一下在亚马逊发书评的基本要求。要在亚马逊发书评，并非只要有电子信箱即可，还必须曾经在亚马逊购买过东西（不一定是购买要评论的书），必然在亚马逊留有真实姓名和地址。虽然在亚马逊可以用化名发书评，但是评论者的身份都是真实的，一个用户很难同时在亚马逊上有两个帐号发评论，更不要说一百个帐号。 

　　lin是最早在亚马逊对傅苹回忆录发表负面书评的，并不断补充，成为最为详尽的、讨论最多、也最受好评的书评，一直被自动置顶，也就遭到伊万斯特别关照，攻击说这个lin不知道是“男人、女人还是两性人”，虽然lin自己在书评里说了是女人，并可由亚马逊作证。伊万斯还说lin的书评虽然是负面的，却冒充5星书评。虽然有的负面书评故意打5星进行讽刺，但lin的书评在被删除前一直就是打的1星，可见伊万斯调查工作之马虎。在傅苹团队的不断投诉下，lin的书评被亚马逊以“扰乱视觉”为由删除。lin新发的书评才改给了讽刺性的5星，但那是伊万斯文章发表之后的事了。 

　　二、在美国的中国民族主义者或中国政府组织的“憎恨运动”。伊万斯并引用了一大段资料来证明中国存在拿钱发贴的五毛。网上当然有五毛，这并非秘密。但是你不能像国内微博上的“公知”那样把批评者一概当成五毛。想要证明傅苹的批评者是五毛，至少要能够回答这么几个问题：为什么中国政府要费心费力组织这么场跨国运动？傅苹并非中国政府的敌人，恰恰相反，近年来她频繁到中国访问、做报告（例如2009年7月10号在南京大学做报告），其创办的杰魔软件公司在上海有分公司，中国媒体此前多次发表过吹捧她的报道（例如：《莫愁·智慧女性》2009年10期《美国新富傅苹：我靠中国智慧成功》，《深圳特区报》2012年2月24日《美籍华人女企业家傅苹获“杰出美国人”称号》，《中国新闻报》2012年3月14日《华裔女企业家傅苹演绎精彩人生》）。傅苹回忆录虽然讲了自己在国内时的悲惨遭遇，但是那也不是什么敏感的话题，亚马逊上描写中国黑暗面的书籍比它更出名的、更悲惨的还有的是，为什么就没有哪一本享受了这样的待遇？所以中国政府根本就没有任何动机要对傅苹或对她的回忆录采取什么行动。 

　　即使中国政府莫名其妙地要抹黑傅苹，它又如何组织得起来？在亚马逊网站上写负面书评的基本上都是海外华人，特别是在美国的华人，因为那是在美国的网站，必须买过东西才能写书评，而且必须用英文写。只要抽查几篇负面书评看一下，就可以知道大多数是由在美国生活多年的华人写的，才有那样的英文写作水平。中国政府怎么指挥得动这么多的海外华人，其中很多已加入美国国籍？而且华人不分政治派别一面倒地给予傅苹回忆录负面评价，斥责傅苹说谎，几乎找不到有华人支持傅苹的（一两个“方舟子反对的我就支持”、借此攻击我的方黑忽略不计），中国政府何时有了如此强大的号召力？何况质疑傅苹回忆录真实性的还有非华人学者（见《卫报》的报道），难道中国政府连他们都指挥得动？也从来没有见过有哪个有影响力的人物或网站号召大家去写负面书评。相反地，倒是见到傅苹及其团队的人在号召支持者去写正面书评和向亚马逊投诉。 

　　伊万斯控诉说，宾州（州立）大学亚洲历史学家Erica Brindley因为在亚马逊支持傅苹，就遭到了“人肉搜索”。伊万斯没有告诉读者的是“人肉搜索”的结果：Erica Brindley是傅苹回忆录代笔者MeiMei Fox的嫂子。Erica Brindley是以“普林斯顿大学博士”、“汉学专家”的身份站出来力挺傅苹的，因为她的发言内容与她的身份不符，人们才怀疑她是否与书的作者存在利益关系，搜索的结果证明了这一点。这种“人肉搜索”完全是正当的，这就好比伊万斯当年为反应停的受害者维权时，如果有人跳出来剧烈地为反应停厂家辩护，他肯定也会想到要去查查此人是否与厂家有着利益关系。伊万斯还控诉说，有一个叫Van Harris的人因为替傅苹说话，就遭到了人身攻击。首先对傅苹批评者进行人身攻击的恰恰是Van Harris自己（我也受到其人身攻击，虽然我并没有和他争论），而且他还威胁傅苹的批评者。此人是北卡罗莱纳州的一个自由图像设计师，有可能与位于该州的傅苹的公司有合作关系。 

　　伊万斯说，回忆录难免有错误，指出记忆错误应该受欢迎。他难以忍受的是批评者试图让傅苹丧失信用，乃至破坏她的生活。问题是，我们并不认为傅苹回忆录中大量的关键性错误是回忆错误，而是有意说谎。那么，对于一个靠撒谎来获得名声和利益的人，难道不该让她丧失信用，破坏她的生活吗？ 

　　伊万斯如此没有专业精神地力挺一个撒谎者，不像一个合格的新闻人，更不要说是一个新闻界的英雄。如此大失水准，是因为对中国的无知、对批评的傲慢与偏见——对华人的偏见。试想，如果换另一个族群，例如犹太人揭露那些捏造自己在大屠杀中的悲惨故事的人（这种事曾发生过），伊万斯敢毫无根据地说这些批评者是在拿钱搞抹黑行动吗？显然不敢。为什么对华人就敢？还不是种族主义偏见在作怪，似乎华人天生就没有正义感，没有独立性，只会听从政府指挥，拿钱替人办事。不管你在美国生活了多少年，不管你是否已加入了美国国籍成为美国公民，在伊万斯这些人看来，你仍然是个中国民族主义者，随时准备效忠中国政府——伊万斯等人这么做，才是抹黑行动。