Fu Ping's Speech at the American Library Association

On June 30, 2013, Fu Ping delivered a speech at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Library Association. The following is an advance transcript released by her through the Geomagic web site:

Dear ALA organizers, librarians, authors and fellow book lovers, 

I’d like to say, “thank you.” It’s a great honor to deliver this speech. 

It is very hard for me to put into words what libraries mean to me. 

Living with my Shanghai parents as a child, the library was where Shanghai Papa cultivated in me a lasting appreciation of ideas, which he said, like books, required proper care. 

Later, as a college student – new to our country – libraries large and small became places of refuge. My favorite is the Geisel Library at UCSD, a lantern design building with a strong geometric form and a fabulous Dr. Seuss collection. 

There, I could escape from the world and sit quietly. Surrounded by the 360-degree glass windows, I could go into the world of ideas, of intellectual challenges, of the experiences of others. And, as a scientist, I could immerse myself in the never-ending search for facts and the truth. I could refuse to be diverted either by what one might wish to believe, or by what could have been the beneficial social effects if it were believed.  

All of this is self-evident for Americans, in large part because of the extraordinary work done by the librarians. 

What I’m saying is that libraries made me feel safe: safe to explore new places, wonders, and controversial ideas. Safe to go off-path, safe to question. 

And I have to share with you: There were times before I came to this country when I did not feel safe. There were times when even asking questions was dangerous. 

So I couldn't, as my Shanghai Papa urged, properly care for my independent thoughts.
I was eight when my world changed. 

My beloved parents were university educated, but in the Cultural Revolution, learning was a crime. As a result, the government cracked down on teachers, professors and intellectuals. Like many other educated Chinese, my parents were sent to the countryside for hard labor camp.  

Suddenly, I was stripped of my afternoons in the library. And I was a long way from the happy kitchen in which my Shanghai Mama taught me the five essential elements of cooking: aroma, color, texture, taste and love. Although only a small child, I was placed in a one-room dormitory with my younger sister, Hong, under the vigilant watch of the Red Guards.  

I was supposed to be in first grade, but schools were closed and books were forbidden. My days were spent studying the works of Chairman Mao, working at factory to build radios, and following the Communist party’s strict code of obedience. 

There were no libraries for my sister and me, or for anyone.  

I was so young and the mind works in ways to protect us from our worst experiences. 

Today is not the time to relive those struggles, but I want you to know that although it was 47 years ago, I can still feel the trauma as my memories flutter like butterflies at the edges of my consciousness. By no means is it impossible, however, for an unexpected trigger to bring the trauma from the periphery to the center so that I actually relive it. 

Those memories have faded into my dreams and my dreams into my memories, but I know for sure the only thing that kept me going was the responsibility for my younger sister and trying to reach a safe place. Fortunately, even in the most vulnerable moment, I can always regain my strength in a good piece of writing. 

You see, life has been messy for me, as it has for most everyone. But we put ourselves back together, don't we? We continue on, toward our journey. 

We heal, leaving small fissures and cracks behind, but these imperfections are okay because it is through these cracks that our authenticity shines.  

We develop compassion, which is emotion shared.  

And it is by revealing these cracks that we can learn to see and be seen deeply. The power of resilience is in all of us, in body and soul. 

When I first arrived in US, like many first-generation immigrants, I had no money or support system. I could not study comparative literature, my previously chosen field, because my English was too poor.  

Talk about being stuck and feeling hopeless!  

But I went forward, going off the beaten path. 

I gained remarkable support from faculty and new friends. And I found those safe places, those libraries, where I could read what I wanted, think independently, and let my mind and spirit venture into new worlds. 

While the study of English was difficult, I found – in science libraries – the language of computer science, which opened to me a whole new world. Instead of writing essays on Montaigne, I was coding for a future that was not yet imagined, a breakthrough that switched the trajectory of my life, both personally and professionally. 

I began working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), which was on the vanguard of innovation. There we took on the “grand challenges of science.” We worked on analyzing protein folding, predicting earthquakes, and revealing the nuances of quantum mechanics.  

Every day I had fun, was challenged, and felt happy!  

We were fortunate. We had few budget constraints and no limits set on our imaginations. We wrote history in scraps of software and tossed much of it into the public domain. We took the work of theoretical scientists and gave it dimension, color and transparency. 

As a child, I had always sought out beauty. This had been a critical part of my survival strategy.  

Now, I had found beauty in the most unlikely place as creating beautiful objects from computer programs was an integral part of my everyday life. For the first time I felt a sense of space and time evaporate as I lost myself deep within my work – the experience of being “in the flow.” 

I believe that innovation is imagination applied. And my imagination and confidence that I could overcome life hurdles didn't allow me to stand idle. I had to innovate. In 1996, I saw a demo from Chuck Hull, the inventor of 3D printing. I was mesmerized. From my factory work in China, I knew the milling machine and casting process. But this was different. Just as a regular printer lays down ink on a blank page in order to form words and pictures, this machine laid down materials – plastic, metal, or ceramic – a layer at a time in order to make parts and products. 

These 3D printers depended on 3D computer models for which I wrote software at NCSA. This was my Aha! moment. Just like how Adobe and Microsoft reinvented desktop publishing, with this technology, we could reinvent desktop manufacturing. This is the Internet of things. This is not about display and sharing data, this is about using data to make stuff. The product is in the software code. My head spun with possibilities. 

It was those possibilities that led Prof. Herbert Edelsbrunner and I to start Geomagic in 1997, a software company to create 3D content for design, print and more. 

When I was growing up, I dreamt of being an astronaut. 

I couldn’t have imagined that the technology we created would be installed on a NASA space shuttle to guarantee the safe return of astronauts. 

Our software has also been used to preserve world heritage sites, such as statue of liberty, and to create beautiful smiles with Invisalign. 

This has been my journey, a circle connected by resilience, compassion and safe places along the way. I was once that broken child. Today, I am the chief strategy officer of a trend-setting public company, 3D Systems. I am an advisor to president Obama on innovation and entrepreneurship, and above all, I am a proud mother of a wonderful daughter. 

And I have a voice now. 

“Bend, Not Break” is a memoir. It is a book, and today it sits on the shelves of libraries around the world. 

I wrote my story – my memoir – in the voice of a mother talking to her daughter, not just any daughter, of course, but my own lovely daughter. 

And I wrote for all the other daughters, too. 

I want to think that in the years to come, a young girl, long after we here are all gone, will reach up and take “Bend, Not Break” from the shelf of a library where she can immerse herself in the words of wisdom. 

And pull it down. 

And turn the pages one by one. 

