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comment 1:
By Philip Sherwell, New York
8:00AM GMT 10 Feb 2013
So it was little surprise that when Ping Fu published her memoirs last year, the searing account of how she was seized from her family at eight, gang-raped at 10 and then forced into exile after investigating infanticide of baby girls was acclaimed by critics and readers.
But Miss Fu is now the target of a vitriolic and sustained onslaught from Chinese Internet users who are accusing her of invention and exaggeration in Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds — its title drawn from a proverb about the resilience of bamboo in buffeting winds.
At a time when American news organisations, the internet giant Google and even US government agencies suspect they have been targeted by Chinese computer hackers, Miss Fu has found herself on the vituperative frontline of cyber hostilities between China and the West.
“I am living the title of the book,” the chief executive of Geomagic, a 3-D imaging technology business, told The Sunday Telegraph in an often-tearful interview.
“I was shell-shocked when the attacks started. I felt I was right back to being the eight-year-old without a voice in a denunciation session, being forced to face public humiliation, being called all sorts of names.
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“But however hurt and sad I am, I realise that I am not eight, I am not in China and that I am speaking out for all those little girls who are abused and still don’t have a voice.”
Not the first memoirist to be challenged about the accuracy of a narrative, Miss Fu, 54, a divorced mother of a teenage daughter, has acknowledged some mistakes over dates and one incident she recounted in a media interview. “But I am not writing a history book, I am telling my story and this my life and what shaped it,” she said.
Indeed, some China-watchers believe that she is the subject of a co-ordinated campaign to discredit her by nationalist online activists who have taken her story as a sleight on an entire nation.
The attacks are intense. The sales website Amazon has been flooded by one-star reviews (the lowest possible) for her book; some critics have accused her of falsifying her story to win residency illegally in the US; her Wikipedia page entry has been hacked; and insulting emails were sent to a potential business partner.
Most hurtful were accusations she had invented a gang rape when she was a child by critics who insisted that such attacks do not happen in China.
“I was being the victimised as the ‘broken shoe’ again,” she said, referring to a term of abuse often used for prostitutes that was applied to her by a particular tormenter in the wake of the brutal sexual assault.
“Who are they to tell me this never happened, that these things don’t happen in China? I have the scars. I know what was done to me.”
The broadsides began after a Forbes magazine interview with Miss Fu suffered some “lost in translation” interpretations when it appeared in Chinese, she said, most notably, that she wrote about children in labour camps — something that does not appear in her book.
But Zhouzi Fang, an influential Chinese blogger and campaigner against alleged academic fraud, then began trawling through her book and previous interviews and identified what he said were a series of discrepancies and fabrications.
Notably, he seized on a radio interview in 2010, the year in which Miss Fu’s profile in America reached new heights after she was invited as a guest by First Lady Michelle Obama to attend the president’s state of the union speech.
In that interview, she described witnessing a public quartering during the Cultural Revolution by horsemen dragging their victim apart in four directions. Mr Fang noted that there had been no other claims of such executions being conducted in China.
Miss Fu now says that she believes that as a young child, she had confused tales told to her of barbarity in old China with the brutality she witnessed and experienced after the Cultural Revolution was unleashed by Mao’s Red Guards in 1966.
But Mr Fang and his online followers have also scorned the plausibility of Miss Fu’s account of how she came to move to America penniless in 1984.
As a child, she said, her father, a university professor, and her mother, an accountant, were sent to the countryside for “re-education”, leaving her to care for herself, raise her younger sister and spend eight years working in a factory.
She then describes how she was forced apart from her family a second time when she was forced out by the regime as punishment for writing a college paper, during what she had thought was a time of post-Mao liberalisation, about the one-child policy which effectively led to girl infanticide in rural areas where some parents killed their first-borns if they were not boys.
Miss Fu said he was arrested on campus, bundled into the back of a police car with a black bag over her head, and later told she must leave the country without making a fuss. The essay, she said she later discovered, was passed by tutor to a Chinese newspaper which wrote an editorial calling for greater gender equality on the basis of its contents.
Amid all the controversy and casting of doubt, the reality of course is that this era in China was one where public records are minimal. But not even her fiercest critics can dispute her stellar academic and professional career since she arrived in the US aged 26 in 1984 for a college course arranged through family connections.
After working for Bell Labs and at the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications, she and her then husband set up Geomagic in 1997. She was named by Inc magazine in 2005 as its entrepreneur of the year and she joined the National Advisory Council on innovation and entrepreneurship in 2010.
So successful was this career that Miss Fu as initially commissioned to write a business book, but she said that when she started on the project, she realised that she could not describe how she makes decisions now without explaining the importance of her past on her life.
