Bend, Not Break
From Mao's China to the White House
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Bend, Not Break chronicles Ping Fu's journey from China's work camps to top CEO.
'Bamboo is flexible, bending with the wind but never breaking. It suggests resilience, meaning that we have the ability to bounce back even from the most difficult times' -Ping Fu's Shanghai papa
Ping Fu is one of the few women running a tech company in the US. But her story begins long before.
Born on the eve of China's Cultural Revolution, she was separated from her family at the age of eight. She grew up fighting hunger and humiliation and shielding her younger sister from the vindictive teenagers of Mao's Red Guard. At twenty-five she escaped to the United States; her only resources were $80 in traveller's checks and three phrases of English: Thank you, hello, and help.
Yet Ping persevered. Within a year she had completed her English qualifications and started studying computer programming, rising to run the team behind Netscape. She then founded Geomagic, a company that has literally reshaped the world, from personalizing prosthetic limbs to repairing NASA spaceships.
Bend, Not Break tells the incredible personal story of a journey from imprisonment to freedom, from Mao's China to technology start-ups. It is a tribute to one woman's courage in the face of cruelty, and a valuable lesson on the enduring power of resilience.
Ping Fu is President and CEO of Geomagic, Inc. A survivor of China's Cultural Revolution, she was imprisoned for her reporting on female infanticide under China's one-child policy and deported to the USA. Fu is one of the few women CEOs in technology and was named the 2005 "Entrepreneur of the Year" by Inc. Magazine. She is a member of President Obama's National Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship and an adjunct professor in computer science at Duke University.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this outstanding testament to the resilience of the human spirit, Ping takes readers on a journey both heartbreaking and inspiring. Eight-year-old Ping is living a privileged life in Shanghai with her intellectual father and loving mother when her world explodes during the Cultural Revolution. With her family seen as an enemy of the state, they are forcibly split up, and Ping is placed in a meager camp with her four-year-old sister. After years of torture as a child, including a brutal gang rape at age 10, Ping is briefly detained after her college thesis on infanticide ends up in the hands of politicians. An exiled Ping immigrates to the U.S. in 1984 with just $80 in her pocket. In 1988, she graduated with a degree in computer science from the University of California at San Diego and worked on the team that created NCSA Mosaic, later known as the Netscape Web browser. Next, Ping and her husband founded Geomagic, a 3D software company, which has counted Mattel and Boeing as its clients. Ping's eloquent prose and remarkable attitude shine through in every word and her compelling story will remind more than one reader to be thankful for what they have.