And say to herself, "I can do this thing, this thing we call life that is sometimes so hard, I can push back the painful dreams and memories and experiences, I can go on.”
“And I will not break...” 

Thank you very much.
 

Bent Fact: Fu Ping's Early Work in Countryside

The Original Story:
Compared to factory works, Fu Ping spent much less time talking about her doing child-labor in farming in Bend, Not Break. The only significant mention is on Pages 142-143:

After just six months making speedometers, I was sent on rotation to the countryside outside of Nanjing for half a year. I found similar situation there -- the farmers were decent people. We black elements had to work hard and do our share without complaining about our aching bodies or the bloodsucking leeches that attached themselves to our legs in the rice fields... 

All in all, working in factories and on farms proved far better for me than my first two years of existence under the tyranny of the Red Guard. I wasn't being abused any more, and I had a tribe to belong to.

The Changing Story:
After her tale of forced labor being widely criticized, Fu Ping issued the following "clarification" on March 6, 2013:

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

The Debunking:
According to her book, this happened after she "built radios for almost a year" when she started that at 10. So one and half a year later, when she was around 12, she was supposed to be sent "outside of Nanjing for half a year."

Presumably that, at that time, her little sister who at 8 was old enough to take care of herself, a little detail Fu Ping forgot to mention in her book.

Mao wanted all the children to "learn from farmers, soldiers, and workers," not just those "bad elements". It was part of the normal education at the time, not a punishment. It might go as long as a couple of weeks but it was unimaginable to last for six months for kids that age.

Broken Fact: Fu Ping's Early Factory Jobs

The Original Story:
In Bend, Not Break, Fu Ping chronicled her experiences of working in factories throughout her early youth years. On Pages 137-149, she detailed her factory working from the age of 10 to 18:

When I was ten, several months after the attack on the soccer field and two years prior to the appearance of Uncle W and Nanjing Mother, I received my first factory assignment. A local Communist organization, in accordance with Mao's teachings, made arrangements for all the children of black elements in our area to be reeducated by workers. I was assigned to a stie about an hour's walk away from the NUAA dormitory. I would work there six days a week for six hours a day, with a two-hour break each day for a study session of Mao's teachings with other children.
...
I built radios for almost a year, completing on average forty to fifty a day... The following year, Wang was transferred to another department of the factory, where he would be making speedometers for cars. I went with him; it seemed we had become a team.
...
I went back to factory work in 1971 at age thirteen, after having spent some time completing mandatory military service.
...
From age fifteen to eighteen, I worked on and off at a factory that made car parts.

On Pages 88-92, she said (when she was about 12):

I had recently been assigned to a job at a nearby factory, and the next morning I rose early to walk to work. Hong went to a study session with kids her own age.
...
For the next several days, we followed the same pattern. In the morning, I would go to my factory job and Hong would go to her study session.
...
From then on, Uncle W and corresponded regularly, swapping letters several times each month. I wrote him about daily life, my factory job, and Hong when she got into trouble or amazed me by quickly picking up new skills.

Then, on Page 128, when she was 14:

I still had no life outside of caring for my family and working at factories, but political pressure against black elements lessened.

And finally, in 1976 as a grown woman, she was working in a factory when Cultural Revolution ended (Page 225):

I notfified my factory boss that I was heading off for two weeks, and he gave his approval.

For all this work, she accomplished quite a lot really early on (Page 84):

My life took another turn for the better shortly after my twelfth birthday. By then, I knew how to forage, grow, and cook my own vegetables, raise chicken, spin silk thread, build radios, march in military formation, remove leeches, operate milling machines, harvest rice, navigate cities without a map, and survive in wildness.

She also recounted the child labor years in several of her media interviews. For example, on Leopard Lopate Show on Jaunary 14, 2013:

Lopate: And then at 10 you were sent to work in a factory?
Fu: I started factory pretty early, I think even at 8. Soon after. A few months after.
Lopate: Were you getting any schooling at this time?
Fu: Not official, not the academic study. I did learn a lot by doing things.
Lopate: Well, what kind of factories were you working in?
Fu: When I was 8, I was there peeling plastic covers to separate them and then I started to build radios around 10.

The Changing Story:

After her tale of forced labor being widely criticized, Fu Ping issued the following "clarification" on March 6, 2013:

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

The Debunking:
There is really no need to debunk this one. Either she was lying throughout her book and her interviews, or she was lying in her clarification with "I also did not say I was a factory worker".

Chinese children "don't get put in labor camps", they don't work in factories when they were 8 or 10 years old either, Jay Leno's frequent jokes notwithstanding. Did Fu Ping actually work in factories? The answer is yes, after she had graduated from high school. But that's another interesting fact that deserves a separate post of its own.

Broken Fact: Fu Ping's Years during Cultural Revolution

The Original Story:
Besides the various physical and mental abuses, including a grusome gang-rape, Fu Ping claimed to have suffered during the Cultural Revolution, in Bend, Not Break as well as numerous media interviews, Fu Ping maintained two main "facts" of her life in that terrible decade:

1. that she never received any formal education as in regular (the equivalent of K-12) schools
2. that she had been forced to work in factories, farms, and even be a "child soldier" in military camps

A couple of earlier media profiles of Fu Ping went so far as to claim that Fu Ping was sent to "concentration camp", "collective farm", or "labor camp", including the original title of the Forbes article that helped to start the controversy.

The Earlier Story:

There were no such claim in her earlier book Drifting Bottle. (This could be understandable since that book was published in China although it has been free and open to talk about sufferings during Cultural Revolution in China as well.) There were several casual mentions of regular education in China in that book, including this little sentence on Page 66:

I remember when I graduated from high school, all I wanted is to leave the warm cocoon of my parents. As if that as soon as I passed my 18th birthday, my wings became so strong that I had to fly. All the friends close to me were talking enthusiastically of how to fly freely. If not for an occasional hesitation at the time, I would have volunteered with a group of my classmates to go to Inner Mongolia for farming work.
记得高中毕业时，一心向往飞离父母的暖巢。仿佛一过十八岁，翅膀就硬得不飞不行了。而我身边的朋友，也都很起劲地商讨着如何去自由地飞翔。如果不是当时有一念之差，我就会跟着一群同学自愿去内蒙古垦荒了。

The Changing Story:

After her tale of forced labor being widely criticized, Fu Ping issued the following "clarification" on March 6, 2013:

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

The Debunking:

The above clarification by Fu Ping is clearly a lie as there are many instances in her book that she stated she was a factory worker. Although the phrase "labor camp" did not appear in her book or recorded interviews, one might be able to forgive Forbe's Jenna Goudreau for acquiring that mistaken impression from the tales she had been telling. We will get through that in more detail in separate posts following this one.