Adrian Zackheim, the head of Portfolio Penguin, the book’s publisher, told The Sunday Telegraph that the company was standing whole-heartedly by Miss Fu and her memoir.
“It is a wonderful book and she is an admirable person and I am very proud to be her publisher,” he said. “This is a memoir, it is her story, it is not investigative journalism.
“Memoirs are often least reliable when they cover the early years of childhood, but I have no doubt of its overall credibility.”
For Miss Fu, there is no little irony that she has exposed herself to these tirades after writing a story that even her own mother wished she had left untold. “Gang-rape is still a taboo in China,” she said. “I am a single mother and my mother said to me: ‘Don’t you want to marry again? Why do you need to tell this?’”
But Miss Fu said she had no regrets that she had chosen to tell her story. “In the end, I wanted to show how love, compassion and generosity can lead to a better life.
“This is not an attack on China. Just as a mass shooting does not define America, my history does not define China.
“I’m human, not perfect, if I mixed up some dates, I will correct them. I would appreciate instructive feedback, but this is not that.
“You don’t have to believe me or like it or read it. But this is my story, my life, and who are these people to bully me while they hide behind the Internet?”
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Comment 2
在前面几篇文章中,我列举了傅苹在接受采访以及她在其回忆录《弯而不折》(Bend, not Break)中关于其在中国的经历的描述中存在的一系列荒唐可笑之处:她在文革10年没有上过学而是被劳动改造、她目睹老师被红卫兵四马分尸、她在10岁时被10~12个红卫兵轮奸、在她在苏州上大学期间全体女生被学校官员每月用手指检查月经、她亲眼看到几百名女婴一生下来就被杀死、她关于溺婴的毕业论文被《人民日报》报道、联合国因其论文制裁中国、她入狱三天在邓小平过问下被释放、她被驱逐出境去美国学习、她刚到美国时只会三个英语单词,等等。
傅苹写了一篇“澄清”,把这些问题归为美国媒体乱报道、翻译错误或记忆错误。我已写了两篇文章指出她的所谓“澄清”乃是狡辩和继续撒谎。我再举两个新发现的例子:
在被人指出文革期间在工厂上班是令人羡慕的工作而不是惩罚后,傅苹“澄清”说她从小在工厂劳动没领工资,不是正式工作。但是其新书的宣传视频却出示了她的工作证(http://www.amazon.com/gp/mpd/permalink/m30Y16VFDBM89J ),表明她是正式上班,而且工作证的照片上她已成年。据其发小说,她中学毕业时上山下乡政策变了,家中第一个子女可以留城,她父母通过关系帮她当了工人。她在文革期间的生活比一般人要好得多。
傅苹的“澄清”承认《人民日报》没有报道过她关于中国溺婴的研究,但是她在1982年读过《人民日报》一篇呼吁男女平等的社论,暗示这是因为她的研究而发的。中国报纸刊发呼吁男女平等的社论并不是奇怪的事,但是我很想看看《人民日报》的这篇社论是怎么写的,又是怎么能跟她的研究扯上关系的。于是我查阅了《人民日报》1982年的报纸(电子版全文),却没能找到有任何关于男女平等的社论、评论或报道。傅苹号称当年是因为《人民日报》的报道而被捕的,对如此重大的人生转折点,她总不至于记错吧,那么请问《人民日报》的这篇社论在哪里?难道像“四马分尸”一样,她又把做噩梦当现实了?
