She may have been successful, but her real story wasn't inspiring at all
February 21, 2013
By Ben Locke

It has become increasingly clear that, from the author's backtracking and forced admissions, most of the main events described in the book are fabricated stories. Together with additional investigations both by the Western journalists and by bloggers in China, an entirely different picture of the author's life story has now emerged. The following is a synopsis of the real life story of Ping Fu, based on the information revealed so far.

She had a fairly unremarkable childhood, born to a college professor father and a government clerk mother and grown up on the campus of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, located in a major provincial capital of China. In China, the major determinant of one's quality of life was the place you live. If you lived in a major city like Nanjing, your life would be much better than those living in smaller regional cities and 1-2 orders of magnitude better than those living in the countryside. According to her neighbors, her family wasn't classified as the "black elements" and hence didn't receive any harsher treatments than other families on the NUAA campus during the Cultural Revolution. Like most of the NUAA faculty, her father spent anywhere between a few months to 1.5 years in the countryside studying Mao's books and doing farm work (the so called 5-7 Leadership Schools) at the height of the Cultural Revolution. However, in her father's absence Ping and her sister were taken care of by her mother or her relatives. If she suffered any hardship at all, it would have been no worse than most city kids during the same period of time. She was in fact privileged enough to participate in the first ever college entrance exam since the Cultural Revolution in 1977 (failed to get in) and again in 1978, becoming the top 5% or so high school graduates lucky enough to earn a coveted spot in a college that year. That said, her performance at the exams was apparently not that great, as it was only good enough to get her into a third-tier regional college called Jiangsu Teacher's College (there are several top-tier colleges in her hometown, including one called Nanjing Teacher's College, which I'm sure she would have preferred to get into). This point will become relevant later.

Unlike most other colleges, the government covered all the expenses associated with the education at a teacher's college, including books and meals. In exchange for the 100% free education, graduates from a teacher's college were expected to accept jobs as grade school teachers. At that time being a grade school teacher wasn't considered a good job, and this was the reason why the government subsidized teacher's colleges. Also at that time, jobs of college graduates were assigned by college administrators. Towards the end of her senior year, Ping learned that she would likely be assigned to a city in the northern part of Jiangsu province. If you are familiar with China, you would know that there is a big difference in living standards between the metropolitan Nanjing and the less developed Northern Jiangsu region. Of course had she performed better in the 1978 entrance exam and attended the Nanjing Teacher's College instead, she would have had much better chance of staying in Nanjing. Disappointed that she would not be able to get a job in Nanjing, she and her family frantically searched for a way to avoid being sent to the Northern Jiangsu. Luckily for Ping, her family had resources not available to the vast majority of her peers. Her uncle was in the US and willing to help, but first she needed an excuse to avoid the unfavorable job assignment, because if you were assigned a job by the government and refused to go, you would have hard time getting a passport from the government. Another option was to postpone the decision by getting into a graduate school. Ultimately they decided that the best action was for Ping to fake a "nervous breakdown" and quit the school. Through the financial sponsorship of her uncle in the US, she managed to get into an ESL program at the University of New Mexico in January 1984.

Her life as a student in the US mirrored many of her fellow international students: supplementing her income by working illegal jobs as a waitress, a babysitter, etc. Being a woman with ambitions, New Mexico didn't provide enough excitement. In a couple of years she moved to California to take advantage of the many opportunities the golden state had to offer. One of the opportunities available to young women was a quick green card through marriage. Not every woman has the will to go this route, because you have to be willing to exchange your body for the benefits. This apparently didn't bother Ping. She quickly married a Joe Blow only months after moving to California. The INS requires that to secure a green card, you must stay married for at least 2 years. She didn't waste much time though, divorcing the Joe Blow like throwing away a soiled napkin three years later ("green card marriage" usually lasts three years because that is how long it takes to replace the 2-year temporary GC with a permanent one). This transaction must have taught her a very valuable business lesson. With a green card on hand just 4 years after landing in the US as an ESL student, her future looked as bright as ever. Later she managed to marry another guy who could help advance her career, this time it was a college professor with expertise in computer algorithm. Eventually she became the CEO of a small software company with 120 employees that is about to be bought by a larger company. Owing to her talent in self-promotion, she is now sort of an unofficial spokesperson for the 3D printing industry.

Yes she may have been successful, but her real story wasn't that inspiring at all. To sell the book she had to make up all the drama, including a bizarre tale of getting kidnapped by a Vietnamese man on arrival to the US and slept on a concrete floor for two nights in a locked apartment with the man's three young children. However, she conveniently failed to mention the two real men that were most important to her success in the US: her two ex-husbands. Written as a memoir, the book is deliberately deceptive and thus deserves no more than a one star rating.