There are also evidences as well as hints in her book that she had actually attended regular schools in those years just as every other kid in China did, except for the first couple of years of the Cultural Revolution. The Drifting Bottle paragraph shows that she graduated from high school and had close friends and classmates, a much more reasonable tale than that she is telling today.

Fu Ping's clarification is actually a big hint in itself. It is true that Mao wanted school pupils to "learn from farmers, soldiers, and workers" (学工学农学军) during the Cultural Revolution and a large portion of the school curriculum at the time was devoted to such activities instead of classroom teaching. It is also a fact, however, that all such activities were organized by schools. For Fu Ping to have participated in these learning-through-labor experiences, she would have been in regular schools at the time.

Fu Ping's Speech at the Downtown Speaker Series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Engineering and Technology's Interview with Fu Ping

The following interview with Fu Ping was written by Nick Smith and published in Engineering and Technology Magazine on March 11, 2013. In the interview, Fu Ping was quoted as saying "I was living in a concentration camp" despite her recent denial of having never said anything like that. The interview mentioned the controversy in passing but dismissed it as a "smear campaign."

CEO and founder of Geomagic, Ping Fu discusses her extraordinary journey from the concentration camps of China's Cultural Revolution to becoming one of America's most influential women in reality capture technology. 

Ping Fu and I are sitting in the London headquarters of her UK publisher, Penguin, in the Strand. The CEO of the US software modelling company Geomagic has a hectic schedule promoting her new book, and simply getting to be in the same room as her has been something of a logistical nightmare. At the time, neither of us could have known that the book would bring her to the centre of a firestorm of controversy. But as we sit in a conference room with a copy of 'Bend, Not Break' between us she is calm and attentive. 

The book is an autobiography tracing Fu's journey from China's forced-labour camps during Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution to becoming the driving force behind a company that was to bring her recognition as one of America's most influential technologists. 

In her mid-50s, well dressed and perhaps suffering from meeting fatigue, Fu tells me how she wrote a book that she had misgivings about starting. "Shortly after I was named Entrepreneur of the Year in 2006, I had the idea for the book. But, going through the research material at the time, I found that it was going to be difficult. My daughter was an early teenager then and I wanted to protect her from a story that she might not be able to take. But in 2012 she turned 18, and I met my co-author MeiMei Fox. It was a case of all things coming together." 

Fu kept a diary in China as a 12-year-old, an activity forbidden by the Red Guard, who ceremonially burned it before her eyes. "I couldn't pick up my pen again. And so to write now was a way to conquer the fear." 

To make the transformation from a 'Black Element' in Communist China to a leading light of the western digital world is unusual, a fact reflected in our conversation continually drifting from one world to the other. Her book is subtitled 'a life in two worlds', and it is clear that the two don't separate easily. One minute Fu is busily describing Geomagic as a "leader in reality capture", and the next reminiscing on a background infected by fear and isolation, where conventional norms of childhood are stripped away by the state. 

Reality capture could so easily be a term to describe day-to-day life in a concentration camp. But for Fu it is a technical term "about taking everything in real life and recreating it in a digital environment. Today, I think our physical environment and our digital selves are no longer separate. If you look at the publishing industry, we no longer think about the distinction between digital and physical. Publishing a magazine on paper or for a digital reader is now one and the same. I wanted to do this for products in healthcare and not just publishing." 

In the early 1980s Fu worked in imaging software publishing, which led to her developing ideas for combining Internet technology with manufacturing "so that instead of desktop publishing we could have desktop manufacturing. That was my thought in starting Geomagic. I also decided some time ago that I wanted to have a technology company that is an enabler rather than being self-contained. We helped many companies in the orthodontic market as well as the hearing-aid industry, which we transformed from a manual process to becoming all 3D printed. Today, we are working with UNESCO. We want to scan 500 Heritage Sites to preserve those old treasures, which is the human collective memory. I think we owe this to future generations." 

Today 3D modelling is more important than ever says Fu, because "given the economic climate it has now become a political issue rather than just a socio-economic issue. We are losing manufacturing jobs to the cheaper labour countries, and so this is how we can bring employment back to the US or the UK. If you fabricate things locally then you bring jobs in all spectrums of society: not just the thinkers, but also the doers. It is no longer efficient to produce a design locally, ship it overseas to make it and then ship it back." 

Earlier this year Geomagic was acquired by 3D Systems, which will "combine the force of design and manufacturing in the digital space. Which is very exciting. That's why I started the company in the first place." In an official statement released by Geomagic, Fu said: "Joining 3D Systems provides us with the scale, resources and strategic platform to realise our shared vision of delivering functional, affordable and extensible 3D authoring solutions for the benefit of professional designers and engineers, as well as the exciting maker's movement." 

Encounters with engineering
Fu's earliest encounters with engineering were to set her on the road to finding a meaning to her life outside of her imprisonment. "My first assignment was the factory. I was living in a concentration camp. Because I was of the younger generation I wasn't sent from the ghetto to the countryside to be a farm labourer. I wasn't immediately sent to the military camp, either. I was sent to the factory." 

She remembers this as being "actually quite a good experience", partly because the workers were adults who tended to treat the young girl kindly, unlike the Red Guards, predominantly teenagers who went "around the country beating people. I had a supervisor who was very kind to me." 

Her first job was building radios. "This gave me a great sense of accomplishment. I had been conditioned to think that I was useless. But to be able to make something with my hands made me feel I could contribute something. The radio is also such a common object. Back then it was just for Communist broadcasting. But I do remember that if you could get an antenna big enough you could pick up Voice of America. It wasn't easy, but at night we tried. It was a treat." 

She could hardly have known at the time, but these early communications with the other side of the world were to become part of a chain of events that would lead to her eventual defection to America. With only rudimentary English and a few dollars, she took whatever work she could. At first this meant bussing tables in a Chinese restaurant, little more than a cliché in the Land of Opportunity. 

Fu is keen to stress that at this point "I was running for my life. I didn't know anything about America. Everything I thought about the place seemed to be wrong. But at the time the unknown was better than a bad life." 

The most alienating thing about America was its boundless freedom. "In China everything was completely suppressed. In America, everything is a choice and there is nobody there to help you make that choice. That was scary because, although in China you might get assigned a bad job, or be sent to a bad area, in America you have to find a job for yourself. If you can't find a job then you can't live. Initially I did not think that this was the land of opportunity. Very quickly I discovered that if I was to have a future then I had to make it for myself." 