傅苹指责别人不看她的回忆录就做批评,其实我们批评她胡编的那些故事,在其回忆录中也都能找到。她的所谓回忆录,应该被归为虚构小说,而且是虚构得非常拙劣、蒙骗美国读者的小说。这部小说中与中国历史事实、社会常识相违背的荒唐可笑之处,比比皆是,我下面再举一些例子。
傅苹声称,她在南京出生没多久(1958年),就被父母送给在上海的姨妈抚养,过着天堂般的幸福生活,一直到1966年文革爆发,她被红卫兵赶回南京,过着地狱般的悲惨生活。傅苹父母是南京航空学院的教师,既非穷人,又非不要孩子(傅苹还有个妹妹),为何要把自己的第一个子女送人,而且送给已有四个男孩一个女孩的姨妈,令人不解。据傅苹的发小说,傅苹其实一直生活在南京,并没有在上海生活。从书中某些细节看,她似乎从小在南京长大。例如她在书中称自己小时候大部分时间都在附近一个废弃的机场玩,梦想着当宇航员。在当时(60年代)上海并没有废弃的机场(何况她说她在上海是住在南京路一带),南航附近倒是有一个,即南京的明宫机场。又如,她在书中说,她去苏州上大学,这是她去过的离南京最远的地方。她如果从小寄养上海而且像她说的因此经常在上海和南京之间跑,就应该知道苏州只是介于两者之间的一站,不会比上海还远。
为了证明自己小时候在上海过着幸福生活,书中出示了一张她的“上海老家”的照片,是一幢很气派的有大门、有花园的三层洋楼。但是这张照片看上去是从某本老建筑资料书里找来的,而不是来自家庭相册。那个年代照相是很奢侈的事,如果要向人显摆自己住的豪宅,也是在豪宅前合影,而不是单独给豪宅来一张。傅苹却没有出示自己在这幢豪宅生活的生活照。她与其“上海妈妈”、“上海哥哥”的合影,都看不出豪宅的影子,而且衣着打扮并不豪华。
傅苹的书写道:1958~1965年她寄养在上海姨妈家,每天晚上,在纱厂上班的姨父下班回家,到门口高喊“甜心,我回家了!”,姨妈跑出来迎接他,两个人拥抱、亲吻,然后手拉手走进门……估计连美国人看到这儿都要感叹那时候的上海老夫老妻真浪漫真有爱哦。但我不知道有哪个中国夫妇会过着如此肉麻的生活,已生了5个小孩还天天在小孩面前拥抱、亲吻、手拉手。
傅苹说她小时候在上海姨妈家享受着每天晚上顿顿八菜一汤四前菜的生活,其中她最喜欢的一道菜是蟹肉白果浇薄荷芒果酱。这些菜都是姨妈亲手做的,傅苹那时候还没去上学,在家里看着姨妈做菜。那么这一幕应该发生在1959~1964年间。那时候中国刚刚经历了三年大饥荒,正是生活最艰苦的时候,有钱也买不到东西吃。她家却能过着即使按今天的标准也是非常奢华的生活,这回做的该是美梦吧?她最喜欢的那道菜怎么看也不像是中国菜,因为用了薄荷芒果酱;也不像西餐,因为用了白果。
傅苹的书中说,1966年文革爆发,在她被赶回南京之前,她的“上海哥哥们”先被红卫兵强迫去上山下乡。强制性的上山下乡是1968年12月开始的,而且上山下乡并不由红卫兵负责,恰恰相反,红卫兵自己就是上山下乡的对象。
傅苹称,1966年夏天,上海红卫兵把她赶回南京,开着军用面包车送她去上海西站,将她一个人扔上火车,火车到南京后,又有两个南京的红卫兵等在火车站直接奔她所在的车厢接她,开着轿车送她去南航。在她看来,红卫兵好像比公安局还要组织严密、资源丰富,上海、南京的红卫兵密切配合,大费周章就为了把一个8岁小孩赶回家去。其实红卫兵不过是个松散的中学生组织,自己就是一群小孩,他们没有能力、精力和心思去组织这么一次送人回老家的行动。难道上海红卫兵还要打电话、发电报通知南京红卫兵去哪次列车哪个车厢接哪个小孩?美国读者知不知道当时打长途电话多么困难昂贵?还开着车接送?美国读者知不知道在当时的中国坐轿车是多么奢侈的一件事?这是接黑帮小孩,还是接大领导?红卫兵只是一群中学生,有谁会开车?她以为那是美国?
傅苹称,红卫兵把她从火车站接来,扔在南航门口,正碰上南航全体教师被送去接受劳动教育,她的父母只在卡车上对她喊了一句“照顾妹妹”就被带走了。文革期间大学教师下放到五七干校劳动,是1968年10月开始的,比傅苹声称被赶回南京的时间至少晚了两年多,所以她描述的一到南京就与亲身父母生离死别的这一幕,也只是她的噩梦。
傅苹的书中说,1966年夏天,红卫兵穿着长筒靴来抓她。在南京她被红卫兵挂牌子、坐“喷气式”批斗(第一次听说小孩也被这么批),红卫兵长筒靴的腐败味道刺激她得了偏头痛,这一疾病从此持续她一生。上海、南京是南方城市,当时那里的人不可能穿长筒靴,在夏天更不可能穿,即使想穿也很少有人买得起。红卫兵的服装是解放军装,穿的是胶鞋(所谓解放鞋)。傅苹描述的把穿长筒靴当制服的红卫兵更像是纳粹党卫军。她显然是根据纳粹大屠杀的故事来编造其文革悲惨经历的。
傅苹回忆录书名叫《弯而不折》,据称这是她的姨父教她的竹子的品德。这也是骗美国人的。虽然很多中国人做事宁弯不折,如墙头草随风摆动,但那会遭人鄙视,中国传统文化崇尚的品德是“宁折不弯”(这是成语),以竹子为喻,即郑板桥所说:“盖竹之体,瘦劲孤高,枝枝傲雪,节节干霄,有君子之豪气凌云,不为俗屈。”
傅苹如此歪曲事实,美国媒体却仍然如此捧她,倒也算得上“弯而不折”。 |
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