Bend, Not Break

by Ping Fu

  On our long plane ride home to the United States, I pored over the journals while Xixi and Herbert slept. Here was the key to my past. I recalled an evening, just before I had been taken away from my family in Shanghai, when my grandfather had gazed out over the city and pointed to darkness where once whole neighborhoods of light had appeared. My grandfather had grown up in that light, I learned now, as I read and reread the newspaper clippings and traced his delicate handwriting across the timeworn pages. He had founded one of Shanghai’s first banks.

  I witnessed the enormous commitment my family had made to education. I learned from an old newspaper report that my paternal and maternal grandfathers, both entrepreneurs, had asked guests to bring only cash as gifts to their children’s wedding, the marriage of my Shanghai Papa and Mama. They doubled the donations themselves and put all the money toward building neighborhood schools in the wake of the Japanese occupation. Their efforts had enabled hundreds of poor children to receive an education.

  The Chinese have a proverb, which is also common in English-speaking countries: “Blood is thicker than water.” The expression has two meanings. The first one is: Family bonds are more powerful than any other ties. I felt the strength of my connection to my ancestors for the first time in many years as I absorbed my grandfather’s journals on that flight. We were family; my heart pumped to keep their blood flowing through my veins. I had a legacy to carry forward on their behalf.

  The second meaning of the saying is: You can’t pollute blood with dirty water. I saw no sins in my grandfather’s story. I had understood years ago that it was Mao himself who had caused millions of people to starve to death during the Cultural Revolution and years preceding it, not my family. But that had been an intellectual reckoning. Reading my grandfather’s journal, I realized that the little girl I used to be, Ping-Ping, Little Apple, had never come to terms with the trauma of being held responsible for her family’s “black blood.” Now I knew, once and for all: red or black, it didn’t matter—the blood that flowed in my veins was good.

  —

  When I returned from HKUST to NCSA in the summer of 1995, Mosaic had changed its name to Netscape due to a dispute over intellectual property with the University of Illinois. The company went public on August 9 of that year. The stock was set to be offered at $14 per share, but a last-minute decision doubled the price to $28. On the first day of trading, the stock’s value soared to $75, nearly setting a record for first-day gains. It closed at $58.25 per share, a market value of $2.9 billion for a company that had almost no revenue.

  Clearly the Mosaic browser our group had created at NCSA had been a success—millions of people had downloaded it within the first two years. Nevertheless, none of us at NCSA had anticipated how Mosaic would spark the Internet boom, shaping the era of the “dot-com bubble” and its characteristic “irrational exuberance.” None of us—other than Marc, I supposed—was a visionary. Even Marc said that he hadn’t seen it coming; he was just obsessed with making the Web accessible to everyone. We were computer geeks who wanted to create cool software applications that other people might find useful, and we gave them away for free.

  By 1996, University of Illinois administrators had been stung repeatedly by media criticism: how had they let so much money slip through their fingers? At the same time, NCSA’s federal funding was coming to an end. Suddenly, entrepreneurship was the next big thing. The Internet was red hot and everyone wanted a piece of the dot-com boom. At NCSA, we participated in many presentations to venture capitalists with investment funds and commercial companies with an interest in licensing promising technology.

  Nothing seemed to stick and no one started a new company. We were scientists and tenured professors with good pay and interesting work; we knew it would be highly risky to start a company, and completely out of our comfort zones. In addition, most of us felt that Netscape’s runaway success was an aberration.

  Then, during an ordinary staff meeting one day, my boss, Joe Hardin of the software development group, became impatient with the situation. “We’re all talk and no action around here,” he moaned. “Who has the guts to start a business?”

  I found myself raising my hand and saying, “I’ll start one.” The move shocked everyone, including me. To this day, I don’t know what came over me. Perhaps I still felt like a nobody who secretly wanted to be somebody. NCSA’s future was unclear, and my husband, a professor, was making enough to support the family even if I didn’t draw an income. It didn’t occur to me to consult with Herbert first; I knew he would back me up. Not only that, he would cofound Geomagic with me and be a pillar of strength throughout the turbulent start-up years.

  Yet here I had written a book just a few years prior saying that I would never start a business. I was unqualified for the task at hand. I was shy, an introverted scientist and artist by nature. I had no MBA, and I lacked completely what people call “the profit motive”: I had been hardwired to think that money was evil, and traumatized as a child because of my family’s success. On a personal level, starting a business now didn’t make sense in many ways: I had a small child at home, loved my current job, and enjoyed the freedom of being able to travel with Herbert on his breaks and live overseas during his sabbatical.

  But facing the unknown did not scare me. I saw the promise of the blank canvas in front of me—unlimited space in which I could create something new. I could feel ideas swirling inside my head. It felt exciting: another challenge to conquer, another mountain to climb. I thought about the social impact of transferring some of the NCSA technology to the commercial world, making useful products that people would love and solving problems to ease their pain. In some ways, I felt that my life, so full of trials and change, my studies ranging from literature to computer programming, and my experiences as a factory worker had prepared me to take this next step.