Realising that her lack of formal education would make it virtually impossible for her to follow her longed-for path into either literature or engineering at university level, she was at a loss. But she was quickly introduced to, and excited by, the idea of computer science. "Here was a manmade language I could learn. I thought it was great that I could make stuff and study a marketable skill." A chance encounter with start-up software company guru Len Sherman gave Fu an introduction to entrepreneurship, of which she admits "I had no idea how hard that could be." This would eventually open the door to career progression to Bell Labs, where she could simultaneously work and pursue her PhD programme. To be paid a salary and have her tuition fees paid "was like a fairy tale". 

At Bell Labs Fu was primarily involved with networking, but it was computer graphics that really fired her imagination. "This was because it was the in-between space between art and science." Eventually she became director of visualisation at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where she "initiated and managed the NCSA Mosaic software project that led to Netscape and Internet Explorer." Working on global warming models led to the idea of founding Geomagic. 

As her career progressed Fu became more influential outside the immediate sphere of software development. She was recognised by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services as an Outstanding American By Choice. Since 2010, she has served as a member of the National Council on Women in Technology in the US, and the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship board at the White House, where she has been photographed standing between President Barack Obama and the First Lady. 

Fu accepts that it is unusual for women to reach the level of influence that she has done in the engineering community, especially if they are from an ethnic background. "But I believe women will be the fastest emerging labour force for the 21st century. Unfortunately, whether you look at Hollywood movies or the Internet, Technology Woman has this image of being nerdy, which is something that a young girl doesn't want to be." 

This is an image she wants to correct, and one of the reasons she is helping encourage young girls to follow a career in technology. "Once you are dealing with adults it's almost a hopeless situation. I asked my daughter what I needed to do or say to help girls, and she said that it is not what you say, but who you are. So I talk to women in technology and I tell them that it is up to us. If girls don't have an ambition to be like us, they will not choose a career in technology. I don't try to be a man. I try to show that being Technology Woman is really, really cool. You get a great job, you get paid well and we are not all nerds." 

"Sad but not broken"
Since the publication of 'Bend, Not Break' (and the conversation that forms the basis of this article), Ping Fu has been subjected to a highly vocal and at times personally abusive smear campaign questioning the accuracy of her memoir that has left her "shocked, heartbroken and deeply saddened". Anyone who has read her book (many of her critics haven't) will recognise that the first half, which concentrates on her formative years in China, is the writing of someone traumatised by their past. While she has publicly admitted to minor inaccuracies in her text, it is clear that she endured suffering and privation under the Cultural Revolution that is hard for westerners to fully appreciate. There are certainly times when her story pushes credulity. But, as she told me, the reason she wrote the book is precisely that her story is so extraordinary. As she says: "It is a story about a life lived in two worlds: China and America. It tells of 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."

Fu Ping's BBC HARDtalk Interview

On January 29, 2013, Fu Ping was the guest of BBC's HARDtalk, hosted by Stephen Sackur. The interview is also available on YouTube. The following is a transcript:

Sackur: My guest today is fast becoming one of America's most celebrated female entrepreneurs. It is not just because the company she founded is revolutionizing manufacturing in the digital age, but also because her own life story represents a triumph over long odds. Ping Fu was just eight years old when her life was turned upside-down by Mao's Cultural Revolution. She endured years of abuse before being thrown out of China. Three decades later, she is an adviser to President Obama on innovation. What lessons lie behind this extraordinary journey?  

Sackur: Ping Fu, welcome to HARDtalk. You grew up in Mao's China. Your life was turned upside-down by the Cultural Revolution. I wonder if the sort of disruption you experienced in your childhood in a sense prepared you to thrive in a business sector, the tech industry, which is constantly being disrupted, where the roles are constantly changing.  

Fu: When I grow up, with the life journey that I had, I had a lot of practice in self-learning
 adaptability to change, and also the endurance of resilience in difficult times. Those were the skill sets that I needed for entrepreneurship. I just happen to have a lot of practices. 

Sackur: I suppose it gives you an awful lot of perspective when you have had such a very difficult upbringing.  

Fu: That's right. My life had been turned upside down, from a loving family with a nice big house in Shanghai, to a ghetto in Nanjing and lose both sets of my parents: the parents who raise me and the parents who born me. In one day, I became a surrogate mother to my little sister. She was only 4 years old. 

Suckur: We're talking about the early 1960s. In essence  you were grabbed by Red Guards who were obviously working for Mao's party, working for the Cultural Revolution. Because your family was regarded as intellectual, they were relatively privileged. You had to be taken away and reeducated, reprogrammed.  

Fu: Mao said we don't need formal education. We needed to be educated by workers, farmers and soldiers. We had to work in factories, farm rice or learning how to march in the military during K to 12, basically. 

Suckur: You have described how in the early days there was a lot of hate in the souls of the young guards looking after you in the military-style barracks. You were forced to eat animal dung. You were brought close to death at times.  

Fu: Yeah, we were fed bitter meals and, at age of 10, I was gang-raped by a dozen of teenage boys and left on a soccer field to die. It was very hard. 

Suckur: It was a long time ago. You are in a very different place. But, does the power of the memories you have still live with you?  

Fu: It does from time to time. It will catch up with me. I learned for a long time to put it away by writing the book that just came out. I learnt how to heal those wounds.  

Suckur: Your birth parents were not the lady and gentleman who raised you. You had two sets of parents. Was there any way in which either your birth parents or those who nurtured you were able to reach you at this terrible time when you and your sister were living the most dreadful and hard life?  

Fu: Not during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution. My birth mother came back when I was 13. She was put away when I was eight. Otherwise all of the other parents were sent to remote areas of China.  

Suckur: What was it that you found within yourself that allowed you, enabled you, to cope with what you went through?  

Fu: My Shanghai papa was very wise. He anticipated the trouble coming to my life. So he taught me the "three friends of winter". Before I was taken away from the family, he told me, Ping, you need to be bamboo, bend with the prevailing wind and never breaking. That is kind of a mental symbol that stayed in my mind.  

Suckur: It is interesting that idea of bending and never breaking? Looking back on it, do you think you ever came close to actually breaking?  

Fu: Several times. When my journal was burned when I was 12 years old. I think I thought about dying. I wanted to jump into the fire.  

Suckur: That's where you had written your innermost thoughts and kept a sense of yourself?  

Fu: I did not have anyone to talk to. I didn't even know where to send letters to my parents. So I kept a journal on the backside of the Communist propaganda for years. That was the only place I could express my innermost thoughts and emotions. 

Suckur: It amazes me in a way that you were so resilient. I guess it was partly of being young as you were. You're so resilient that when the Cultural Revolution, this very hard-line phase of it, came to an end you were actually able to resume studies. You made contacts with your family and you ended up going to a university and studying journalism.  

Fu: That is right.  

Suckur: But it was not the end of your problems, was it?  

