Book Review: Bend Not Break By Ping Fu

I heard about Bend Not Break by Ping Fu on NPR and started reading it before I realized that it was so controversial! I won’t get into all that, but your eyeballs might catch fire if you read all of the “reviews” on Amazon ….

According to the official description on Amazon:

Born on the eve of China’s Cultural Revolution, Ping was separated from her family at the age of eight. She grew up fighting hunger and humiliation and shielding her younger sister from the teenagers in Mao’s Red Guard. At twenty-five, she found her way to the United States; her only resources were $80 in traveler’s checks and three phrases of English: thank you, hello, and help.

Yet Ping persevered, and the hard-won lessons of her childhood guided her to success in her new home­land. Aided by her well-honed survival instincts, a few good friends, and the kindness of strangers, she grew into someone she never thought she’d be—a strong, independent, entrepreneurial leader. A love of problem solving led her to computer science, and Ping became part of the team that created NCSA Mosaic, which became Netscape, the Web browser that forever changed how we access information. She then started a company, Geomagic, that has literally reshaped the world, from personalizing prosthetic limbs to repair­ing NASA spaceships.

Bend, Not Break depicts a journey from imprisonment to freedom, and from the dogmatic anticapitalism of Mao’s China to the high-stakes, take-no-prisoners world of technology start-ups in the United States. It is a tribute to one woman’s courage in the face of cruelty and a valuable lesson on the enduring power of resilience.

I thought this would be a good book to read as we face the uncertainties of the looming sequestration, and that it might help me put my irrational economic insecurities into perspective.

Ping’s story is amazing, but because of that I find it hard to relate to. Whether or not her account of her childhood in China is accurate, her experience in the U.S. is what I find most hard to believe. She worked hard for her success, but she also seemed to be at the right place at the right time every step along the way. Even though I wasn’t inspired by her story, it was interesting to follow her account of the technological advances she was a part of in the dot-com era. I still don’t understand how the internets work, but I am more excited about what my more tech-savy children might do with their math and science degrees.

Does the controvery over this book make you more or less likely to read it?