  The university administrators had offered support with fund-raising to all start-ups. Most of us at NCSA didn’t realize that this was a goodwill gesture and not a promise. I was naive enough to go forward without understanding the complexity of a large public university and the primitive start-up support infrastructure in our area. Even though they couldn’t ultimately help with funding, the university administrators did grant me a sabbatical. I thought that I would return to the academic life once I had developed a marketable product and executed the technology transfer to a commercial company—a year, I figured, maybe two.

  In the blink of an eye, there I was: a reluctant and unlikely entrepreneur without a business plan.

  { FIVE }

  Everybody Is Somebody

  FACTORY WORKER: 1968–1976

  WHEN I WAS ten, several months after the attack on the soccer field and two years prior to the appearance of Uncle W and Nanjing Mother, I received my first factory assignment. A local Communist organization, in accordance with Mao’s teachings, made arrangements for all the children of black elements in our area to be reeducated by workers. I was assigned to a site about an hour’s walk away from the NUAA dormitory. I would work there six days a week for six hours a day, with a two-hour break each day for a study session of Mao’s teachings with other children.

  I awoke before dawn on my first morning of work, head exploding with questions. What would I be doing? How would I learn to do it? While I felt nervous, my mind also hummed with excitement. After two years of an almost completely unstructured existence, I was ready for an assignment. I needed a reason to get up in the morning, something meaningful to do with my time. During the long walk to the site, I felt as though I were embarking on a grand adventure.

  The factory building stretched like a reclining concrete giant across a quarter mile of open land. Eyes wide, I approached the door and stepped inside. At once, my senses were assaulted. Massive machines resembling an alien species come to take over the earth made explosive hammering and whirring sounds. Conveyor belts whisked metallic parts furiously from one station to the next. D
ust-filtered sunlight pierced through the open doorway, revealing chunks of metal and pools of oil littering the floor. Hundreds of androgynous adults, dressed identically in one-piece denim coverall suits with hair tucked up into caps and greasy soot covering their faces, skittered across the floor like ants constructing a nest. I found the whole scene petrifying and thrilling at the same time.

  A manager spied me gazing awestruck at my surroundings and asked if I was there to work. When I nodded and told her my name, she led me through a maze of crashing machinery to the far side of the factory. Occasionally, I spied what looked like another child scrambling to and fro like a chicken lost in a pigsty. My ears were ringing by the time the manager introduced me to the worker who would be my supervisor. Then she disappeared into the controlled chaos of the factory floor.

  Wang towered intimidatingly over me. His lean muscular body, large rough-skinned hands, round golden brown eyes, and high cheekbones made him look like the star of a Communist propaganda film: the idealized Chinese worker, a hero of the Cultural Revolution and master of our developing modern economy. I instantly felt respect for him, as I did for all workers. Yet I was also fearful, not knowing how he would treat me.

  Crouching down until his face came level with mine, Wang said, “They sent you here, huh?”

  I nodded.

  “Where are your parents?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I whispered.

  Wang’s brow furrowed. He looked me up and down as though sizing up a fish he’d just caught. “You’re going to build radios with me. Do you know how to build radios?”

  I shook my head, silently wishing I did. I worried that Wang would be angry with me. But he just shrugged casually. “Then I’ll show you.”

  Wang led me to a long metal table covered in boxes, cylinders, and tiny parts. He pulled up two chairs and we both took a seat. Then he picked up a radio from the stack of those he had already made. When he removed the four screws on the back of the box, I was surprised to discover that the inside was mostly empty. I could see only a large cone-shaped object, a dozen or so metal bits that looked like tiny beads and candies wrapped up in rice paper, and a few wires.

  “This can talk?” I asked.

  Wang started to laugh, a big, comfortable laugh like a wide-open cloudless sky. “Don’t you know what a radio is?”

  I frowned. “Of course! I listen to it every day.”

  “Well, yes, you use one, but that doesn’t mean you know how it works,” he said.

  “How does it work?” I asked eagerly, crouching over the open box to take a closer look at the pieces inside.

  Wang spoke deliberately, pointing to the parts as he talked. He reminded me of my first elementary school teacher before the Cultural Revolution started. “A radio is a tool for picking up broadcasts of sound. This box is the container—it’s like your head. The cone here is the speaker. That’s where the sound comes out, just like your mouth. These little pieces are the electrical components. Don’t worry about how they work—you’re too young to understand. Just think of them as magic. These wires are like your brain—they help the different parts of the radio communicate with one another.”

  “Where are the ears?” I asked.

  “Good question,” Wang answered, pulling up two thick, straight wires from the top of the box. “The antennae are the ears. They are what pick up the sound waves that are broadcast through the air.”