Fu: No. Right before I graduated from college I was doing my thesis research. I thought I was picking a humanitarian topic, which is infanticide. I heard that the one-child policy in China caused farmers to kill baby girls because they wanted boys. I did not realize how widespread the killing was. When I went to do the research, in my bare eyes I saw babies being tossed into river with their umbilical cords still fresh. It broke my heart. I was a mother since I was eight.  

Suckur: You mean since you raised your little sister? 

Fu: Right.  

Suckur: It strikes me in a way, looking forward and back, knowing what happened to you, that you made it to the States and made it into business, I am beginning to feel that there was something about you that refuses to bow down to authority. You refuse to accept the received wisdom. Otherwise you would not have embarked on this challenging university dissertation about the terrible impact of the one-child policy.  

Fu: That is quite insightful. I think when I was looking back, I realized that even though I was brainwashed that I was nobody, I never really believed it subconsciously. I always wanted to be somebody. It was not specific. I never knew how to stop it. I kept travelling and wanting to be somebody.  

Suckur: You talk about brainwashing. What do you really mean by that? It is a phrase that is easily used, but in what way were you actually brainwashed through your youth?  

Fu: We did not study anything in the normal academic field. We always studied Communist propaganda or Mao's Little Red Book. That's all we have. I was told that I was nobody, my parents were criminals. I was born with black blood. 

Suckur: You're in a black file, weren't you? You were a black element. I wonder that you, in turn, having been dismissed by the party, by the system, were you angry with the party? Even before you left China, had you decided that communism was deeply, deeply damaging to your Country?  

Fu: I believed some of the concept of what communists taught me, about helping others and being good. Yet at the same time, I did not believe much of what they said, like rather to grow Communist weed rather than capitalist rice. When we didn't have anything to eat, weed doesn't sound very good. 

Suckur: In the end, you were forced out of the country. Some people listening to your story might wonder how come, in a sense, you had the great fortune to be allowed to leave China and make your way to the United States when So many other people who were described as black elements, put on blacklists ended up either in the most hard and difficult provinces working in fields or worse than that, imprisoned or even killed. How come you were allowed out?  

Fu: I was kicked out. I did not speak any English, I had no idea what American life is like. At the time I was running from trouble. I thought anything is better than death or being exile to a remote area. I knew I did not have a future in China. The future was unknown to me when I came to the United States. Back then, I did not know it was going to be a good future. I was just asked to leave and never come back again. 

Suckur: You had no family in the US, and you had never been on a plane before. There you were, a girl in her mid-20s, on a plane from Shanghai to California and then onto New Mexico. It must have been phenomenally daunting.  

Fu: It was very scary. No family, no friends, I did not speak the language, I did not know what life was ahead of me. At that time, the unknown was better then trouble.  

Suckur: I supposed so. Yet when I picture you as a young woman in New Mexico, with no language, no money and no contacts, then I think about how quickly you got on. Within a few years you were becoming a specialist in computing and software. What was it within you that allowed you to get on so quickly? 

Fu: One part of it is that America is a wonderful place for immigrants. Many people helped me when I first landed in the US. The other part is that I've always learn how to do things by myself. When I grow up there were no teachers or parents around. I had to learn cooking very quickly. When I was at a factory, I learned how to put lights in the factory, how to build radios. I had this ability to learn. I never thought I could not do anything. Life just throw  at me with many things that wasn't supposed to be when I was at that age. Coming to the United States was not as hard as the life I had from 8 to 18.  

Suckur: You were arriving and studying science at a time when the digital era was just beginning. The era of computing was taking off. What drew you to that?  

Fu: First I wanted to study comparative literature. I could not do it because it did not have English skills. I asked somebody what I could study since I did not have a math, science background. Somebody told me to look a computer science. I said what is that. He told me it was a man-made language that is used to make stuff. I thought to myself, I'm good with language and know how to make stuff. So I just picked that up. The interesting thing is, even this experience teach me that behind every closed door there is an open space. Every time life slams the door at me -- in this case that I didn't have the language skills, I end up picking up a skill set that is very beneficial in my later life. 

Suckur: You say that with a degree of understatement. As it happens, by the mid-to-late Nineties, you had alighted upon an area of software development and computer technology which frankly over the last ten years has become the absolute cutting edge of where many people think the next phase of the digital revolution is going. Perhaps we should in simple terms explain to people that your interest in 3D printing, in a sense shaping things by computer and then turning those shapes into actual products in a new way, it's potentially revolutionary, isn't it?  

Fu: That's the next big thing. It's as big as steam engine, Henry Ford, assembly line, or the Internet.  

Suckur: That's a big claim, can you justified it for me?  

Fu: When I was at Supercomputing Center I hired a student whose name is Marc Andreessen. We started the Mosaic that became internet Explorer and Netscape. After that success I went out to start my own company called Geomagic. That was 15 years ago. I thought about combining the internet with manufacturing to create the internet of things. That was of course way ahead of its time. I went out and I saw this machine, which is a 3D Printer from 3D systems, and I was just totally amazed by this machine. It can literally print a 3D product from a machine. Not just paper. 

Suckur: Out of this machine comes a tangible product?  

Fu: Yes. It prints layer by layer. If you print on paper you just grinned one layer. Imagine you add a layer up... 

Suckur: The best way we can make sense of this at least visually is to look at your shoes.  You have come in today to the studio with a pair of shoes that were printed.  

Fu: That's right, this is the 3D design and 3D printed shoes that is made to mold to the shape of my feet. So I think, in the future, the product design will be in the software code. The product fabrication can be locally next to you. The product will be built start with the person. We call it mass customization of personal factories. 

Suckur: If you think of a shoe company that wants to make big profits by producing millions of pairs of shoes for the mass market, they can't use this technology, can they? Aren't you talking about something very local, very small scale and will never in terms of cost be able to compete with the traditional production line?  

Fu: It's actually not true because the traditional shoe, the most cost is not in the material and the making of the shoes. It is the inventory, shipping across the sea, retail shops and shoes that made nobody wants. 90% of the cost is in that. Less than 10% of the cost is the material in making the shoe. In this case the material and the making of the shoe is not more expensive because the machine is making it. You can make it locally so you don't have to ship across the sea, which is not only cheaper but less foot print.  

Suckur: In a sense it is the end of globalisation, the end of making something that has to  be originated in some place like China and have it shipped to the United States. It is bringing manufacturing back home? 

Fu: Absolutely. In 2006 When Thomas Friedman wrote the book, "The World Is Flat". I went on the stage and said, no the world is 3D. We were sharing a stage. I talked about globalisation is passing, it is now about localisation. We live on one earth, we watched one moon, we inhale the same air. Localisation is very interesting. 

