True or False? The Tussle Over Ping Fu’s Memoir
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW
Did Ping Fu, a prominent Chinese-American businesswoman and author of a
recent memoir, “Bend, not Break,” make up her horrible experiences during
the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution in order to gain United States citizenship?
Did they help her become an American by claiming political asylum?
That’s what her critics, many of them fellow Chinese-Americans, say. It’s
an accusation that can stick. As a recent New York Times investigation
showed, claiming persecution has spawned an immigration industry involving
lawyers prepping clients to make false asylum claims.
As I write in my Letter from China this week, Ms. Fu is being accused of
making up a lot of things in her memoir. She’s also a successful
entrepreneur: the U.S. government honored Ms. Fu, the founder of the
software company Geomagic (in the process of being sold to 3D Systems), with
a “2012 Outstanding American by Choice” award.
Ms. Fu is on the board of the White House’s National Advisory Council on
Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and is a member of the National Council on
Women in Technology, according to the Web site of the U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services.
Ms. Fu, who says in her memoir she was “quietly deported” to the U.S. in
1984 for writing about female infanticide while still a college student,
denies the accusations. But until now she hadn’t explained in public how
she became an American.
In an interview with the International Herald Tribune, she said, apparently
for the first time, the reason she kept quiet was she was trying to protect
her first husband, an American, whom she does not mention in her memoir. The
marriage took place while she was living in California, she said.
“I had a first marriage and that’s how I got my green card,” she said by
telephone. She married on Sept. 1, 1986 and divorced three years later.
Until now she had kept silent because of a “smear” campaign against her
online, mostly by fellow Chinese who accuse her of lying, which extended to
real-life harassment, she said: “They smear my name, they try to get my
daughter’s name on the Internet, they sent people to Shanghai to surround
my family and to Nanjing to harass my neighbors.” She said the accusers,
who are “angry” for reasons she doesn’t really understand, contacted U.S.
immigration authorities to challenge her award and her citizenship, as well
as shareholders of 3D Systems to warn them she was a “liar,” and not to
buy Geomagic. Her second husband, Herbert Edelsbrunner, whom she has since
divorced, received many “hate e-mails,” she said. “I just don’t want to
hurt innocent people.”
If a first, unpublicized marriage might lay to rest one contentious issue,
there are others. Some were the result of exaggeration or unclear
communication with her ghostwriter, MeiMei Fox of Los Angeles, she said.
In the interview, she volunteered an example of an error: a widely
criticized account of the ‘‘period police,’’ the authorities who checked
a woman’s menstrual cycle to ensure she wasn’t pregnant in the early days
of the one-child policy. To stop women substituting others’ sanitary pads
for inspection, they were sometimes required to use their own finger to show
blood. Through a misunderstanding with Ms. Fox, Ms. Fu said this was
portrayed as the use of other people’s fingers — an invasion of the woman
’s body.
Ms. Fox “wrote it wrong,’’ she said. ‘‘I corrected it three times but
it didn’t get corrected.’’ Women used their own finger to show blood, she
said, but the mistake went into print anyway.
In general, Ms. Fox may have ‘‘just made some searches on the Internet
that maybe weren’t correct,’’ Ms. Fu said.
Chiefly the errors involved use of the words ‘‘all, never, any,’’ that
generalized unacceptably, Ms. Fu said. And, ‘‘She doesn’t know China’s
geography,’’ she said.
At the beginning of her memoir, Ms. Fu writes of being kidnapped by a
Vietnamese-American on arrival in the U.S. state of New Mexico and locked in
his apartment to care for his very young children, whose mother had left,
in a bizarre incident. A spokeswoman at the Albuquerque Police Department’s
Records Office, where the alleged kidnapping took place, said she could not
locate such an incident in their records. Asked about it, Ms. Fu repeated
that she did not press charges as, fresh from China, she was terrified of
all police, “So I don’t know how they keep records, if there is no
criminal charges or record.”
And in an e-mail to me, she admitted she made mistakes about a magazine she
said she helped edit, called Wugou, or “No Hook,” produced in 1979 by
students at her college, then called the Jiangsu Teacher’s College (later
it changed its name to Suzhou University, she said.) It was not that
magazine but another one, This Generation, that was taken to a meeting in
Beijing of student magazine writers from around the country, she wrote in
the e-mail. “A good case that shows everyone’s memory can be wrong,” she
wrote.
But bigger questions about the scale of the online vitriol from parts of the
Chinese and Chinese-American community remain. “I really haven’t known
China for 20-something years, and it didn’t occur to me that what I wrote
would generate so much anger,” she said. In the last years, “as China got
stronger, nationalistic views got stronger,” she said, making a “civil
conversation” about disagreements apparently harder.