MCLC: Bend, Not Break memoir (1)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Rowena He <rowenahe at gmail.com>
Subject: Bend, Not Break memoir (1)
************************************************

Source: The Daily Beast (2/4/13):
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/04/ping-fu-defends-bend-not-b
reak-memoir-against-online-chinese-attack.html

Furious at the airing of China’s dirty laundry in Ping Fu’s new memoir,
Chinese commenters have kicked off an online assault. The tech
entrepreneur tells Katie Baker the vitriol feels like the public shame
sessions of her youth.

“It’s like I’m living the book title,” says Ping Fu, author of the new
memoir Bend, Not Break. Over the past week, the Geomagic CEO and her book
have become the targets of a virulent attack by China’s Internet
vigilantes, who have slammed her account of the country’s Mao-era troubles
and lampooned the book on Amazon with a flood of one-star reviews. But to
her critics and bullies, Ping has a simple reply: “I will stay strong, and
I will not break.”

The bloggers began their Amazon blitz after Forbes China published an
interview 
<http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2013/01/23/one-womans-journey-fr
om-chinese-labor-camp-to-top-american-tech-entrepreneur/> with Ping late
last month in which several aspects of her story, including the use of the
term “labor camps,” apparently got lost in translation. The memoir, which
was released last month, tracks Ping’s tumultuous childhood
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/20/ping-fu-s-journey-from-cu
ltural-revolution-orphan-to-geomagic-ceo.html> during the Cultural
Revolution, when she was forcibly orphaned and left to raise her younger
sister alone, through her immigration to the United States and her years
as an entrepreneur of Geomagic, which consults on 3-D technologies.
Critics have questioned the timeline of Ping’s account, along with some of
the more gruesome details of the story, including a childhood rape and the
public quartering of a “black element” by the Red Guards. When Forbes
followed up 
<http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2013/01/31/bend-not-break-author
-ping-fu-responds-to-backlash/> to correct the details in its interview
after a prominent Chinese academic and other Internet users cried foul
<http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1139194/liar-hunter-fang-zhouzi-
accuses-ping-fu-selling-fake-tragedy-americans>, the site was deluged with
commenters calling the author a liar and a fake, and accusing her of
fabricating everything from her knowledge of English to her account of
public executions by the Red Guard. (In addition to the Forbes follow-up,
Ping clarified many of the facts in a separate article
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ping-fu/clarifying-the-facts-in-bend-not-bre
ak_b_2603405.html> over the weekend.)

Meanwhile, over on Amazon.com, the book’s ratings began to plummet. As of
press time, it rated 1.6 out of 5 stars, with 315 out of 377 reviewers
giving it the lowest possible one star, often under such headlines as
“Absolutely a liar” and “A good book only on April 1st.” Under Amazon’s
reviewing system, most of the critics were able to weigh in under a pen
name—but many appeared to be non-native English speakers with a knowledge
of Chinese history. “Only those cant [sic] read chinese and not familiar
with modern chinese history will believe the story,” wrote one. “She had
[sic] talked this fake story too many times,” added another. “Her father
and my father worked together in the university since 50s until they
retired … Ping Fu was also a Red Guard herself!” blasted a third.

Both Ping and her publishers say they were caught off guard by the
vitriol. “We’ve never had an experience like this before,” says Adrian
Zackheim, publisher and president of Portfolio, which released the book
last month. “It’s not clear that any of the comments are based on an
actual reading of the book itself, which is also a cause of some concern …
The barrage of negative comments mostly seem to be based on the blog and
Internet comments.” (The book is not yet available in China.)

“We are proud of the book, and of Ping, and of her perseverance,” Zackheim
added. “Ping worked hard to get her facts right, but it’s her memory that
she’s offering … it’s a personal memoir that’s written with candor.”

While Ping says she expected a certain amount of backlash inside China,
she was shocked at the firestorm her book touched off. “I have never seen
an attack of this scale,” she says. “It was really a surprise … they just
suddenly all appeared, and they appeared like armies.”

After her initial replies to her critics, Ping expected the furor to die
down—but her responses seem to have added fuel to the fire. “We looked at
some comments, and I thought if I were to just make a public answer to
some of them, some of the questions and issues that I thought were
triggered by the Forbes translation into Chinese…it would be fine,” she
says. “But it just comes more and more.”

“It makes me feel like I’m living my youth again. Like everybody just
screaming at me with all these names,” she says. “It makes me feel like I
went right back to when I was 8 years old”—when, as Ping writes in the
book, she was labeled a “black element” and forced to undergo public shame
sessions. “Most of those [behind] the anonymous attacks are trying to
reflect their own experience over mine. But everybody’s life is
different,” she says.

While Ping says she expected a certain amount of backlash inside China,
she was shocked at the firestorm her book touched off. “I have never seen
an attack of this scale,” she says. “It was really a surprise … they just
suddenly all appeared, and they appeared like armies.”