Suckur: We will get to that but I want to stick with the shoes are a little bit more. The material, what are they made of?  

Fu: In this case it is a linen, a natural fiber.  

Suckur: Linen shoes?  

Fu: Yes.  

Suckur: The idea of 3D printing, would it be applicable to other materials? Could you make things out of metal?  

Fu: Yes.  

Suckur: Obviously plastic could be quite amenable?  

Fu: Yes, plastic, metal, rubber, linen, ceramic. There's more than 100 materials. 

Suckur: Could you make a mix of materials? Let's be ambitious, could you make a car via a printer?  

Fu: Not today, yet some of the car parts can be made via a printer, and even better, because you can design geometry inside of the metal to make it lighter, stronger on impact, and you can use material to make new material, which is very interesting.  

Suckur: The what-ifs that apply to this technology seemed to run in different directions, one is a dangerous direction. We have already seen the notion of a Wiki weapon aired on the internet, and there's one particular student and some associates of his in Texas who are determined to use 3D printing to make a home-made gun. All you need is the software and a 3D Printer and he believes you can make all the necessary components for a working weapon. It does raise real questions about where this idea of home made assembly and production ends up, doesn't it?  

Fu: Yes, but I always believe in our human history it always good against evil. The gun doesn't shoot itself, it is the human that takes the gun to shoot. Technology itself is not evil. Right?  

Suckur: But technology can play to our worst instincts. One of the things that seems to me a danger with the spread of 3D printing is that it enabled piracy, copyright infringement, to become even easier.  

Fu: Maybe. But it could generate more innovation. If you make one of a kind, not one in a million, why would you care about piracy?  

Suckur: You care about piracy and Copyright for lots of reasons. The one story that intrigued me, a German man saw a picture of a Dutch policemen carrying his handcuffs. He took a picture of those handcuffs, blew it up, looked at it in great detail, scan it, and he was able to make a key through a 3D Printer to fit the handcuffs. It sounds extraordinary but apparently is true. That's the sort of danger that you could never anticipate that might come with your technology?  

Fu: That's true. But innovation is also going to create so many more solutions that counter those bad intentions. It's interesting, in human history, when good against evil, there's always more good and evil otherwise we would have been erased from Earth already. The reason we evolve is that we are always able to make solution.  

Suckur: That's a very optimistic view. I want to reflect again on your background in China, you've been appointed to the US National Advisory Council on entrepreneurship and innovation, but there are voices in the US saying that they are losing their innovative edge, especially compared with China. You have got a unique insight into both cultures, is there some merit to that argument?  

Fu: The US has been a very inventive society. We invented many, many technologies that have been adopted by other countries. Innovation is about invention made real. Our US or developed Western countries have this issue of not adopting our own invention. We need to look at that more.  

Suckur When Peter Thiel, I don't know if you have met him, he is the founder of Paypal, he said innovation in America is somewhere between dire Straits and dead. You don't share that view?  

Fu: I'm not that pessimistic. I think the United States is still quite an innovative country. I don't share that. 

Suckur: Particularly in your field, information technology, and other economists, Robert Gordon, he said the benefits of information technology have largely run their course, which suggests he is not quite as thrilled with 3D printing as you are.  

Fu: Let's wait for ten years and see what happens. I think he would have a lot of 3D printed things at his home. 

Suckur: Do you ever go back to China and perhaps think about launching your business, that's done so well in the US, in China as well?  

Fu: I do have a subsidiary in China that sells products we made in the USA. I don't think China needs to be a dumping ground. China has 1.3 billion people, would-be consumers. I think the competition between the US and China or the rest of the world is healthy. I hope we will all get together and live as one world. 

Suckur: Ping Fu, we have to end that. But fascinating stuff. Thank you very much for being on our HARDtalk.

The Guardian: Ping Fu's Childhood Tales of China's Cultural Revolution Spark Controversy

Tania Branigan and Ed Pilkington, who had previously reported doubts on Fu Ping's story, published another report on The Guardian on February 13, 2013. This was the first media report on the affair in which the reporters actually sought out experts to exam, and almost unanimously refute, several aspects of the story, including her claimed family history, her episode with student magazine, and so on.

It's also worth noting that Professor Perry Link, who was quoted in this story, is still banned from visiting China by the government there for his pro-democracy involvement decades ago. So, he could be hardly grouped into the conspiracy theory of a Chinese government sponsored "smear campaign."

Top US software entrepreneur faces new contradiction claims over rags-to-riches memoir of personal torment in 60s China 

A successful US entrepreneur faces mounting questions over her widely lauded tale of childhood torment in China's cultural revolution, as fresh contradictions emerge and experts cast doubt on key elements of her story. 

Ping Fu's rags-to-riches memoir Bend Not Break says she was torn away from her parents at eight, brutally abused and sent to work in a factory; then forced to leave China for the US after triggering an international outcry over female infanticide as a student. She went on to found software company Geomagic, currently being acquired by 3D Systems. 

Critics acknowledge the horrors of the cultural revolution, but question Fu's personal account. She has already conceded that a description of Red Guards killing a teacher by tying their victim to four horses was an "emotional memory" and probably wrong. Closer examination of her book and interviews reveal numerous conflicting claims and experts told the Guardian several parts of her story were implausible. 

Fu, 54, said she was traumatised and hurt by the criticism, adding: "I don't know who is behind this, but somebody is." 

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. 

Fu said: "For 10 years I didn't have proper schooling. I was sent to study in the factory, and sometimes in farms." 

A photograph supplied to media by Fu shows her posing with a little red book, Mao badge and armband. Michel Bonnin of Tsinghua University and Prof Yin Hongbiao of Beijing University said it showed she was not disgraced as a "black element" at the time, as she claimed; Fu said it was common for children to be pictured pledging allegiance to Mao, "whether 'black' or 'red'". 

Fu also says she was arrested and criticised by Suzhou University authorities after Deng Xiaoping, then China's paramount leader, met student publishers. She says Deng had seen a daring article from the popular magazine she edited. 

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

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

Yinghong Cheng, now a professor of history at Delaware state university, studied at the same time and in the same building at Suzhou as Fu, and had his own literary group. He told the Guardian: "I am completely unaware of that group [Red Maple] and publication, and if it had been that popular I would have known about it." 

Fu, who supplied a copy of her magazine, said her contemporaries might not have heard of the society because it was underground. She said Deng met the representatives at the same time as Communist Youth League leaders, noting that she was told about the meeting and was not present. 

