[Vision2020] Cultural Revolution Vigilantes

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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June 28, 2013
Cultural Revolution Vigilantes By JOE
NOCERA<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/joenocera/index.html>

Even now, nearly six months later — during which time Amazon.com has been
flooded with hundreds of negative reviews condemning her; a Web site was
set up attacking her; and her friends and colleagues have been bombarded
with e-mails denouncing her — it is a little hard to understand why Ping
Fu’s memoir, “Bend, Not Break,” has aroused such
fury<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/21/world/asia/21iht-letter21.html>in
some quarters of the Chinese immigrant community.

Fu, 54, came to America from China nearly 30 years ago. In 1997, she
founded a company, Geomagic, that was recently sold for $55 million. In
2005, Inc. magazine named
her<http://www.inc.com/magazine/20051201/ping-fu.html>entrepreneur of
the year. On Saturday, she’ll be speaking at the American
Library Association’s convention.

In other words, Fu is the classic immigrant success story. You’d think that
would be a source of pride for Chinese immigrants. Instead, she has been
subjected to what they call in China a “human flesh
search<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Human-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>”
— an Internet vigilante campaign designed to bring shame on its target.

Fu’s mistake — if you can call it that — was to include in her memoir
scenes of growing up during the Cultural
Revolution<http://www.history.com/topics/cultural-revolution>,
China’s decade-long descent into madness. It was a period when people were
routinely denounced and punished (and sometimes killed) for the crime of
being an intellectual or teacher; when millions were sent to the
countryside for “re-education”; and when teenagers ran rampant as “Red
Guards” — all with the assent of Chairman Mao. It is impossible to read
about the Cultural Revolution without conjuring up “Lord of the Flies.”

Three decades later, there is almost no one in China willing to delve into
the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese government does not exactly encourage
discussion of the subject. It remains a deeply painful subject to those who
lived through it.

When I spoke to Fu recently, she told me that she had originally wanted to
write a business memoir. But once she started writing, she realized that to
explain the woman she is today, she needed to write about the girl she had
been during the Cultural Revolution. A daughter of privilege, she was taken
from her family in Shanghai when she was 8 and sent to live in a dormitory
far away. She was raped by Red Guards when she was 10, she writes. She
worked in factories and had to raise her younger sister. Although she says
that she saw atrocities, she also writes about kindnesses that were
afforded her. (Disclosure: I am currently writing a book for Portfolio,
which published “Bend, Not Break.”)

In China, a blogger named Fang Zhouzi, well known for his Internet
denunciation campaigns, decided to attack her. Quickly, Amazon was
flooded<http://www.amazon.com/Bend-Not-Break-Life-Worlds/dp/1591845521>with
one-star reviews denouncing her as a liar. Her critics, most of them
Chinese immigrants, picked apart her story, and, though they found a few
real errors, most of their criticism was highly speculative. Yes, they
seemed to be saying, bad things happened during the Cultural Revolution,
but they couldn’t have happened to Ping Fu.

“School was interrupted a bit, but there was still school,” sniffed Cindy
Hao, in attempting to refute Fu’s claim that she had worked in a factory.
Hao, a Chinese-born journalist who lives in Seattle, has become one of Fu’s
most vociferous critics. “Ping Fu made up her whole story,” she told me.

(Note: Hao, a freelance translator whom the Beijing bureau of The New York
Times uses on occasion, helped report an article by Didi Kirsten
Tatlow<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/21/world/asia/21iht-letter21.html>.
She says that she became a critic only after that article was published.
She is no longer permitted to do reporting for the bureau.)

You can’t spend time talking to Hao and other critics without thinking that
the real issue here is not whether Fu’s book has errors, but rather who
gets to tell the story of the Cultural Revolution — or even whether it
should be told at all. Roderick MacFarquhar, an expert on the Cultural
Revolution who teaches at Harvard, told me that for anyone who lived
through it, the memories are ones they would prefer not to conjure up. “If
you were a teenager in China during the Cultural Revolution, you were
likely either being beaten up or were doing the beating. Either way, it is
humiliating to think about.” Yes, Ping Fu’s book has mistakes in it. But it
is hard to see how they justify the level of extreme, unrelenting
vilification she has suffered. Her real sin, it appears, is that she
stirred a pot most Chinese would prefer to leave alone.

In recent months, Hao tried to get Ping Fu disinvited from speaking at the
American Library Association convention. In one letter, she described Fu as
lacking “honesty, integrity and trustworthiness.”

>From where I’m sitting, it sounds a lot like the denunciations that were so
routine, and so awful, during the Cultural Revolution.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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