“The other thing I respect is that if there are editorial mistakes, which
every book has, here, we just point it out and then we correct it. I
already corrected some information I was going to correct in the second
print,” she adds. “If they could help me make it more accurate, I’d be
more than happy to do that … [but] this organized attack is not
constructive.”

The Amazon attack bears elements of the type of Internet bullying—known by
the ominous phrase “human flesh search”—that is increasingly common among
Chinese bloggers. “Coordinated Netizen action against an individual is not
at all unusual in China,” says Emily Parker, a senior fellow at the New
America Foundation and an expert on the Internet and democracy. (Parker
cautions that she is unfamiliar with Ping’s case and therefore cannot
speculate on who might be behind the attacks.)

While the human flesh search phenomenon has helped expose injustice, it
also has been trained on individuals to humiliate them publicly or to
punish those who do not align with a strongly nationalist viewpoint.
Indeed, recent hacking attacks
<http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/01/31/170732833/hack-attack-on-ne
w-york-times-looks-like-part-of-chinese-campaign> on prominent American
media outlets 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/chinese-hackers-suspecte
d-in-attack-on-the-posts-computers/2013/02/01/d5a44fde-6cb1-11e2-bd36-c0fe6
1a205f6_story.html> seem to have been aimed at publications deemed
critical of China’s leaders.

In Ping’s case, the most intimate details of her life story have become
fodder for the bloggers’ mockery and their conspiracy theories—including
her account of a brutal gang rape as a child. “Why can I say [the rape] is
a lie with 100% confidence?” wrote one commentator. “Because, had anybody
in the US dare [sic] to claim that she was gang raped by 10 teen boy [sic]
in broad daylight on Pennsylvania ave without providing any evidence,
everybody would know that is a LIE!!!”

Ping says she knew writing about the rape might be risky. “My mother and
my sister were very much against it,” she says. “They don’t understand why
I would want to air the dirty laundry. To them, for me to write about the
rape is unbelievable.” But Ping says she knew that keeping silent about
the assault would perpetuate the trauma and the cycle of injustice.
“During the writing process, I found this piece was an important thing [to
address] because it was such a traumatic moment in my life. And not
writing it feels like hiding with fear. I was trying to confront my own
fear, so that I can heal and move forward.”

Indeed, many of Ping’s critics seem to take offense at the book’s airing
of China’s dirty laundry—namely, of the traumas of the Cultural
Revolution—to non-Chinese readers. Others seem to resent Ping for having
escaped China to resettle into a successful life in the United States. As
one blogger wrote, “I think the most important point that outrages Chinese
is that Ping … lived a better-than-average life.”

Of her critics, Ping says, “I sympathize in some way, because we are in a
generation where most of us, whether a ‘black element’ or Red Guard, we
have all gone through a period where I feel we all have been victims in
life. I’m lucky that I came to the United States and made a better life,
and many people over there did not. And they may be angry.”

Still, she notes, “there are so many people in the world, there are so
many women in developing countries [who] have no voice
<http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/21/world/asia/india-rape-danger/index.html>,”
she adds. “Like that little girl who was lonely and scared, they have no
voice. But I have a voice now, today. And I need to talk about it and
write what happened.”

Another point of contention for the Internet attackers has been Ping’s
account of a paper she wrote as a college student on China’s one-child
policy and the practice of forced abortions taking place in the
countryside. According to her book, Ping was one of the first people to
report openly on the infanticides and forced abortions, and the paper
eventually got her into trouble with the Chinese government, which asked
her to leave the country.

The furor over the details of the college paper dovetail with a heated
debate 
<http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/world-news/all-change-for-chinas-one-chil
d-policy_817537.html> inside China at the moment about the possibility of
abolishing the one-child policy, amid concerns over China’s falling birth
rate and the country’s gender imbalance, the result of the preference for
boys among Chinese families. With the policy now “at the top of national
consciousness,” Ping says, “my story … may have just triggered some
people.”

Regardless of the online attacks—and her worries about visiting China
(“You worry about fanatics,” she says)—Ping and her publishers remain
undaunted, and the book just landed on The New York Times extended
bestseller list. As the controversy has gained steam, the author also has
received support from fans and colleagues near—the CEO of 3D Systems,
which is set to acquire Geomagic, comes from a family of Holocaust
survivors and has encouraged her to “be strong”—and far. One Twitter
follower told her, “I read the Forbes article about you, my parents … went
through the same.” These small acts of kindness are right in line with the
philosophy espoused by Ping’s title. “This is not a book about bashing
China,” she says. “I hope [the attackers] understand that I have come to
peace with what happened in the past … I try to use my story in a small
way to show people that there’s hope, and you can make it.”

“The thing is, this is my story. This is a memoir, not a history book.
This is not a researched biography of somebody else. This is my life, this
is my memory, this is my experience,” she says. “I was trying to show
people how generosity, love, and compassion can lead to a better life.
It’s not about anger.”