The entrepreneur claims she was ordered to leave China after exposing female infanticide in the early 80s, writing that in a few months of research she "witnessed with her own eyes" drowned and suffocated female infants. Last month, she told a radio station she watched "hundreds of baby girls being killed in front of my eyes. I saw girls being tossed into the river." 

Therese Hesketh of University College London, an expert on population controls in China, said: "I have never heard stories of this kind. Infanticide did of course occur, but was not commonplace … It certainly was not done in public as even at that time to be caught meant a possible murder charge." 

Fu told the Guardian that she mis-spoke in the live radio interview and should have said "my research was based on hundreds of cases, and I saw baby girls killed right in front of my eyes". 

She added: "If you went to the countryside and to the family planning unit it was going on all the way down the line in every village and every school. Very few people were allowed to go to the poor areas. These kinds of things happened, and China doesn't want people to know it happened." 

The entrepreneur once said Deng personally intervened to free her when she was jailed due to the resulting outcry – a remarkable detail not mentioned in her book. 

Other questions include when Fu left China: she has said variously that it was two weeks or over a year after her release. 

Fu said she had been wrong to call the criticism a smear campaign, adding she had realised the people she thought were attacking her were telling their own stories of the cultural revolution. 

"I hope that this will turn into a more civil discussion about what happened and if any good can come from it I don't mind that people have turned their anger towards me so long as we can heal together," she said. 

Adrian Zackheim, publisher of Penguin's business imprint, Portfolio, said: "Ping Fu wrote in the Author's Note at the front of her book: 'I have tried my best to remember and describe the events and people in my life. Mostly, I have used real names, although some names have been altered to protect privacy. Many details happened more than forty years ago and I've tried as much as possible to verify the facts.' 

"Sometimes, despite everyone's best efforts, minor mistakes appear in nonfiction books. Whenever they are brought to an author's attention they are corrected in future printings. Ping has already acknowledged several of these, and if any additional corrections are required, of course those will be made as well."

ZiLanZhai Master: Story always belong to those who have Stories

The author of this blog remains anonymous but claims to be a former classmate of Fu Ping's in college. Based on the story he told in this blog, even Fu Ping herself thought that is most likely to be true.

The post, published on January 26, 2013, is a reaction to the initial Forbes profile of Fu Ping. The author describes that some former classmates in their own social group had tried to recall various facts in Fu Ping's story but,

1. None of them had heard anything about her childhood suffering before, including their guidance teacher.
2. None of them ever heard about her thesis research on infanticide. Some remembered that Fu Ping was good at writing, but mostly novels.
3. Their class was separated into two classes for English lessons. Fu Ping was assigned to the "fast class" based on her English skills at the time. So, she knew a lot more than "three English words."

    信息时代，每天要在媒体上读到一些故事，成功人士的事迹催人奋进；偶一的失败让人叹息，但教训也能值得人借鉴。更多的时候，那些人和那些人的故事是我们绝对陌生的，自然也就没有任何可评判的了。一旦读到熟悉的人的陌生故事，情形就不一样了。
    今天，在我们为了迎接大学毕业三十周年而建立的QQ群中，得知了大学毕业之后就一直没有消息了的一位女同学的消息，这位同学的“事迹”或者说“故事”这些天已经成了媒体的热点。而且那故事是从“福布斯中文网”上用双语发布的呢（点击这里来看看）。
    这是一个在我们大学同学中年龄算是偏小却故事不断的同学，四年的时间里故事多多。从1982年大学毕业之后但一直没有了消息，如今，一下了成了名人，成了美国总统奥巴马团队中的人物了，而且那篇题为“从劳改犯到高科技企业家”的文章，还是从“福布斯中文网”上翻译转载过来的呢。真让人吃惊！而读了网友们的评论，更吃惊，也就不得不说一说了。
    在群上，我们同学就在努力地搜寻记忆。30年，毕竟还不是太久远，大家还能记得许多的事情。
    “在南京劳改队里度过了十年。她在那里接受思想改造，忍饥挨饿，饱受折磨，惨遭轮奸，被迫在工厂里当了一名童工，没有接受良好的教育。”我们都是从那个时代过来的人，文革不过是十年。当年的中国，再黑暗，还不至于将一个女孩关到牢中十年，去做童工的。再说，我们那些同学都是恢复高考后的1978年考取大学的，不要说是在在劳改营中度过了十年，就是曾经被派出所抓过关过的，“政审”就过不了关，怎么有可能被大学录取？就算是侥幸进了大学，四年的时间里，以彼人的性格，也不会不向同学们展示那一段“历史”的。可我们中文系的同学中没有一人，甚至是当年录取我们进校，后来又做了我们的年级辅导员的老师也从没听说过有此事。故事。
    “童工”一说，倒还是有些另一种可信的。我们那些人在那个时候是没有什么“童工”的概念的。当年能找到一份“童工”去做，算是有关系有后门的人了，我们普通人家的子女是连“童工”也做不到的。还是故事。
    “在毕业前几个月，傅苹发表了一篇毕业论文，讨论中国农村溺杀女婴的现象，引起了全国新闻界的关注。但她也因此入狱，被判劳教。”我们同学在群里互相问了，没有任何人知道在那个时候有过那么一篇文章——这个故事的主人公是能写些东西的，这是事实，但文学性的小说多，偏又不及另一位高我们半级的范小青同学。更不曾听说当年我们的同学中有哪一位因为文章而被劳教了的。因为我们的同学全是江苏的，没有一个外地人，如果哪一位因为文章而出了事，至少是会有人知道的。可没有一个人知道有此事，甚至三十年同学聚会五六次之多，没有人知道此人在何处。又是故事。
    那文章用不着细读，就可看出问题来，“劳改”与“劳教”，我不知道在英语中是不是有什么区别——我甚至不知道在英语中是不是有这两个词汇。“劳教”怎么会有十年之久的？故事啊！
    “在美国开始了她的新生活，当时她独自一人，身无分文，只会说3个英文单词”，那就更是故事了。当年我们中文系1978级两个班，这个人的英语水平算是高的，在快班。就我这个高考英语只考了4分（我们1978年高考英语不算分数，只好将精力集中在算分数的科目上去了），大学里只能在慢班的笨人，也不至少只有四五个单词啊。还是故事。
    讲惯了故事的人，有时会连一些真实的事情和经历也弄不清了呢。这位同学2012年“在接受中新社记者访问时说，1977年她在苏州大学学习中文（点击这里查看原文）”，我们这明明是1978年入学的，是在1978年的10下旬才上学的，就连高我们一届的1977级学生，因为特殊的历史原因也是在1978年的3月才入学的，她怎么会跑到1977年去？那时她不还在“做童工”吗？
    我们的这位同学现在在资本主义国家里，还发达了，这是事实，不是故事。我估计。
    钱钟书先生曾说过“暴发户续家谱”，那一年高考语文的现代文阅读还曾以此作为材料的呢。现在看来，有些暴发户还会“编”家谱，走的是与老暴发户们不一样的路数，是先将自己往最低处损，以显得自己“奋斗”的光彩！
    由此，再回过头来看许多的事迹，许多事迹的评论，冒出一个词“起哄”。至少我知道，在这个人的故事及评论中是有不少不了解情况而起哄的。
    突然想到一句话，“牛皮不怕大，就怕当场炸”。故事，永远只属于那些有故事的人。    

