Bend Not Break

“In this outstanding testament to the resilience of the human spirit, Ping takes readers on a journey both heartbreaking and inspiring. Ping’s eloquent prose and remarkable attitude shine through in every word.” — Publishers Weekly

When she was eight years old, Ping Fu was torn from the family she knew, relocated to a new city, and became a “mother,” solely responsible for feeding and caring for her four-year-old sister in one of Chairman Mao’s campuses for “black elements,” those born to educated and affluent families. She suffered unspeakable abuse, was forced by Mao’s teenage Red Guards to eat “bitter meals” of dirt, animal dung, and tree bark, was gang raped at 10, detained for political reasons at 25, and told to leave the country. She arrived in the United States with $80 and three English phrases: “Hello,” “Thank you,” and “Help.”

Starting all over, without family or friends, as a maid, waitress, and student who arrived at the University of New Mexico in a squad car, Ping became a pioneering software programmer and innovator. She founded and was the CEO of the successful global technology company Geomagic, an Inc. Magazine Entrepreneur of the Year, a member of President Obama’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, a proud mother of a daughter, and a U.S. Citizen.

Now, in Bend, Not Break (Portfolio/Penguin; December 31, 2012; $26.95), Ping Fu shares her remarkable and inspiring journey through these two very diverse worlds in a powerful testament to the resilience and strength of the human heart and spirit. As an “unfinished child,” she held tight to the memories and teachings of her beloved Shanghai Mama and Papa — “Bamboo is flexible, bending with the wind but never breaking, capable of adapting” — and to any small kindness, like Uncle W smuggling to her forbidden Western novels including Gone With the Wind. She persevered through the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in which 36 million people were persecuted, and 3 million were killed or maimed.

In Bend, Not Break, Ping skillfully blends the wisdom and lessons learned from both her worlds in her fascinating story; from imprisonment to freedom, from a cruel childhood in which her voice was silenced as she was forced to denounce herself and her parents as less than nothing to an engaging speaker who inspires rapt audiences, from a 10-year-old worker building 40 radios a day in Mao’s anti-capitalistic China to a mentor and powerhouse in the high-stakes realm of U.S. technology start-ups. Hopeful, heartbreaking, and empowering, in Bend, Not Break Ping includes her thoughts on her life, starting a business that revolutionized design, motherhood, and creating success.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Ping Fu is the Chief Strategy Officer and Vice-President of 3D Systems. She founded and was CEO of Geomagic, a 3D software company that reshaped the world of design and manufacturing, from personalizing prosthetic limbs to repairing NASA spaceships. She was Director of Visualization at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where she initiated and managed the NCSA Mosaic software project that led to Netscape and Internet Explorer, the first browser to make the Internet easily accessible to non-techies, available for every desktop, for free. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

MeiMei Fox is an author and book editor who also blogs regularly for the Huffington Post.