"We underestimate the value of stepping back because we are trained to perceive a willingness to make concessions as a weakness, or looking for alternatives as being inconsistent" - Can a realization be challenged to be lie? Yes, it can be. Because we live in an era of INFORMATION (INFORMATION CORRUPTION and INFORMATION POLLUTION). A few can recognize what exactly knowledge is. Too few can realize a piece of WISDOM. Ping Fu, like many talented people of her time, is in business of information technology; which is quite different from typical dot com. Even while the produces from her company’s product will flood our lives, none of us will be able to understand we are enjoying comfort, perhaps, of twenty second century. Her product is enough to replace entirely manual labor required for manufacturing, mass production and customization and that too at a rate cheaper than that of all Chinese manufacturing units with starving, fatigued labor force can produce. In short, her business can put China out of business someday. Obviously China will tend to denounce, decry and dissent the book. That is why they are crying fowl in collaboration with some hegemonic media groups. While reading the pages of those papers, remember that the regime, with inheritance of wiping out history and belief in wiping out lives that appears to be perceived threats to their existence, in wink of an eye can wipe out pages from a journal and/or book is to prove themselves right. Fu’s book is neither about entrepreneurship nor about horrors of Cultural Revolution. It is about life. As Ping Fu written, "Like a mountain range, I realized, life offers surprising views at every turn. Although the best views can be found on the peaks, it is valleys that offer the most opportunities for growth and development. In valleys we farm, build roads, and formulate our visions for reaching ever higher. In valleys, we develop resilience and cultivate hope.” She depicted bad governance menacing lives of good people in China while bad people rigging good governance in the United States. How “red blooded” braggarts harassed and humiliated erstwhile middle class and how some snooty Americans look down upon others, are both narrated with immense care so that it do not hurt anybody’s feeling or self-esteem or patriotism. No book, since biography of Marie Courie, could moved me so much towards faith in life and positivity of living. This book teaches more than survival. “Bend, Not Break, A life in Two Worlds” inspires to live our own lives. The author never idolized herself, nor bragged. She has narrated an intimate piece of her experiences through journey of a life more than a half a century, halved into two worlds. The end product is a marvelous piece of literary work. Above all, it is a book to live with. End note: “It is tunnels that we start our journey; in pockets that our imaginations blossoms towards the opening; and in voids that we must face our naked agonizing vulnerability.”

This book's truthfulness has been cast in doubt. After the Guardian ("Ping Fu's childhood tales of China's cultural revolution spark controversy" http://goo.gl/WZq9k ) and other media outlets questioned Ping Fu's tales, a book she wrote in Chinese and published in China in 1996 has come to light. In that book, Ping Fu tells an entirely different story: she had a normal and, dare I say, happy childhood in China, but her life in the US as a foreign student was harsh. She had to do menial work to support herself and complained that she had not suffered such hardship in China as a professor's daughter. Comparing these two books, I see a life in two versions. Is any of it believable?