Fang Zhouzi: The Habitual Liar Fu Ping

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

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

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

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

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

　　请问这是不是傅苹又出现了把想像当现实的“回忆错误”了？ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

xgz: Bend, Not Break: A Lie in Two Worlds (Part I)

On January 31, 2013, "xgz" at The Daily Kos published the first of his several blogs questioning Fu Ping's book:

I was listening to the NPR news in the morning last week as I drove to work, and heard the promotion of a book by Ping Fu titled "Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds." It was an amazing story of someone who suffered through the Cultural Revolution in China, then succeeded in getting herself an education and made a fortune in the US. Truly amazing. 

I was simply amazed when I heard the story. When I got home in the evening, I searched for more details about the story, wanting to know more because this story was simply too good. As I learned more details, some minor inconsistencies began to creep up. I explained them away by convincing myself that either the author remembered wrong, or the reporters who reported the story got the details wrong. 

But as I found out about more and more details, the story made less and less sense. Finally, I saw the criticism by the Chinese freelance writer Fang Zhouzi (who just received the combined Nature and Sense About Science inaugural John Maddox Prize for standing up for science). His analysis convinced me that the whole story was made up. 

I was a young child at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. My home and those of my close relatives were all ransacked by the Red Guards. They took away almost everything from us. For a brief period afterwards, my parents were away from home and I was taken care of by one of my cousins who was the middle school age. When she walked me to the kindergarten before going to school herself, the other kids in the neighborhood would spit on her. This period was so brief that I have no memory of it. My parents came back very soon and we had a basically "normal" life, considering the circumstances. 

The reason I told my own experience during the Cultural Revolution is to provide the background for my criticism of Fu's book. I did not read her book itself, but read the story told in the book from the Chinese version of the Forbes article and other reports on the book, including the NPR story. 

The first incredible detail in the book is the claim that Fu was taken to the labor camp at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution while she was eight years old. She stayed at the labor camp for ten years. She also said that she had to take care of her four year old sister. This means that the labor camp had children as young as four years old. Of all the people who went through the labor camps before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution, there had not been a single person who reported seeing young children in a labor camp. 

A photography of her from that period provided by herself in fact contradicts her story. The photo shows her with a group of children posing in front of a flag. The Chinese characters on the flag read "Red Guard Brigade". All of the children in the photo wore armbands indicating that they were members of the Red Guard. I remember these armbands because many children were not allowed to wear them due to their "bad" family background. The photo shows that they were in a park. In fact, this was a park in the city of Nanjing. This was probably a photo taken when this group of Red Guard toured the park, perhaps on a weekend trip. It is clear that instead of being sent to a labor camp, Ms Fu was a member of the Red Guard herself. 

The second incredible detail was how she got into college. She said that she entered Suzhou University in 1977. This was incredible in two ways. First, Suzhou University did not even exist until 1982. Although it was first built in 1900, it was split into several colleges in 1952 after communists took over China. The main part of it became Jiangsu Teacher's College. In 1982 it was merged with some other colleges to form Suzhou University again. Let us be charitable here and assume that she entered Jiangsu Teacher's College in 1977. But then there is a bigger problem. In 1977 entrance into a college was a privilege reserved for the political elite. It required going through a political evaluation. People who had questionable political backgrounds were not allowed into college. If as she said that she spent ten years in a labor camp, that would definitely disqualify her from any college. Conversely, if she indeed entered college in 1977, it would mean that she was a member of the politically privileged during the Cultural Revolution. This would also be consistent with the possibility that she was a member of the Red Guard. 

But let us be charitable again and assume that she remembered wrong again. She would actually take the first national college entrance exam after the Cultural Revolution in 1977, and entered college in 1978. But even then it would not be consistent with her story. There was still the problem of political evaluation which was still used in 1977 but dropped in the subsequent years. There was also a problem of how she was able to study for the exam. In 1977 because it was the first exam in more than ten years, there were many times more people who took the exam than what would be on average. The competition was fierce, and the admission percentage was extremely low (about 4.8%). It would be highly unlikely that someone without any formal education would have been able to pass the exam. I had several cousins who took this exam, and none of them passed. 

The biggest question was how she came to the US. She claimed that she wrote an article about infanticide in China while she was in college. This article was said to be published on the People's Daily in 1981. Its publication led to an UN sanction against China's one-child policy. As a result, Fu was jailed for a few months, then was exiled to the US. This was just not something that could happen in China in the early 1980's. First of all, People's Daily would never publish such an article. Indeed, no one has been able to find such an article during the time she claimed.  Second, the UN never imposed any sanctions on China for its brutal birth control policies, as much as many people wished that it would. Third, exiling dissidents to the US was not a practice by the Chinese government in the early 1980's. A famous dissident of that period, Wei Jingsheng, was not exiled to the US until 1997, after spending 18 years in various Chinese prisons. 

In the early 1980s, it was very hard for anyone in China to be able to get permission to leave China and study in the US. That Fu was able to do this would indicate again that she was from the privileged class, not persecuted as she claimed in her book. 

Let me end by quoting a review by a reader Farside Z on Amazon: 

There is a very logical explanation of the two extremely opposite reviews of this book. It's what your mother tells you - If something looks too good to be true, it ain't.

Taken at face value, the book is truly inspirational. The author's life experience is a triumph of human spirit in spite of overwhelming odds and adversities against her. It is simply out of this world. 

The sad truth is - it is. The stories are more than perfect because the author is not inconvenienced by fact or historic accuracy. She made up most, if not all, her stories for sensationalism and personal gain. China was brutally dark and oppressive during the culture revolution, but what the author described plainly had no credibility with people who had lived through the period. 

This is why people are speaking out and where the lowest ratings come from. Tragedy and suffering are not pretense for personal agenda, especially when they are false. Sympathy and admiration are to be earned, not manipulated. 

People are rightfully outraged because the author's insincerity undermines the genuine catastrophe of the culture revolution. She takes advantage of people's trust and makes a mockery of their compassion. 

By now, the author should have realized her stories have backfired. It's time to face your conscience and apologize to the people that are lied to.