Book Summary
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Our choice, always, is to love and understand.
Bend, Not Break
Ping Fu has experienced life as a child soldier, industrial worker, and political detainee. For the offence of being born into a well-educated family, you will be beaten and raped. Deported with just enough money to buy a plane ticket to an unfamiliar place. To start again as a maid, waiter, and student, with no family or friends.
Ping Fu has also worked as a pioneering software programmer, an inventor, a CEO, and the Entrepreneur of the Year for Inc. magazine. To be a friend and mentor to some of the world's most well-known technologists. To create some of the world's most innovative new items. To deliver speeches that elicit standing ovations from large groups. to meet with the president of the United States and provide advice.
This is the genuine story of a life lived between two worlds, and it sounds too fantastic to be true. Ping, who was born on the eve of China's Cultural Revolution, was removed from her family when she was eight years old. She grew up suffering starvation and humiliation while protecting her younger sister from Mao's Red Guard adolescent soldiers. She arrived in the United States at the age of twenty-five, with just $80 in traveler's checks and three English phrases: thank you, hello, and help. Ping persisted, and the principles she learned as a kid lead her to success in her new homeland.
She evolved into someone she never imagined herself to be: a strong, independent, entrepreneurial leader, thanks to her well-honed survival instincts, a few excellent friends, and the goodwill of strangers. Ping became a member of the team that built NCSA Mosaic, which later became Netscape, the Web browser that permanently revolutionized how we access information, thanks to her love of problem solving. She went on to found Geomagic, a firm that has actually transformed the globe by customizing prosthetic limbs and repairing NASA spacecraft.
Bend, Not Break illustrates a journey from incarceration to freedom, as well as from Mao's dogmatic anticapitalism to the high-stakes, no-holds-barred world of technological start-ups in the United States. It's a testament to one woman's bravery in the face of adversity, as well as a wonderful lesson in the power of perseverance.
Our choice, always, is to love and understand.