  For the next half hour, Wang showed me how to assemble a radio. He took an empty box and slid one of the speaker cones inside. Next, he taught me to solder the parts together using a special tool. “Think of it as a pen, only much hotter and far more dangerous,” Wang said. He dipped the red-hot tip of the tool into a round metal box that contained a brownish block of solder, and then touched it delicately to the components until they stuck. The beads and wires were color coded, so I quickly memorized which ones went where. Finally, he attached the back with four screws.

  “That’s all there is to it,” Wang said. He then gave me a drawing with all the pieces numbered, which mapped out how to put the radios together, in case I had forgotten anything.

  I went to work, my mind keenly focused on proving my worth and not letting my factory hero down. By the end of the day, I had made maybe thirty radios. But would they talk?

  I walked up to Wang’s table. “Would you help me check my radios?” I asked. He picked one up and spun the knob to the right. No sound came out, not even a sputter of static. My stomach dropped. Wang picked up another radio. It didn’t work, either. I swallowed, my mouth gone dry. One by one, he went through my pile. Not a single one of my radios made a sound.

  I gazed at Wang with terror in my eyes, certain he would punish me. Instead, he just looked perplexed. He unscrewed the back of a radio and traced the wires with his fingers. “Aha!” he cried. “Here is the problem—you didn’t attach the circuitry for the volume control knob.”

  I gulped and stared at the filthy factory floor. It wasn’t my fault. Wang hadn’t shown me this step, and it was not indicated on the instructional map he had given me, either. But two years of living under Red Guard rule had taught me to keep my mouth shut. What sort of punishment and ridicule would wasting thirty radios earn me?

  To my surprise, Wang didn’t reach out to strike me or march angrily away to report me to our manager. He just smiled gently. “You look like you’re about to pass out. Don’t worry—it’s an easy fix.” He then showed me how to take the missing step, soldering one end of a wire to the volume terminal and the other end of the wire to the ground loop. When he turned the knob this time, the sound of a Communist worker’s song floated into the dusty air, and my mind danced with it. “Just be sure to check that the radio is working before you screw the back on,” Wang said, handing me the now functioning device.

  I couldn’t believe my good fortune. It didn’t trouble me one bit that I had to go back and repair each of the thirty radios I had already built. I wasn’t being punished, and I hadn’t wasted any materials. How lucky was I to have been given such a gentle and patient supervisor?

  My heart filled with pride. I could build something—and not just anything, but something that hundreds of millions of Chinese used every day. In fact, Wang told me that our factory had manufactured cars and trucks prior to the Cultural Revolution. The government had converted it because many of the poorest peasants living in the countryside still didn’t have radios. This work was important, he said. Thanks to us, tens of thousands of Chinese families would be able to tune in to hear Chairman Mao’s voice each morning.

  It was motivating to have been given such an opportunity to redeem myself. My factory work gave me a sense of self-worth. Rather than drifting aimlessly without school or parental supervision, I had a purpose: I was doing good things for our great leader, Chairman Mao, by helping to spread his teachings. I was one of the people, at last.

  —

  I built radios for almost a year, completing on average forty to fifty a day. The work was repetitive: I sat at my workstation, my head bent over, soldering the same parts together day in and day out. But I glowed with satisfaction. It gave me a sense of relevance to be making useful products and helping my country.

  The following year, Wang was transferred to another department of the factory, where he would be making speedometers for cars. I went with him; it seemed we had become a team. Though the work proved less challenging than building radios, I nevertheless felt lucky: at least I had Wang on my side. I always made tea for him in the morning, pouring boiling water into a glass jar with green tea leaves. He looked after me as he would a younger sister, defending me from any criticisms made by other factory workers.

  On the whole, I quickly realized that workers were good people, far kinder and calmer than the Red Guards. For one thing, they were adults, not rude, crazy teenagers. I could tell that they genuinely cared about one another. Like members of a big f
amily, they asked how things were going and offered assistance—a kind word, a bit of extra food, an excuse made to a manager—when someone in their work group needed help. When my face got dirty, my coworkers would tease me without ever making me feel threatened, bullied, or belittled. In general, they were amazed that this petite girl could do their jobs as well as they could.

  After just six months making speedometers, I was sent on rotation to the countryside outside of Nanjing for half a year. I found a similar situation there—the farmers were decent people. We black elements had to work hard and do our share without complaining about our aching bodies or the bloodsucking leeches that attached themselves to our legs in the rice fields. But if we did, the farmers allowed us to take breaks and sometimes would even help us out. In the best circumstances, the farmers’ wives cooked aromatic meals for us. Everything tasted better in the countryside because it was so fresh—rice, vegetables, and meats.

  All in all, working in factories and on farms proved far better for me than my first two years of existence under the tyranny of the Red Guard. I wasn’t being abused anymore, and I had a tribe to belong to.

  —

  I went back to factory work in 1971 at age thirteen, after having spent some time completing mandatory military service. I was elated to discover that I would be rejoining Wang, this time as an electrical engineer. Later, I found out that he had requested me because I was a quick learner and reliable; he never worried about the quality of my work. He also enjoyed having a little assistant who was eager to bring him tea or fetch him lunch.