Chinese critics question 'harrowing tale'
Source: AFP |
February 14, 2013, Thursday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
A CHINESE-BORN woman's tale of gang-rape and murder during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) has come under fire by online critics who accuse her of duping impressionable readers in the United States.
Ping Fu, who founded US technology firm Geomagic and sits on a White House panel on innovation, described her experiences in her autobiography "Bend, Not Break" and media interviews.
Born in 1958, Fu said she was gang-raped and forced into child labor in a factory, and that on one occasion the Red Guards dismembered a teacher with four horses pulling on each limb to terrify her and other children.
She was jailed in the early 1980s for writing a university thesis on female infanticide due to the one-child policy, she said, only for paramount leader Deng Xiaoping to intervene. The book says she was later "quietly deported."
"Bend, Not Break" reached the New York Times bestseller lists before questions raised by Chinese Internet sleuths cast doubt on key parts of Fu's story.
She has admitted to some exaggeration but blamed that on a faulty memory or intervention by her editors.
Fang Zhouzi, a blogger known for hunting down celebrity lies, wrote: "Fu Ping not only fabricated her tragic experiences during the 'cultural revolution,' but also fabricated what she saw during the period when China strictly enforced the family planning policy. Because she knows clearly that apart from the 'cultural revolution,' the family planning policy is another Chinese issue that can most easily touch Americans' nerves."
Fu told a US radio station that she witnessed the killings of hundreds of baby girls, and drew official anger for exposing this.
Fang says it is incredible she could have seen so much infanticide, and that if Deng had intervened on her behalf, nobody would have dared expel her from the country. He also dismissed her account of the teacher's equine quartering as "easy to tell but hard to conduct."
Fang suggested that Fu - who uses a Western word order for her name - invented the stories to enlist sympathy from US officialdom and build a grittier image of survival to embellish her credentials in the business world.
Fu became a US citizen in 1992 and was given an "Outstanding American by Choice" award by the US government last year.
In its citation, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services agency said she "was imprisoned during college for her research into China's history of infanticide."
But Zilanzhai Zhuren, a Chinese teacher on the same course, said if she had been jailed, none of their fellows was aware of it.
Fu blamed media misinterpretations and a typo in her book for any misunderstanding.
But she said Fang's analysis of the dismemberment-by-horse was "more rational and accurate" than her "emotional" memory.
In interviews, she has said that the word "deport" was not in her manuscript but suggested by her editors to "attract readers" and that "we could say that was a literary interpretation."
But on Twitter, Fu described one of Fang's exposes as "full of errors." "He should fact-check," she added, while promising to "correct and rectify imperfection" in the book's next printing.
Ping Fu, who founded US technology firm Geomagic and sits on a White House panel on innovation, described her experiences in her autobiography "Bend, Not Break" and media interviews.
Born in 1958, Fu said she was gang-raped and forced into child labor in a factory, and that on one occasion the Red Guards dismembered a teacher with four horses pulling on each limb to terrify her and other children.
She was jailed in the early 1980s for writing a university thesis on female infanticide due to the one-child policy, she said, only for paramount leader Deng Xiaoping to intervene. The book says she was later "quietly deported."
"Bend, Not Break" reached the New York Times bestseller lists before questions raised by Chinese Internet sleuths cast doubt on key parts of Fu's story.
She has admitted to some exaggeration but blamed that on a faulty memory or intervention by her editors.
Fang Zhouzi, a blogger known for hunting down celebrity lies, wrote: "Fu Ping not only fabricated her tragic experiences during the 'cultural revolution,' but also fabricated what she saw during the period when China strictly enforced the family planning policy. Because she knows clearly that apart from the 'cultural revolution,' the family planning policy is another Chinese issue that can most easily touch Americans' nerves."
Fu told a US radio station that she witnessed the killings of hundreds of baby girls, and drew official anger for exposing this.
Fang says it is incredible she could have seen so much infanticide, and that if Deng had intervened on her behalf, nobody would have dared expel her from the country. He also dismissed her account of the teacher's equine quartering as "easy to tell but hard to conduct."
Fang suggested that Fu - who uses a Western word order for her name - invented the stories to enlist sympathy from US officialdom and build a grittier image of survival to embellish her credentials in the business world.
Fu became a US citizen in 1992 and was given an "Outstanding American by Choice" award by the US government last year.
In its citation, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services agency said she "was imprisoned during college for her research into China's history of infanticide."
But Zilanzhai Zhuren, a Chinese teacher on the same course, said if she had been jailed, none of their fellows was aware of it.
Fu blamed media misinterpretations and a typo in her book for any misunderstanding.
But she said Fang's analysis of the dismemberment-by-horse was "more rational and accurate" than her "emotional" memory.
In interviews, she has said that the word "deport" was not in her manuscript but suggested by her editors to "attract readers" and that "we could say that was a literary interpretation."
But on Twitter, Fu described one of Fang's exposes as "full of errors." "He should fact-check," she added, while promising to "correct and rectify imperfection" in the book's next printing.
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